From Microsoft's KB2450831 support article:

Windows Phone 7 Secure Digital Card Limitations

[...]

Some Windows Phone 7 devices include a Secure Digital (SD) card slot underneath the battery cover. If you buy a Windows Phone 7 device that includes an SD card slot, you should be aware of several important differences from other devices that use SD cards:

• The SD card slot in your phone is intended to be used only by the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) that built your phone and your Mobile Operator (MO). These partners can add an SD card to this slot to expand the amount of storage on your phone.
• To help ensure a great user experience, Microsoft has performed exhaustive testing to determine which SD cards perform well with Windows Phone 7 devices. Microsoft has worked closely with OEMs and MOs to ensure that they only add these cards to Windows Phone 7 devices.
• You should not remove the SD card in your phone or add a new one because your Windows Phone 7 device might not work properly. Existing data on the phone will be lost, and the SD card in your phone can't be used in other Windows Phones, PCs, or other devices.

[...]

A simple visit to the web page followed by a modicum of reading would have led you to the following (emphasis added):

Lots of Computers

Finally, we were able to distribute the 55,882,296 cosets of H among a large number of computers at Google and complete the computation in just a few weeks. Google does not release information on their computer systems, but it would take a good desktop PC (Intel Nehalem, four-core, 2.8GHz) 1.1 billion seconds, or about 35 CPU years, to perform this calculation. .

Since the New York Times is just the aggregator here, would it not be more more pertinent to begin with "Considering that Slashdot didn't even bother to report on this ReadWriteWeb blog post about Slashdot..."?

After all, you want to link to the original story for maximal relevance, right? If Slashdot accepted summary contributions that linked to third party aggregate sites reposting other site' original articles, or accepted summary contributions with no citations whatsoever beyond virtual hearsay, imagine the degradation of relevance!

Do you really think "most people" are that dimwitted?

According to RFC2616 (HTTP/1.1) section 15.1.3 "Encoding Sensitive Information in URI's", "Clients SHOULD NOT include a Referer header field in a (non-secure) HTTP request if the referring page was transferred with a secure protocol."

Considering one subscriber in the linked discussion thread got charged 13 times for his ~$77.94 6-month subscription (which wasn't even up for renewal for another five months), for a total of $1,013.22 in charges—yeah, this sort of thing will fly under everybody's radar.

Many players probably use debit cards tied to their personal checking accounts; I'm sure they'd notice multiple charges. Even more so if they live paycheck to paycheck.

Even though EA/Mythic are allegedly working with their payment processing vendor(s) to reverse all the extraneous charges, they're still putting the onus on the customer to check with their respective financial institutions to ensure that any fees incurred are voided or reversed. I'm sure that is going to give said customers the warm fuzzies about continuing their patronage.

Total clusterfuck on the part of EA/Mythic. Heads should roll, and liberally.

No. Read the article or just look at the pretty pictures.

Feel free to create such an internal catalog and share it with the world.

At some point I imagine you will concede that you need to give chess a little more credit.

You choose to support one OS; the developers of EQII choose to support another. I don't think anyone is shedding any tears over this.