Unless they saved the credit card number, either directly or through vaulting at their provider. Both of those are easy and common, and the second one is even safe (since it only allows that particular merchant to charge the card at will, it doesn't appeal to thieves like an actual credit card number would).

Because that's the only way to tell that its a real credit card instead of a bunch of made up numbers that happen to look like a credit card number. The whole reason that pre-authorizations exist is to allow people to show that they're "good for the debt" without actually paying for it (yet).

People fail to do the math properly. Dropping free usage by 99% and increasing paid usage by 10% still increases paid usage by 10% - and at the end of the day, that's what's important to the owners of most commercial ventures.

There you go, bringing facts to a bitchfest :) Especially when you weigh the barely noticeable performance improvements (IRL rather than on a benchmark) vs. the complete and catastrophic consequences of failure.

Yup. Apple thinks that their users are the kind of people who value a machine that doesn't randomly lose all of its data after an SSD upgrade and don't want to spend the time to do the brand research themselves, rather than the kind of people who desperately value a .03% gain in SSD performance after said upgrade.

Apple happens to be pretty much right about that. Even as a developer, one of the reasons that I prefer Apple kit to code on is that I don't have to worry about working on it as well as what I'm supposed to be working on.

And ignoring this silly edict is part of what has made Apple one of the most successful solutions providers of all time.

Yup. Of course, doing that is a little technically challenging - probably intentionally, since people blindly doing so would defeat the entire purpose. Many posts in this thread have information about signing your own certs, for that matter.

Making arcane things that could potentially screw up your system beyond the scope of an average desktop user is generally seen as a Good Thing, too :)

Because Apple's support includes supporting the entire solution - hardware and installed OS. When things go wrong they'll actually work with you to fix them rather than simply pointing fingers. Naturally this gives them a really strong incentive to make sure that both of those item continue to work in harmony; part of their approach to that is restricting the more arcane things that the majority of end-users don't have enough experience to do safely.

For anyone who has enough experience to know when to accept an unsigned kernel extension, there's a trivial command to allow it; I happen to agree that people who can't figure out how to enable unsigned drivers really shouldn't be installing them.

So only 500X? Oh, well then. Let's get going tomorrow!

Yes, but you have the heat anyway so inefficiency doesn't matter. It would be a silly way to get cool air if you didn't want the heat in the first place, but that's not what's going on.

The cost of fraud and security is built in to the interchange rates that make up the bulk of card-present fees from Visa et al. By and large, the retailers already cover those costs. If specific retailer-focussed fines are put in place they should be accompanied by a drop in interchange rates (not going to hold my breath here). Also, by reducing cost-sharing and increasing self-insurance, that's another way of squeezing out smaller merchants (who can't begin to cover those costs) in favor of the larger ones (who don't need external underwriting to do so).

Bzzt, no secret spy handshake for you. The correct response being sought was, "Inside of a snake, its too dark to read."

I don't think anyone would argue against their right to say it - making it not a first amendment issue - what's being argued is that they may not have the right to continue to claim the right to avoid both taxes and financial disclosure while at the same time saying what they're saying. That's very different.

That's one area I'd love to see some Supreme Court guidance on. The issues really stem from the fact that Churches are granted an unprecedented tax exemption (every other organization that wants to not pay taxes has to open its books for a start) in exchange for following a very small yet undefined set of rules, some of the most important being 1) claiming to be a church and 2) agreeing to stay out of politics. Risking that massive taxpayer subsidy for a violation of the staying out of politics rules seems like a poor decision on their part at the very least.