No, the bank refused the transaction (declined the card). The Apple store employee was then tricked into thinking that the bank had authorised it with a manual code though they had done no such thing.

It is on the very verge of release now. It's been shown in several US cities and is now invading Canada. I'm a backer of the Kickstarter campaign to get it released: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/elizabethkarr/radio-free-albemuth-theatrical-release/posts/ . Hopefully the DVDs and Blu-rays will not be too long away and I'm waiting for a UK release so that I can get my hands on a legit copy.

The bank didn't "verify" the transaction. An accomplice of the trickster "verified" the transaction and the Apple store employee thought that the bank had verified it.

There's still rumours about that. Michel Gondry has declared that he's "still working" on it. Ubik is supposed to be the most unfilmable of all of PKD's work, but Michel Gondry has a unique style that could work really well (I'm thinking of Eternal Sunshine - definitely not Green Hornet).

Incidentally, the Radio Free Albemuth film is almost available (for certain values of available) now. I'm kind of bummed that I paid $70 for the Kickstarter campaign, but as I live in the UK and it hasn't been released here yet, I can't get my hands on a legit copy of it yet. In case you didn't know, Radio Free Albemuth originally started as a sequel to Man in the High Castle, but then ended up becoming a first-draft of what became VALIS.

I really enjoyed The Cabin in the Woods, but then I'm a big Joss Whedon fan. I even enjoyed Dollhouse (apart from the first 5 or so episodes). Yet to see Much Ado About Nothing, though.

I agree with Prometheus being a big pile of poop, but Alien was superb - it had buckets of claustrophobia and tension. (Aliens was directed by James Cameron, so I assume that you meant Alien).

The credit card issuers do have some security in place - they confirm the identity of the card-holder with various questions. However, in this case, the credit card company weren't contacted and were obviously unable to confirm or deny the card-holder's identity.

As the bank didn't provide an override code and have no record of providing an override code, why should they accept liability?

I found the book kind of slow going at the beginning, but I really enjoyed the book-within-the-book recursion whereby there's a book written about an alternate reality where the Allies won World War II.

I often delete the relevant /etc/udev/rules.d/ files if I'm installing a virtual image as the changing MACs and UUIDs can be more complex to manage. Sometimes, you know that the machine will only ever have one disk and one network card.

You're right. Most of the updates I've done on a variety of Linux boxes have not caused any problems - even upgrading from different OS versions (e.g. Ubuntu 12.04 -> Ubuntu 14.04) have proceeded fine. There have been a few occasions where Grub has got confused or distribution upgrades have failed due to LD_LIBRARY_PATH being set etc. However, every OS has had issues with bugs and updates.

You shouldn't need to make a bootable USB as typically, you'd have the media that you originally installed the OS with (DVD or USB or network install). If not, then it's easy to borrow someone else's system long enough to download and burn another copy of it (unless you're in Windows OEM hell).

It's a shame you didn't persist as most boot/grub errors are generally quite easy to fix. Most of the time, you can boot from CD/usb stick and repair the grub install within about 5 minutes.

Still, if you don't want to use it, use something else. Choice and competition are good.