I do. iPod touch with dead battery always plugged into a JBL mini-stereo-alarm clock thingy. Works quite well. A few times per year I plug it into a computer to add/remove some tracks.

I think that the cute icons on google maps that appears on some business are not for free.
Also the more people search in maps the more ads with geo extensions will worth.
Or Zagat property.
People used to say the same about search, there is no way to earn money out of it.
I think the road to maps money is the same.

I once watched a theatre piece that had exactly that plot. Shows very well how ridiculous is banning trade of some plants and their products...

It might be of some help to know how is it handled in other countries...
Where I live (Spain), direct debit has been the rule since long ago: almost everybody does it this way. Utilities (electricity, telephony, gas, mobile phone), insurance, mortgage, all charge your bank account monthly or bimonthly. It is convenient (especially for them) and problems are not too common, although they exist. But then you can dispute the charges or go to the consumer protection office.
Banks try to push you to do it this way: most of them only let you pay your bills only one hour per day (for example, from 10 am to 11 am only).

My personal take on all this: I like it this way. As I said before, problems are rare; it is far more usual to know someone that has had his credit card number stolen than to know a case of having trouble with direct debit. And to have something less to care about is worth it. Anyway, most of the time the bill gets to you by mail two or three weeks before the charge is made, so you can check it and have some time to fix the problems (good luck with that though).
Overdrafts are allowed, but they are easy to avoid. Actually, banks like so much this system that they will equate having this kind of automated bill payment with being a regular, good customer: in most "fidelization" promotions, they ask you to have two or three bills paid through them.

Any one can download the specs and do a client/server implementation just using apache projects. (Xerces, XML-SEC) and some DOM/servlets knowled to implement their
protocol.

Any how you can do it in c++/java/.NET or whatever languege you like.