This is to prevent abuse from bots, spammers, hackers, and other things malicious on the Internet. Having a valid credit card means you are probably a real human being

Do you mean understand as in "understand the architecture, structure and the domain" of the project worked on? Are you implying working for 5 hours a month only on a project is not enough for these? Is that what you are saying?

Offering a free service without any kind of barrier would be ridiculous. It is not unknown that free services would ask you for a credit card. For example, website hosting, at a lot of places would ask you for a credit card, even on a free plan. This is to distinguish between bots, scammers and spammers and real human users.

It is a free trial if it is time-limited. Like 30 days, or 2 months. It is not a free trial if it continues forever. I never said it is 5 hours for the first three months or anything like that. If 5 hours is enough for you(and you would be surprised there are many sites that need nothing more than that, just to keep running), then it will be free forever

There are so many websites and apps, that can do just fine forever with a little bit of maintenance and nothing more. For people that fall into this category, it will be free forever

"...marketing, sales, taxes, content creation". Other than taxes, I enjoy everything else on this list more than programming. Am I a bad programmer :D

Joking aside, excellent article. Once I've read the rest of it, I realized I could not agree more with everything you've said.

I've always done my own taxes, by hand. I like the annual reminder of the insanity of the process, in a masochistic sort of way. But a voice is slowly getting louder, telling me to just turn this over to someone who likes doing it enough to be doing it for a living.

Yes, you're right, but that also comes from the Software. Car as a hardware device has no features on its own.

Physical cars have electrical fuses that are flags that can be turned on or off. Example, disable motor for opening windows, or disable ABS braking in ice, etc etc. Flags have valid purposes even in hardware.

What Payoneer is saying is BS. It is not just card that's not working anymore. My funds were frozen, so I could not withdraw it to my bank account either. They always looked to me like a shady business, but I kept using since I had no alternative. I've put up with it somehow. Now they proved my gut feeling was right. I would not be surprised they were deeply involved somehow in grand scheme of this.

That's what's happening with me as well. Unfortunately some payment came into my account just overnight and that's now frozen. I have switched to a similar service (TransferWise) for that specific affiliate but this change won't get in effect until next cycle - not helpful since I got this month's payment straight into my Payoneer account. Arghh.

I hope this affects cards only and not the funds as those were debit cards, not prepay.

[EDIT] Sorry, I think I was mistaken - the cards were prepay and only funds above $5000 were held by Payoneer.

Today I was able to withdraw amount above the card limit to my bank account. At least something. "Amount below the limit" on card, still stays frozen

Because of 'naked domain problem'. You can not create CNAME record with naked domain. And if you want to host your blog on Amazon S3, you have to use CNAME...