The earliest methods, submitting credit card slips to a merchant processing bank by US mail, or by accessing an Automated Response Unit (ARU) by telephone, are still in use today but have long been overshadowed by electronic devices. These early methods used two-part forms and a manual device for mechanically imprinting the embossed card number information onto the forms. Whenever practical it is best to swipe a credit card because the rates will be much lower and the incidence of stolen credit card number fraud is greatly reduced.

Credit card terminal

A credit card terminal is a stand-alone piece of electronic equipment that allows a merchant to swipe or key-enter a credit card’s information as well as additional information required to process a credit card transaction. A credit card terminal is a dedicated piece of equipment that only processes credit cards although it is common for related transactions including gift cards and check verification to also be performed. A credit card terminal typically must be plugged in to a power supply and connected to a telephone line. However, some terminals may be powered by batteries, communicate over the Internet or through the cellular phone networks.

When a credit card is processed using Merchant accounts (either swiped through the magnetic stripe reader or keyed in to the keypad), it contacts the network to verify if the credit card can be authorized. The most popular credit card terminals consist of a modem, keypad, printer, magnetic stripe reader, power supply and memory card. They have had the same basic design since the 1980s. As with computers, there is a wide range of memory capacities and other features like built-in printers and debit card pinpads that affect the manufacturing cost of a credit card terminal.

Automated Response Unit (ARU)

An ARU (also known as a voice authorization, capture and deposit) allows the manual keyed entry and subsequent authorization of a credit card over a cellular or land-line telephone. With this method a merchant typically imprints their customer’s card with an imprinter to create a customer receipt and merchant copy, then process the transaction instantaneously over the phone.

Payment gateway

A payment gateway is an e-commerce service that authorizes payments for e-businesses and online retailers. It is the equivalent of a physical POS (point-of-sale) terminal located in most retail outlets. A merchant account provider is typically a separate company from the payment gateway. Some merchant account providers have their own payment gateways but the majority of companies use 3rd party payment gateways. The gateway usually has 2 components: a) the virtual terminal that can allow for a merchant to securely login and key in credit card numbers or b) have the website’s shopping-cart connect to the gateway via an API to allow for real time processing from the merchant’s website.

Level 2 or Level 3 Processing – Purchasing Cards

Visa and Mastercard have created a specialized type of credit card used primarily by government agencies and businesses. Increasingly, corporations and government agencies are relying on this form of payment to compensate their service providers and suppliers. Businesses benefit by receiving their funds quickly and by winning competitive bids and government contracts where purchasing cards are the required form of payment. The downside, however, is the increased costs associated with receiving these payments. These costs will usually be much higher than accepting a standard consumer credit card.

The solution is that some businesses may qualify for ways to process these transactions that allow them to pay lower fees if they can supply additional information, called “level 2 or level 3 data”. For example, if government transactions are over $5,000, businesses can significantly reduce their transaction costs by including “level 2 or level 3 data” about the purchase along with each transaction.

Examples of level 2 or level 3 data is a purchase order number associated with the transaction that the credit card will be paying. This data is passed on to the purchaser so that it may be many times easier to reconcile the transaction. If all the required data is not collected and passed on during the transaction, the merchant can have surcharges added to the basic fees or be forced into a non qualified transaction category.

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At grocery stores across Las Vegas, voters are casting their ballots, and then shopping for bananas or hitting the slot machines a few feet away.

About 100 people have voted from the windows of their cars, A.T.M. style, in Orange County, Calif. Several busloads of voters pulled up to the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections in Cleveland on Sunday, did what they came to do, and then repaired to a church across the street for some fried chicken.

In all its forms, early voting has been an election year hit. Enormous lines in Florida led Gov. Charlie Crist to issue an executive order extending early voting hours statewide from eight hours a day to 12, while in Georgia an elderly woman in Cobb County stood in the sun so long to vote that she collapsed.

For many, an early vote has been a stab at ending, at least in their own homes and hearts, the seemingly endless loop of campaign rhetoric, cascading polls and tension, according to interviews over the past several days with dozens of early voters in six states.

“I thought I might as well do this,” said Rhonda Woolcox, 83, who came to a community center here on Monday to cast her presidential vote for Senator John McCain of Arizona. “I wasn’t about to change my mind.”

Others seemed to view early voting as a leap of faith.

“I was afraid that if I voted early our votes wouldn’t be counted,” said Glynetter Prather, 44, who nonetheless cast her ballot in Florida for Senator Barack Obama of Illinois. “I mean, there’s enough time to lose these ballots. And I hate to say that, but that’s Florida’s signature.”

Among some of the 32 states that allow their residents to vote early without an excuse, either by mail or in person, the verdict is already in from a full quarter of registered voters — well into the millions. In some counties across the nation, the percentages are far higher. The early voting will continue for several days in most of the states, but in Louisiana it is already closed, and it will end on Friday or Saturday elsewhere to give time to update the books to prevent people from voting twice.

In 2004, 22 percent of voters cast an early presidential ballot, and the number is expected to climb to 30 percent to 35 percent this year. “We have predicted a third of the electorate; I expect that we will meet that,” said James Hicks, research director at the Early Voting Information Center at Reed College in Portland, Ore.

Although some states turn on their early voting tabulators before Election Day, none reveal the results until the polls close on Election Day itself and most do not begin counting a vote until then, said Doug Lewis, executive director of the Election Center in Houston, an association of elections officials.

No matter, one result is already known: Voters are drawn to the ballot boxes early.

In some places, like the three polling stations visited in the Las Vegas area on Monday, voters were rewarded with short waits and well-oiled systems designed to make them so. Several grocery stores offered electronic voting.

“We are the only state in the nation where you’ll hear, ‘Wet mop at Voting Booth 4,’ ” said Bob Walsh, a spokesman for the Nevada secretary of state.

In other states, lines snaked for hours and tested tempers. In New Orleans, for example, voters clocked six-hour waits this week.

In Jupiter, Fla., security guards have been hired to direct traffic and oversee the mild mayhem at a county library, where the parking lot has been jammed with the over-70 crowd competing for spots so they could cast a vote.

Early voting stations in Clayton County, Ga., which includes suburbs of Atlanta, stayed open until 1 a.m. one day last week to accommodate voters who had been delayed — some by as many as nine hours — by snags with the software that confirms voter registration.

Even with the problems and delays, voters in many states said they viewed the chance to vote early — without the constraint of the past of having to provide an excuse for not voting on Election Day — as a boon.

“In New Hampshire where we came from,” said Arthur Schuetz, 62, who voted Monday at the community center here in Henderson, “it is not socially acceptable to do anything but go to the polls on Election Day and stand in the snow talking with all your neighbors. But here you can vote in five minutes and go home. It’s super.”

Mr. Schuetz said he voted for Mr. McCain, a Republican, with enthusiasm. His wife, Linda, called the choice the “lesser of two evils.”

For those who work long hours and occasionally miss the chance to vote, early casting is helpful.

“Voting is always a problem for us nurses,” said Donna J. Simmons, 59, who cast a vote in Cleveland, anticipating a 12-hour shift on Election Day. “We’re always trying to work out ways to cover for each other so one of us can go and vote. I think this event is the most wonderful thing because voting is always such a challenge for people like me.”

So far, the early voting has attracted more Democrats than Republicans. For example, in North Carolina, according to state election officials, 58 percent of early voters have been registered Democrats compared with 25 percent registered Republicans. Democrats have also turned out in higher numbers in Florida, Iowa and New Mexico.

For the last few months, volunteers for Mr. Obama, a Democrat, in California, a state sure to go Democratic, have been making telephone calls to voters in neighboring Nevada, helping to perfect the lists of likely early vote-casters for get-out-the-vote canvassers. In Nevada, a Republican stronghold in past presidential elections, 52 percent of early electors in the population centers have been Democrats, 32 percent Republicans and 16 percent unaffiliated voters.

Some of them have cast their ballots at the Galleria at Sunset Mall in Henderson, where voters lined up to use three rows of machines sandwiched between two jewelry stores, a Mervyn’s department store and a stand selling face cream.

Volunteers waved citizens, some carrying shopping bags, to the open machines with little American flags festooned to sticks. Leah Darrington, 30, came with four couples to vote, and the adults took turns entertaining the five children who were brought along.

Dee Welch gave her son DeLano an admonishing tug as he tried to drag her from the rows of voting machines to a toy store. “I’m getting in line to vote for president,” Ms. Welch said firmly. “So you behave!”

There were elderly couples who shuffled carefully along the slick mall floor, scores of parents pushing strollers, couples holding hands as they affixed the “I voted” stickers to their shirts, and several first-time voters.

“It was fun,” said Christie Kaminska, 20, who picked Mr. Obama for her first presidential vote. “I have class on Tuesday, and I heard from someone at school I could vote here. Plus, I have some things I needed to return.”

In Pittsboro, N.C., Zaw Min Thu, 36, a refugee from Myanmar who came to the United States eight years ago, cast his first vote, for Mr. Obama, this week.

“I wanted to check it out because of my work schedule,” said Mr. Thu, who works as a housekeeper at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. “Our government is a military government, and the government is not good,” he said. “That’s why I vote today.”

The Mount Olive Missionary Baptist Church, one of the largest black churches in Cleveland, has pulled nearly 200 churchgoers over the past few weeks to early voting polls.

“I look at this as a form of cholesterol removal from the clogged circulatory system of this nation’s election process,” said Larry Harris, the pastor there. “We know we’re looking at record-breaking turnout for this election. It’s going to be difficult to count all the votes that day. And if the weather is bad, some of these people will just stay home. So we need to get people out early, and make sure that every vote counts.”

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Seems you just can’t keep this darn stock down. No matter how bad the market wants to beat tech an stock a day seems to be the way to pass all those woo on by.

Apple Inc. rose as much as 12 percent in German trading after soaring iPhone sales lifted profit and Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs said customers will stay loyal in a recession.

“We may get buffeted around by the waves a little bit, but we’ll be fine and stronger than ever when the waters calm,” Jobs said during his first appearance on an Apple earnings conference call in eight years. Consumers are more likely to delay purchase rather than switch to competitors’ products, he said.

Apple reached a goal of selling 10 million iPhones three months ahead of schedule after customers snapped up 6.89 million last quarter, topping analysts’ predictions. Rising demand for the iPhone and Macintosh computers came at a time when customers are curbing spending, and Jobs’s comments helped investors look past a forecast for the holidays that missed analysts’ estimates.

Apple rose as much as $11.41 to the equivalent of $102.90 in Germany after closing at $91.49 yesterday on the Nasdaq Stock Market yesterday. The shares traded at the equivalent of $100.86 as of 10:10 a.m. in Frankfurt.

The iPhone and Mac contributed to a 26 percent gain in fourth-quarter profit to $1.14 billion, or $1.26 a share, beating the $1.11 estimated by analysts in a Bloomberg survey. Sales rose 27 percent to $7.9 billion in the three months ended Sept. 27.

Profit this quarter will be $1.06 to $1.35 a share and sales will be as much as $10 billion, Cupertino, California-based Apple said. Analysts had predicted earnings of $1.66 a share and revenue of $10.6 billion. Apple typically delivers a forecast that misses estimates and then tops those predictions.

`Prudence’

“Steve Jobs being on the call helped,” said Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray & Co. “Expectations were low, but people started to get a sense it wasn’t really that bad.”

Jobs said there’s a “lot of prudence” in the forecast. Munster said Apple was being “hyperconservative.”

The company’s shares slid 32 percent last quarter, their worst performance since 2001, on concern U.S. consumers will spend less as jobs become scarcer and house prices drop. The holiday season is one of Apple’s two biggest sales periods, along with the back-to-school quarter that ended in September.

Jobs, 53, said iPhone shipments surpassed the 6.1 million BlackBerry devices sold last quarter. “This is a milestone for us,” he said. “Apple beat RIM.”

The iPhone is now available in more than 50 countries and Apple plans to reach more than 70 markets before year-end. To help win users away from the BlackBerry, the top-selling smart- phone in the U.S., Jobs added software that links the iPhone to corporate e-mail systems and opened an online application store.

Apple said fourth-quarter sales were $11.7 billion after setting aside a subscription accounting standard in which revenue from the iPhone and the Apple TV set-top box is spread out over two years. On that basis, iPhone sales in the quarter were about $4.6 billion, or 39 percent of Apple’s total business.

Mac Promotions

Back-to-school promotions for the Mac, which accounts for about half of Apple’s revenue, lifted shipments to a record 2.61 million units. Apple said yesterday it has already seen a rebound in Mac orders after the debut of new models last week.

The slowdown presents opportunities for companies with cash to invest, Jobs said, adding that the company established its retail stores during the last economic slump. The company has almost $25 billion in cash and no debt, Jobs said.

“This provides us tremendous stability and the ability to invest our way through this downturn,” he said.

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