I still like wearing my old school Casio Data Bank 150 calculator watch. I don't own a mobile phone and don't want to carry it since it is big and heavy. I am small and can't put in my pockets when I go out. I wished there was a smartwatch that didn't require a mobile phone.

Back then 3.5" disks were useful to be reused as blank ones. ;)

I used to get OTA for TV, but not anymore after the recent forced move (eviction). Now, I have to pay my cable company to get TV since several channels don't come in due to the small mountain/big hills block the transmitters. :(

... I am still waiting for a smartwatch that doesn't require a mobile phone like my old school Casio Data Bank 150 calculator watch. Its battery replacement is every few years too!

Are you in the future? We're still in October.

And does she need mobile phone? If not, dump it and get landline services.

Were you able to find another job or were you hit hard? :( I hate it when I fail. I wished we had time machines to undo our errors.

.. new narrative: Those evil retailers hate Apple and the credit card companies.

I always found it amusing that articles used to say that Google didn't know what it is doing with NFC or that NFC is lame. Some articles stated that NFC isn't good enough for Apple, but if Apple did NFC they'd win. The problem is that those articles focused on the technology and not the true gatekeepers. The gatekeepers are the credit card companies and the retailers. A person can't use NFC if there are no NFC terminals. There are few NFC terminals because there is not reason to have them. Some companies that issued NFC plastic stopped doing so because there just wasn't demand.

Now we have a liability shift deadline fast approaching. Terminals must support EMV. It's not surprising that many EMV terminals also support NFC. But who made that happen? The liability shift. Not Apple. Not Google.

So now we have a perfect storm. We have a company that is great at marketing their new NFC tech. People finally become aware of NFC around the time that banks are reissuing their cards with chips in them. We have a way for phones to easily participate in EMV transactions wirelessly. We also have a consortium of companies about to launch a mobile payment system. Who has the most power in this? They are going to shut that interface door and be the gatekeepers for mobile payments. Then they can focus on the real war. Not a war between Apple and Google, but a war between retailers and the credit card companies.

There are still ways to get around this and have "mobile payments" tied to your phone that will work anywhere. Someone needs to make EMV adapters for phones. Or maybe "Plastc" will go big. But either one of those things is too high a bar for most people. They'd rather just pull the plastic out of their pocket.

If you use Windows, there is an excellent chance that you or someone you know who does use Windows executes my driver code the entire time the PC is operational; I have a pretty decent idea of "how it works".

In this case the device was claiming to be a specific device (and was not) and yet did not correctly behave like the device it was claiming to be. You might not consider that defective. I would. The instructions that change the PID to 0 are discarded by a legit device and would be discarded by a correctly implemented clone.

In the old days the DEC "Tulip" was a pretty popular NIC "standard" and was cloned, I guess it was a kinder gentler world then (of course, where is DEC now?) or maybe the clones were better back then.

I don't think this was wise, but I can understand their interest in defending their brand reputation - when a crap clone says it's made by FDTI and then doesn't perform perfectly it's not going to damage the reputation of an unknown chip cloner in a Chinese alley, it's gonna look like FDTI makes crappy chips, which in my experience is not true.

Yep. FYI, it's = it (i/ha)s. ;)

... They didn't want people with disabilities back when I was younger and applying for IT jobs with them. :(

Haha. I read that as a lap(top/py) too. :)

Wow, those CEOs and agents have major/serious grammar issues. :P

I wonder if that means we will lose OTA TV eventually. :( OTA rocks!