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Comment Re:Glad I don't smoke (Score 1) 77

Hate me? Motherfucker if I caught my children smoking they'd be out on the street, disowned, and I'd be in the bedroom making a replacement for their sorry asses. Parenting isn't about letting young idiots (which they universally are) who are incapable of making good choices do whatever they want. That's "bad parenting". It's the reason we don't treat kids as adults in the first place (and one of the reasons selling this stuff to them is already illegal).

Comment Re:Glad I don't smoke (Score 1) 77

That's funny. I remember when Americans travelled to Europe, we were strongly advised to bring cash because plastic was not nearly as widely accepted.

That's a misnomer, you still should bring cash. It's not that plastic isn't widely accepted. For a long time it's actually been more widely used in Western Europe than it has been in the USA. It is *CREDIT CARDS* that are not widely accepted (and still not in much of Europe). Most of Europe runs on debit transactions. Yes it can be confusing to see two overlapping circles and confuse the Mastercard logo (red and yellow) with the Maestro symbol (red and blue) or the Cirrus symbol (light blue and blue).

Come here with your fancy Mastercard / Visas and you may not even be able to buy something at a major supermarket even in a very digital country. And god help you if you have an Amex card.

That said things are changing Mastercard has announced it will discontinue Maestro and that is forcing countries to massively rollout card readers capable of reading Debit MasterCards and VisaDebit cards, and since they have the same underlying technology as credit transactions, that will mean credit cards will very soon become far more widely accepted.

Reminiscing aside, I don't see a need for a mandate. If enough people complain, I'm sure charging makers would include credit card readers.

This is a case of a captive audience. If in general machines don't accept credit cards then the complaints will fall on deaf ears. What are you doing to do, drive to a different supercharger and hope for the best? Call roadside assistance when your battery runs out? It's one of the situations where you get to force your customers to do what you want.

TBH, what'd I'd prefer over either a phone app or a credit card is that plugging your car in looks up an account and payment method and just handles it (which, I believe, is how my Tesla-owning friends tell me it works).

That is coming. Quite a few cars on the market support auto-negotiation of the charging. It does work for Tesla... at Tesla chargers. Great if you have a monoculture, not so much if you live in Europe where there are literally close to 100 different companies offering charging infrastructure.

That said most of them offer "network" style subscriptions, which is to say you apply for something like a Shell Charge card and you can tap and go literally anywhere. Yeah it would be nicer for the car to do that automatically, but really you need to stand next to the charger to plug the cable in anyway so it's not like tapping your charge card at an RFID reader is a hassle. So far I've yet to find a single charger that didn't work in my "network" of allowed chargers.

Comment Re:Geo-fencing? (Score 1) 77

Wouldn't building GPS into vapes make them much more expensive, especially for something that doesn't work inside buildings? That being said, Google does a fairly good job of triangulating your position from nearby WiFi access points, but WiFi would be even more expensive than GPS.

TFS says the vape would use Bluetooth to connect with the phone/app. The vape won't work w/o the app, so they'd build any extra functionality into the app, like ads, tracking and geo-fencing. See my other post Why stop there?

Comment Why stop there? (Score 1) 77

Move the vape too far away from the phone, and it shuts off again.

If the vape is going to be app-locked, then the app can be (a) tracked and (b) geo-fenced. Establishments/locations can post if they allow vaping and the (nanny) app can track where you are and disable the vape if it's prohibited. Marketing bonus: The app will probably be running a lot, so the data it could collect could be HUGE. /s

Comment Re:Sony makes memory cards? (Score 1) 38

You'd be very wrong. Sony hasn't made camera sensors in a decade. They spun off Sony Semiconductor Solutions as an independent company back in 2016. Also Sony makes a loss on Playstation, but you are close to correct there, 60% of their profit is gaming. A lot of the rest is music and film, followed by professional gear.

Comment Re:Sony makes memory cards? (Score 1) 38

Who knew?

Literally everyone other than you from the looks of things. Certainly everyone who has a Sony video camera professional or amateur, or a Sony mirrorless professional or amateur all of which I wonder if you know about...

I can't name a single product this company makes besides the PlayStation

I guess that answers that question. This sounds like a *you* problem.

They're a dead company walking

Yeah the company that made $81billion selling products you don't know nothing about about is "dead". Gotchya buddy.

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