It's all right, I hope I didn't sound too snippy. The world needs "idea men", don't get me wrong.
I don't know if it would help much, but maybe here's an analogy that might help for understanding USB in the future: USB peripherals are like drill bits and accessories. There's all sorts of cool things you can attach to a drill: spade bits, sanding disks, hole saws, screwdrivers, miniature lathes... heck, I've used a hand drill powered emergency sump pump before. The one thing all drill bits have in common is they need to be chucked onto a *drill* before they can work. The drill is the USB host, which is almost always a "computer". Just like there's no way you can chuck two bits together and have them do anything useful there's no way you can take a USB peripheral and connect directly it to another. Without a "drill" there's no "power", and thus you are dead in the water before you start.
This is basically how it works. USB is point-to-point, not really a bus at all. A given USB host device can talk to one peripheral device at once, and the host directs the entire conversation. I know, wait, what about USB hubs? In this analogy imagine that a USB hub is a sort of gearbox that can transfer torque from one input "drill", the host, to any of a number of output shafts. When a computer is using multiple USB devices "at once" on a hub it's actually shifting the "transmission" rapidly from one device to another. USB devices are not like Firewire or SCSI, which are peers of the host interface and have their own busmastering capability; USB devices are complete slaves to the host and cannot talk directly to each other. You *need* a host of some sort, be it a full-fledged computer or a minimal microcontroller-based implementation, to drive the conversation, and no off-the-shelf peripheral like a USB-to-serial converter is going to have the brains to be the host.
(The one exception is "USB On-The-Go", which is a specification for things like mobile phones or media players, which sometimes act as USB peripherals and sometimes act as hosts. A good example of this is the USB cable that Apple sells for iPods to let them download photos from a digital camera on the go. When the iPod is plugged into your computer it's a peripheral emulating a hard disk, but with the digital camera cable the iPod is a host for the camera, which itself is probably emulating a USB storage device. But really what the specification covers is how in the case of two OTG devices cross-connected to each other they negotiate which should be the master and which should be the slave. Once the devices have chosen their role they then act like normal USB hosts or peripherals respectively.)
Anyway. Maybe putting it in those sort of terms might help. But if not, no worries.
I don't know if it would help much, but maybe here's an analogy that might help for understanding USB in the future: USB peripherals are like drill bits and accessories. There's all sorts of cool things you can attach to a drill: spade bits, sanding disks, hole saws, screwdrivers, miniature lathes... heck, I've used a hand drill powered emergency sump pump before. The one thing all drill bits have in common is they need to be chucked onto a *drill* before they can work. The drill is the USB host, which is almost always a "computer". Just like there's no way you can chuck two bits together and have them do anything useful there's no way you can take a USB peripheral and connect directly it to another. Without a "drill" there's no "power", and thus you are dead in the water before you start.
This is basically how it works. USB is point-to-point, not really a bus at all. A given USB host device can talk to one peripheral device at once, and the host directs the entire conversation. I know, wait, what about USB hubs? In this analogy imagine that a USB hub is a sort of gearbox that can transfer torque from one input "drill", the host, to any of a number of output shafts. When a computer is using multiple USB devices "at once" on a hub it's actually shifting the "transmission" rapidly from one device to another. USB devices are not like Firewire or SCSI, which are peers of the host interface and have their own busmastering capability; USB devices are complete slaves to the host and cannot talk directly to each other. You *need* a host of some sort, be it a full-fledged computer or a minimal microcontroller-based implementation, to drive the conversation, and no off-the-shelf peripheral like a USB-to-serial converter is going to have the brains to be the host.
(The one exception is "USB On-The-Go", which is a specification for things like mobile phones or media players, which sometimes act as USB peripherals and sometimes act as hosts. A good example of this is the USB cable that Apple sells for iPods to let them download photos from a digital camera on the go. When the iPod is plugged into your computer it's a peripheral emulating a hard disk, but with the digital camera cable the iPod is a host for the camera, which itself is probably emulating a USB storage device. But really what the specification covers is how in the case of two OTG devices cross-connected to each other they negotiate which should be the master and which should be the slave. Once the devices have chosen their role they then act like normal USB hosts or peripherals respectively.)
Anyway. Maybe putting it in those sort of terms might help. But if not, no worries.