The Mazda3 is available as a 6 speed manual if you are still looking for a fun manual car in general.

Funny thing though, now manuals are typically only available with premium trim levels aimed at enthusiasts, whereas before the cheapest version of a car was the version with the manual transmission.

Would a plugin that blocks tracking pixels fix the problem? I use firefox for android with Ublock Origin installed when I browse on the phone. I do use the facebook app when I access it on the phone, as they have made the mobile browser experience fairly terrible in comparison (on purpose.)

Thanks I'll check that out.

Uh, no, not even close. CS6 master suite (with everything you get now) was $7,988 circa 2007. Photoshop alone was $700. Illustrator similar when it was a standalone product.

Now, if you have a CS subscription long enough, year after year, yes you'll pay that much eventually. But not for one year's subscription cost, even under the new price. But unlike the old days, you're getting all the updates continually without paying $150 - $200 for upgrading one standalone piece of software like PS.

I would say that for people who use a lot of the apps and on a continual basis year after year and want the latest updates, they are probably saving money overall and spreading out the cost evenly. (i.e. a design agency.) But for us little guys buying it personally as an independent artist, people who used to skip four or five versions before upgrading (that would be me) or only need a few pieces of software and not the whole suite, yea it's a raw deal over time.

When Adobe came up with the perpetual license, I'm sure they put in a lot of thought to the pricing model to make sure they overall weren't going to lose money and that they would make more money and make it more consistently in the long run. But it creates new winners and losers in their customer base in terms of what they are paying and depending on their needs. They definitely lost a lot of good will from regular starving artists who don't need another monthly bill, but can afford to occasionally buy something that they'll use for the next five years without dropping another dime. Paying $800 up front for 5 years of use rather than $800 every year is a big difference, even if you get access to everything else. Frankly, most of the new features year to year are just fluff and cosmetics, the only truly groundbreaking new feature has been gen AI.

As an existing subscriber, I will likely go with the 'reduced AI' option because I don't really use AI except for light object removal with generative fill now and then.

I could actually live with the photographer plan but I actually use Illustrator a fair amount, and Acrobat to assemble, edit and otherwise convert and modify PDFs. I don't use much of anything else anymore.

I'd have to check to see if there's an alternative for Illustrator that will actually work for me. (usually the 'alternatives' are missing some key functionality...like CMYK support...or that one amazing vector graphics tool I desperately need that does not exist outside of illustrator.) Illustrator is a fairly terrible piece of software overall, but there is a lot of power buried inside of it if you need to do something esoteric.

Adobe CC is one of the very few 'subscriptions' I'll tolerate, simply because I've been a PS user since 1995 and I know it inside, out, backwards and forwards, and I like Lightroom for processing images. I even give classes on it at photography workshops.

Looking at it now though, the full suite price is starting to not be worth it at all given how little I use. They need a pick-your-own plan, but of course it's more money if they force everyone into the big one if you need to go outside PS and LR.

Convincing arguments and skilled debate are both learned things that most people are not good at. (I am not.) It's something you generally have to study and know and become good at. A few people are naturally good at it. AI algorithms hoover up all of the most convincing debate material and have that at perfect recall level, giving the average human a significant disadvantage. This is one area that it is not surprising that predictive AI is good at.

As a non-real-time debate person, usually I'll think of a good answer a few days later. With the algorithm, it's pretty much instantaneous. I'm sure it's already being used in troll farm posts everywhere.

So many other things external to the durability of the media have to go right for that data to read or want to be read that far in the future. It's difficult to tell whether technological society will have collapsed or just evolved to a point where all this is meaningless. In either case it may not be very useful. With a collapse, you have to bounce back to a recovery by that point. There is a minute chance that someone could discover the media an archeological style dig AND be able to read it with whatever technology is on hand. I think we're either going to go a direction where current computing technology is unrecognizably primitive, or we'll be gone by then. Not sure there is a middle ground.

Sure but with mobile hotspot capabilities included with many phone plans (at least on Verizon with my unlimited plan with an Android phone...) you don't even need that, unless you're doing something bandwidth / data intensive.

I don't consider computing a public activity for me anyway, but I can see it being handy for someone who rents a room in an apartment in a big city and just needs to get out of dodge for a while.

Some friends and I owned one of the first internet cafes in Silicon Valley. This was the late 90s before widespread adoption of WiFi, so we had ethernet jacks at all tables that were up against a wall, and with each purchase you'd get a free hour on our T1 by keying the MAC address in from your machine. A friend wrote the code to handle that. You could also buy additional time inexpensively, or buy another coffee. We had plenty of room so overstaying one's welcome wasn't an issue, the local university students really liked it there. Fun times.

...it can still make me a sandwich we're good.

Huh. Don't remember this, and I usually had a solid colored background. Like another poster said, perhaps it requires a specific combination of factors.

I still have Win7 on my desktop machine but I don't use it anymore. Too much of a road warrior so I got a high powered laptop instead.

...how to rip out or physically disable OnStar in vehicles that carry it? It continues to collect data even when you don't have a subscription.

I'm happily driving a 30 year old truck and a newer passenger car that does not have any outside connections or built in cellular modem. I'm afraid it'll be harder to find something like that as time goes on.

...how do they afford the storage space for all those videos? How much space do they have to keep adding every month to keep up with it? All videos ever uploaded to YouTube that weren't removed are available for viewing as far as I know.

My YouTube channel is part of my income, and I have to say that they are one of the best platforms for paying users for ad revenue run against their content. I just don't know how they can continually add the space to store it all. The revenue model must work, to pay for both the bandwidth and the space. It's mind boggling how much stuff there is on there. I'm guessing 5% of the videos pay for the other 95%.

My first job in high school was working as a playtester for Atari TenGen games, at that time mostly games made for the Sega Genesis (this was 1991-ish). I had just gotten my driver's license and I would drive to Atari in Milpitas during one summer to work with the other temps who were mostly random people of all ages and backgrounds employed through a local temp agency. We'd play the games over and over, trying to break them and find bugs. The usual thing.

A friend who I had met through the Amiga scene was a 'game counselor' there, those guys on the other end of the 1-900 toll number you could call for help if you were stuck in a game. He's the one who recommended me for the job.

The game councilors were located in the same room as us, at desks around the walls where they answered the hotline all day. They had booklets with walkthroughs in front of them and for a fee could get you unstuck. This was the days before widespread text and then video walkthroughs were available online. While I had seen text based walkthroughs posted on Usenet for PC games, especially difficult text adventures from Infocom etc., the console industry was untouched, allowing the game makers to have a lucrative profit center for a while.

As a teenager, I thought it was the coolest thing be able to work at Atari for a while, even as a lowly game tester. It sure beat working retail or fast food at the mall.

At the time, I had no idea of the legal hijinks going on behind the scene of independent game companies producing cartridges, so interesting article. Had plenty of Activision cartridges for my 2600 before all that as well.

Some alternatives for Adobe Software in a GitHub ReadMe. Start exploring alternatives or stop bitching. Once that cat is out of the bag there's no going back.

  Sure, it's insincere corporate bullshit, but I don't think that warranted that reply. I pay individually for a monthly CC subscription, it's the ONLY subscription I have to ANY software, and I use it a lot so I feel it's actually worth it in my case. But for me it's a freelance business write off, and I understand not being able to afford it, I've been there.

On the other hand, people don't remember how much the individual standalone software pieces cost. Maybe $600 a piece for the big ones. With CC you can use anything you want at any time, even if you just need it for one project. The buy-once-use-forever concept works great if you plan on skipping a lot of versions, which I used to do. The upgade price was also lower than the full price.

As it stands right now, I feel I'm getting my money out of the subscription, I use Lightroom, Photoshop and Illustrator quite a bit, plus Media Encoder and a few others occasionally like InDesign. It would be nice if they had a pick-your-own-subscription, where the cost increments individually depending on what software you need to use. Most specialty media arts professions only need to use a few pieces of software out of the very large selection you get with a full CC subscription. They do have a photographer's special with Lightroom and Photoshop, but I also frequently use Illustrator so it's no good for me.

There is also a problem of re-training - I've been using Photoshop since the mid-1990s. That level of familiarity is hard to re-learn on a new piece of software when you've been at it that long and you're very comfortable at it as an expert. There is a cost for re-training in lost time if you're using it for business.

There is a lonnnnng animated video on YouTube which I can't currently find which goes over the history of consolidation and mergers in graphic arts and 3D software combined with subscription based models that points out how much it screws over small time creatives. If someone else knows where to find it please post a link. It mostly deals with Autodesk and Adobe. It's a little over the top and asks for things that those companies will never give, but it has some valid points.

Data at each checkpoint deleted within 15 seconds....bullshit. Everything will be logged and used to build a profile of your movements. If it doesn't do it at the get-go, some incident will happen that will be used to justify the change.