You'd think they would be useful in snow, but my 2025 BRZ's traction control will reduce power to the point that the car stalls out instead of letting the damn wheels spin in 2nd gear so I can make it up a snowy hill. (Thank God the car has track mode which disables all the nanny devices, but still, most cars don't have that mode).

I say this with the utmost respect. If you think that having to care about what gear you are in is too much for an already 'dynamic environment', for everyone's safety, especially your own, PLEASE stop driving.

You are at the edge of being overwhelmed as it is with your automatic vehicle by your own admission, any extra things you need to focus on, like the state of your engine's load, the gear you are in, and forecasting if you might need to downshift or upshift is a distraction, and not a feeling of being in control?

Either you haven't driven a manual car, or you haven't seen a good driver operate a manual transmission. There is no distraction from the road. The driver is literally in FULL control of the car without taking their eyes off the road. An automatic cannot tell you're about to take a right turn, it won't downshift and hold the gear throughout the turn, it will absolutely decide that engine load is low and upshift for fuel efficiency destabilizing the balance of the car for example. The solution, they added traction and stability control to compensate. You are not in full control of your vehicle if you're driving an automatic. Don't take my word for it, you have all the proof in your own experiences. Does your car stop accelerating the instant you let go of the gas pedal or does it keep accelearting for a moment, even though you've let up on the accelerator completely? That doesn't happen with a manual transmission.

But genuinely, if you feel having to take in any extra information while driving is a distraction, please reconsider continuing to get behind the wheel.

2: Safety features and self driving. Lane assist (for the most part), traffic jam assist, and park assist are all highly requested features that come to mind that simply cannot be offered with a manual transmission. Self drive is right out. Even emergency braking would be considerably tougher with a manual.

Sorry, you're quite wrong on that one. I also am in Canada and drive a Subaru, mine is a stick shift and a sports car, and it's riddled with this safety/nanny system crap. Automatic emergency braking? Yup! It'll stall the car when it activates unless you have lighting fast reflexes and manage to depress the clutch nearly instantly. Lane Keep assist? Yup. Adaptive cruise control? Yup! And if you're not paying attention and fail to downshift as it slows down, it'll happily stall the car for you, automatically. Also, traction control? You better believe that if you're trying to start the car in 2nd gear to get out of a bit of snow, the traction control system will cut engine power so much it'll auto-stall your car for you.

So yeah, safety features are jammed/shoved into the manual cars as well. But they are idiotic and wouldn't be needed if people actually drove their car instead of sat in the car pressing the gas pedal while doom scrolling on their phones. It's almost like having to shift gears, and pay attention to the car's behaviour and revs, traction, etc. keeps most people off their phones when driving stick. (Sadly I say most as I have seen the incredible lengths to which some idiots go to in order to use their phone while driving a stick shift.)

Mythbusters did an experiment to disprove this. I'd say they are about as credible as these researchers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Increasing UDP throughput simply by inlining a function is a big deal!

And nothing of value was lost.

Sadly while your logic sounds spot on, the reality is, that TV still does ACR (basically hashing each screen sometimes multiple times a second) and builds one hell of an accurate profile of everything you watch. Even if the source is HDMI. And it's still sold.

Food for thought, that HDMI cable to your dedicated device, it likely supports networking, so the TV has a path to the internet even if you don't connect an ethernet cable directly to it, or add in your wifi creds.

I've heard of traffic 'accidents' where a diabetic went hypoglycemic, passed out, and drove into other cars, pedestrians, etc. For some reason the news always reports it as a 'medical event', but the point is, people are killed by diabetics due to their diabetes way too often. It is an apt analogy. An idiot decides to drink and drive an puts people at risk. An idiot with diabetes fails to control their blood sugar and decides to drive, putting people at risk.

Yeah, it's easy to add more code to fix stuff that should be deleted. Just have the launcher code call your new code which bypasses all the old code. The old code can happily remain, it'll just never be called. No special skills required. If you look at the windows codebase, you'll see this technique everywhere.

And she's probably still a threat to national security!

Agreed, I had a 486DX2-50 from Dell. At best, I got it to boot into windows 3.1 on Dos 6.22 in about 25 seconds. That was with the HDD in DMA mode, and a heavily optimized config.sys and autoexec.bat. Unfortunately just the POST ate up 10 seconds.

The OP's claim of 3 seconds is ludicrous. Maybe on a modern VM emulating a 486?

What's really scary is that we've reached a point where I can't tell if this is a legit suggestion or sarcasm... and that says a lot.

You had me until you said you live in the UK. As a Canadian, it pains me to say, but the UK is even stricter than Canada on this surveillance and violence prevention crap. Even if Ebay didn't demand you prove your age for wanting a pair of scissors with less than an inch long blade, the UK Post would likely demand ID before delivering the 'dangerous goods', to track the movement of 'nefarious instruments'... lol

In case my sarcasm wasn't evident. I feel your plight, and share in it. This nonsense needs to end.

Oh dear... you seem to think that the human eye takes a picture like a camera. That's not at all how our eyes work. The number of rods and cones is not really that important, density of them matters more, but the focal length between the front and back of our eyes matter the most.

You see (pun intended) the human eye and brain work by scanning and filling in the blanks. Your eye is scanning (micromovements) constantly. Your brain is storing what it saw in an extremely narrow field of view and building up a mental image that makes you think you're seeing everything around you in one shot and in high detail. Nobody is. We're all seeing a very tiny sliver of high resolution dead center of our vision (well minus the tiny blind spot where the optic nerve leaves the back of the retina), and the rest is composited together from memory, and some of it is hallucinated (or inferred by experience and the brain being lazy).

So you are correct that it is unlikely the person can actually see such detail at that distance, but in theory, if his eyes are able to focus light just right at that distance onto the important part of his retina, he theoretically could make out the pixels, even if the pixel density is higher than the density of the cones and rods on the back of his eye.

My guess is he really believes he sees the individual pixels at that distance, but what he's seeing is artifacts from groups of pixels that his brain perceives. Not too dissimilar to how many people (myself included) can tell the difference between a CRT monitor refreshing at 60Hz, 75Hz, and even 85Hz. We're seeing secondary effects and claiming we see the flicker. Heck, anything below 400Hz for a fluorescent tube light and I absolutely see flicker, yet physiologically I should not. Clearly my eyes don't refresh at 400Hz. Just like the OP's eyes do not have the ability to resolve the pixels at that distance, but his brain is treating secondary artifacts as pixels, when they are very likely groups of pixels that appear to show banding in his vision (a common issue with human vision, and the reason why sub-pixel blending is used on fonts, to avoid that exact phenomenon).

So yeah, the OP is confusing his perception with what he is physically seeing. Lots of us think we see details we don't actually see. Our brains are fantastic at guessing and seeing patterns, then convincing us that we are indeed seeing them. That's the foundation of most optical illusions. And if he really did have a genetic abnormality where he could resolve the pixels at distance as he claims, then he'd be blind when looking at anything at any other distance as he'd be unable to focus the lens of his eye due to thickness.

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