Mazda's legacy button layouts plus the dial are really great. I have a 3rd Gen Mazda3 and it's nearly perfect. There is a touch screen but it's never used. The dial turns and also pushes for select, and there are some other buttons around it for getting back out of menus and a home button, and some shortcuts for various things. All within comfortable reach just between the gear selector and parking brake (real mechanical parking brake handle!) without having to raise your arm and glance away from the road to make sure you're finding a button. It's all done by feel.

On the steering wheel is volume, track skip (which works in Spotify for it's normal 15 second skip function forward or backward to skip through commercials) and cruise control. Also a phone answer and hang up button.

About the only complaint I have is the A/C fan speed is two buttons rather than a knob, but at least the temp adjust is a big fat knob. They gave up room for a fan knob in exchange for dual temperature knobs for passenger and driver.

The Gen 4 Mazdas are similar, with better Android Auto / Car Play integration and a nicer screen, and are still fairly new, a lot of low mileage cars still available through CarMax, etc.

If they are going to rely on voice commands I'm done. I don't talk to machines. If it's still usable via buttons, fine.

My wife has a Tesla and the UI experience is awful. Absolutely awful. The only good thing about it is the drivetrain. It's like owning a supercar in terms of acceleration. Other than that, I would consider Teslas to be actively driver-hostile. I avoid driving it as much as possible. I hope they will eventually be considered a quirky novelty relegated to the dustbin of history, while more traditional button interfaces make a comeback.

First of all, the amount of money that gets back to the creator is vanishingly small compared to what's kept by the cartel. While you think you're supporting the creators when you pay your license, you're really just supporting a vast army of middlemen leaching the money out. I'll say that to the apologists in this thread.

Secondly, they'll hit you up for a license even if you're just playing over the air radio. A radio station that's already paid a license and is playing advertising to pay for it. They will blatantly double dip. This happened to me when I owned a cafe / art gallery a long time ago.

I'm all for supporting the aritsts, but the system as it exists is seriously broken.

I'll add my voice to the chorus of "who cares about pocket, firefox works great" and it's the best platform to load up on anti-tracking, anti-adware, anti-spyware plugins and go surfing.

If firefox as a product degrades enough, someone most likely will come up with a viable replacement. The fact that there hasn't been a huge effort put into one shows that Firefox is still a very viable platform. You can change / disable just about anything that bothers you, and it has robust extension support. Those are the two most important things. Performance is just fine. I'm not exactly looking for top speed when running AdBlockPlus, Ublock, Social Fixer for Facebook, etc. Those are going to slow things down a bit and that's just fine. I mean c'mon, my first experience getting online was with a 300 baud modem, I can't really complain. I have synchronous gigabit fiber at home now, which is astonishing. A little rendering lag from FF is not going to bother me.

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%.