> The manual transmission is a work around for a technical problem with ICE engines.

Point of clarity: any transmission is "a work around" for that technical problem of needing torque multiplication at the drive wheels. And yes, EVs do away with that.

Folks such as myself that prefer manual transmissions aren't concerned with that. Nor are they concerned with the ultimate performance of the car in question; of course a tuned planetary automatic or DCT will outperform it.

IT'S FUN! Really. It's fun. It keeps the driver completely engaged in the act of driving his or her car. More so than a vehicle with a different type of transmission (or worse: no transmission!) does. The manual driver has no choice in the matter unless they want to try and drive around in one gear. Which with a torquey enough V8 would be doable, but not efficient.

It's a pity that the manual is basically gone. My '26 Cadillac 5BW has a stick and I specifically ordered it that way (gave up a '24 Z06 for it, too!) The engagement that car provides is just hysterically fun. But the majority of drivers don't want that any longer. They want a transporation appliance to go from A to B, and to Hell with the fun involved in getting there.

It makes the baby Jesus cry.

> The biggest deterrent: Girlfriends and/or wives. They don't know how to operate one

I can counter this with one anecdotal, funny story: my good friend Brian and his (then) new 2010 Corvette ZR1. Only available with a manual (I had one, too). His wife brought him to the dealer in her SUV so he could pick the new car up and drive it back home. But: he'd not driven a manual in a very long time and was way, WAY out of practice.

Stall. Stall. Jerky take offs and shifting, all the while his wife is behind him in her SUV. She finally has enough of the show and calls him, "Hey. Let me drive that thing back home. You're embarrassing me!"

All these years later, he's still not lived that one down.

I'm a long time GM buyer; I've only ever purchased their vehicles from Corvettes, to performance Cadillacs, to pick-up trucks. I currently have a '24 GMC 2500HD that I take off-roading, and a '24 Z06 that I'm selling to move to a new '26 CT5 Blackwing. Cut my arm and I bleed little blue GMs. But this move makes me seriously re-think that fanboi'ism.

The built-in Google system in the Corvette and pick-up is, how to put this nicely so I don't offend the Google fans...

Hot trash. Google Automotive sucks. Badly. Like, really, catastrophically badly. If you actually feel that it's a good system, you've used nothing but horrible systems in the past, for sure. It's super-trash.

It's awful. It's slow as all hell, applications crash constantly, and the nav system can take forrrrrever to find itself when the car is first turned on. And it requires OnStar to get constant updates, traffic, etc. You can attach the car to a Wifi setup or HotSpot to your phone and hope the offline maps can update that way, but it's sketchy as hell whether that works. No, GM wants you to pay nearly $600/year (per car!) to have your BUILT IN nav system work.

Remember when Nav systems had DVD updates, or even SD card updates because they stored everything locally in the car? Pepperidge Farm remembers. I actually prefer those days. But failing that, I'll take CarPlay over that Google crap any day of the week. The Apple stuff just works. All the time. Every time. Without waiting or any extra subscriptions other than my mobile bill. As someone else wrote here: I'm already paying for that for other things.

This is yet another silly decision that Ms Barra has made during her tenure, that her successor (who can't get here soon enough!) will have to unmake.

They've been working on this or something like that since I was a kid. For reference: I'm 52 now; 51 of those with T1D. The encapsulation idea isn't new at all, it's just not been scientifically feasible.

I kid you not, I'm writing this from 35000 on a United flight. We were all seated with bags stowed in the overheads, and the crew then told us get the eff off the plane. Apparently, some idiot lost his mobile phone on the plane during the previous flight, and it managed to fall between some of the plastic interior panels. We were all forced to leave the plane so they could tear the interior apart to get to the phone. They did finally find it, and we were allowed to get back in the plane and in the air almost two hours later.

I understand the concern with the lith ion battery being a threat to the plane. I just hope I somehow never meet the person responsible for this f__k up because I can't promise something bad won't happen to him. Several times.

Sure, assuming you have the extra PCI-E slot(s) to offer it, along with the lanes to drive it.

My quoting sucks. As does my spelling.

>It's worth noting that the PCI-SIG doesn't see PCI Express 7 living inside the PC market, at least not initially. Instead, PCIe 7 is expected to be targeted at cloud computing, 800-gigabit Ethernet and, of course, artificial intelligence.

PCI-E 6.0 will support 800GigE NICs because a 16-lane slot will handle 1Tbit/sec. These exist now; Nvidia's already launched the 800G CX8 NIC even though there's not yet a server motherboard to connect it to.

PCI-E 7.0 will support 1600GigE (yes, it's a thing) NICs because a 16-lane slow will handle 2Tbit/sec. It'll likely be eons before we see a motherboard that can do it.

This is an asinine statement, and you knew exactly what I meant when I said it wasn't their fault. The possessive pronoun, in this case, is referring to the baby that is born with the genetic mutation that causes the immune system to kill the betas. It's not that baby's fault.

The clue phone is ringing. It's for you.

I haven't had that misfortune, to be fair to myself. I was also trying to avoid Godwin, but it appears I've failed.

It doesn't matter whether they're "all the same" or not. As I said in a follow-up, it's trading the devil I know for one I don't. Just because the suppressant you're taking (for instance) isn't "bad" for you doesn't mean it wouldn't destroy someone else. Everyone's immune system is different.

The crux of T1D is that it's an immune system problem: the immune system, for some genetically fucked-up reason, sees the beta cells as intruders and destroys them. That problem doesn't go away once the beta cells are destroyed; new beta cells will be destroyed just as quickly (whether from your own stem cells or someone else's). Tamping down that immune response to retain those new beta cells will compromise the body in some form.

This can be interpreted very badly, so I'd back off on your rhetoric there. You do realize that without some "sort of medical intervention" you'd be dead by now? So would I and most of the rest of the race? Why is it that we've outlived our natural lifespan of about 35-40 years of age? Mother Nature certainly doesn't want us around for 80-100 years: she set the timer on us for 35 or so years. But we've temporarily beaten her with all "sorts of medical intervention" including antibiotics, pasteurization, etc.

Again, careful with the rhetoric. It has a "master race" feel to it, though I'm certain you didn't actually mean it that way.

We kinda agree here, but not 100%. The genetic mutation that causes the immune system response to the beta cells needs to be figured out and unfornicated. But as it turns out, that's REALLY fricken hard to do, elsewise it'd be done already. In the mean, the researchers are doing phenomenal work to try and improve T1D folks' lifestyles and lifespans; it's not their fault they ended up with this disease. Right?

I'm never sick. Well, almost never. I actually appreciate my immune system even if it's the cause of my T1D. Personally I'd rather not trade the devil I know for one I don't. The researchers are still hard at work trying to figure out ways to implant beta cells that can't or won't trigger the auto-immune system. I'd consider that the cure, and the only cure worthwhile. Until then: insulin pump, finger pricking, eating well, etc.

As a T1D patient of over 50 years, I'm happy to see these various attempts at cures. But until they can do it without the need for immuno-suppressants, count me out. As much as I hate this disease, I've managed it incredibly well with my pump, exercise, and eating well. I really don't look forward to a day when my diabetes are gone, but it's replaced by the fear that I could die from a silly infection that I'd otherwise fight off.

I'll pass.

Mine's a dual Xeon server that I also happen to use as a NAS. It's a SuperMicro dual-Xeon server board sitting in a SuperMicro 2RU chassis that has hot-swap SATA slots. It's running FreeBSD with ZFS, and I have 8x4TB SATA drives in it, in ZFS' version of RAID 10. It's packed full of dual-port 10G NICs as well and runs a pile of FreeBSD jails (DNS server, sendmail server, web server, DB server, etc, etc) along with serving storage. Works wonderfully for my use cases.

Sure, I'll do that. No problem. Honest I will.

It's OK if you want to surrender more and more of your agency to the government over-stepping their bounds, all in the name of "safety", but I'm not keen on it. If I can react in time while driving at over 150MPH on the race track, I can react in time at highway speeds. Perhaps you can't, but then you wouldn't know because you haven't actually tried. However I know what I'm capable of in a vehicle.

Of course. And it won't be overly intrusive either, will it?