I live in the country and several of my neighbors have copper POTS service, pretty much for the same reason.

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.)

Users have only been asking for this since Vista...

Have been doing this for years.

That "someone" was Maureen O'Gara. She was trying to find PJ's identity, probably to discredit her.

The NYT reports that Chinese open weight models like GLM-5.2 have almost caught up with the US frontier models: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/0...

Instead of trying to stay ahead, Sam Altman and Dario Amodei have been saying for years that they want government regulation because their products are too dangerous. Amodei even said 3(!) weeks ago he'd like a pause in AI releases. Well now they have their government regulation and Amodei even has a government imposed pause on Claude releases just like he asked for.

Idiots.

Having actually RTFA for once... I was looking at where Mark was noting his first email address.

I remember those days -- pre internet, so you had to give the route (...!ucbvax!ucscb).
We also had write (and for see as you type, "rite") on our PDP-11/70, and for the life of me, I couldn't understand why I'd use email instead of write. It took a while before I realized the value of asynchronous communication.

But yes, those were the days.

For those who are too young and missed it, or those who remember it and want to see it in all its glory: https://www.flickr.com/photos/...

Finally! Someone I can tell to get off my lawn with those hot grits!

I waited for quite a while. I figured it wasn't necessary. Otherwise I probably would have had a 4 digit ID as well.

I am shocked, SHOCKED! That AI didn't preserve institutional knowledge.

"Today, there is intense interest in the use of multivibrators in cryptography. Turing’s key generator, the most original part of Delilah, contained eight multivibrator circuits, along with the five-wheel assembly mentioned previously. In effect the multivibrators were eight more very complicated “wheels,” and there was additional circuitry for enhancing the random appearance of the numbers the multivibrators produced."

Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO, has been campaigning for government regulation. Only last week, he was putting out statements that we need an AI pause. He keeps saying how dangerous his own products are and how likely they are to create mass unemployment. Well, now he has his government regulation and he has his own personal pause. Hopefully, this will teach him why many are sceptical of asking governments to regulate against innovation.