FTA the boomer rate was 83 percent, and GenZ rate of 39 percent, both of those numbers seem credible to me. When I was in HS, we did at least half our Drivers Ed training in standard shift cars. So if you took Drivers ed, you knew how to drive a standard at the time.

Out of curiosity, how did you equate registration with number of motorcycle riders? Seems to be a very loose connection to me. While registered bikes almost certainly equate to a person who is familiar with standard, there are people who know how to shift who don't own a bike. Also there are people with more than one registered bike. Finally in off road biking, most are titled, but not registered. They can't be put on the highway, they do not have the required equipment to be inspected, like my old Montesa Cota and VR.

Flash memory is dirt cheap. Optical media are more expensive

Flash media is cheap if bought blank. It's expensive if you have to program it.

Optical media is expensive individually, but dirt cheap when you can press them by the thousands per hour.

That's why optical media hangs around - a CD can be stamped in about a second - it's basically just a more precise form of injection molding. The same applies for DVDs and Blu-Rays - they can stamped out in seconds.

But flash memory cannot. If you go with the cheap flash memory devices, programming 1GB will take about a minute. You can make it go faster by parallelizing the operation but approaching the speed of a single CD stamper is very expensive. The more expensive flash memory that's faster can probably do it in a few seconds, but then the media costs jump dramatically - it's why you can buy 128GB thumbdrives for a couple of bucks, but a 1TB SSD costs hundreds.

Plus, flash memory has power off lifetimes - if you don't use it, it gradually forgets over a period of a few years. CDs generally last as long as the coating doesn't rot.

Honestly, AI is useful here for a lot of the mechanical bits.

Darwin is BSD userland so most of the porting for the NetBSD would be just mechanical bits of changing Makefiles and other things. And AI is really, really, really good at that. Anything that really is just a mechanical transformation is a good candidate for AI assistance. It can mean you can easily port most of the Darwin userspace over with very little effort.

And the parts that aren't so easy can be assisted or done by humans. If you have 1000 packages that need to be ported over, AI can probably help you doing 950 of them in a few hours. The remaining 50 are ones a human probably can do in a few days, so you can have something up and running quick.

Or you can force a human to do 1000 packages, and they can probably do it in a couple of weeks but likely will run out of steam by the first week because it's boring work.

I'm no AI promoter, but I can see when tools are well, tools. Let AI do the boring stuff while you work on the stuff that scratches your itch. Isn't that what open-source was supposed to be about?

It sounds a lot like putting speakers in EVs to make vroom vroom noises. Whatever affection people have to it, the manual gearbox worked around a technical problem with engines and isn't in any way superior for driving. Yes having control over the engine is important, but the best option for that is pedal shifters. This seems like Ferrari chasing a nostalgia market rather than developing a performance car.

But then this is the same Ferrari that just released the Luce so that would track.

No, it makes complete sense.

You can't have your traditional H shifter anymore - it's just too impractical because honestly the modern engine and gearbox has 8+ gears to deal with. Sure truckers have dealt with it with their 10 to 18 speed gearboxes, though usually the 10 speed is a 5 speed with a high and low lever, while the 18 speed is a 6 speed with a 3 speed tied together so you have multiple shifters. It's just a lot of manual hand flailing.

Modern race vehicles know shift speeds are basically it, and the manual gearbox is no more for them - it's all computer controlled shifting and the driver paddle shifts because that's really the only way you can go between gears in sub-100ms.

For today's cars, automatics have basically taken over because 6 speed autos are basically standard, and many now coming with 8, 10 or 12 gears. Some can still be bought with a manual option, but compressing 10 gears down to 6 means very tall gears and basically lousier gas mileage because your gears are not ideal.

So basically getting it to an automatic gearbox - be it a standard automatic, or a dual clutch standard box with a computer controlled shifting that can be controlled from paddles is basically the way to go.

Ferrari is not doing it for nostalgia - they have to do paddle shifters because a 12 speed gearbox cannot be shifted traditionally with an H shifter. Meanwhile having the control paddles affords can avoid a lot of the guessing. While modern computer controlled transmissions are very good at picking the right gear, there are still some circumstances that it's not as ideal so a way to manually control the transmission can help (usually during extreme weather - snow, heavy rain, etc).

That is the way the industry has to go - Ferrari is showing you cannot take advantage of their cars unless you let the computer do the shift, while the logic of when to shift remains with you the driver. And that's perfectly fine, though purists probably won't call it a "manual transmission". But it's what the industry recognizes is happening.

Heck, even in trucking many new trucks are coming with automatic transmissions - likely with some sort of manual up/down in case you need to pick a better gear. More gears makes the engine more efficient and fast computer shifts mean very smooth rides. In a modern luxury vehicle you cannot feel it shifting - it's so silky smooth the only thing you notice is the tachometer needle moved.

The nutty thing is that learning to drive a stick shift is dain bread easy. I've taught a few people including my wife and son. Find an empty parking lot. First depress the clutch and let it out a few times while in neutral, then put in gear, and drop the clutch. it will stall, but fine. Student now knows what happens and when the clutch engages., then have them give it a little gas and slowly let the clutch out. They'll figure out the sweet spot, and then you drive around on the straight. The hardest part is the hill start. Start them with the emergency brake method. Super easy with modern electrical Emergency brakes. have them give some gas, then as soon as it starts to bog, push the brake release button. Soon they'll be shifting like a boss and won't need the EB method.

I mean I could teach the wife standard shifting, and teaching a spouse is seldom a good idea, and she's pretty spunky. I don't think she called me an asshole once!

Just about every motorcycle rider has intimate knowledge of manual shifting. If they are included, 60 percent could be about right.

note, there were some auto bikes, but not many.

A fair number of Petro-fueld sporty cars likewise have speakers https://www.slashgear.com/1929...

Goofy. Although I need to find out if my Jeep has that. When I need to kick it in the arse, it positively howls. My wife's Jeep has the same engine, but hers is much more civilized. Her's is a Cherokee, mine is a Trailhawk. I hope not, that would be embarrassing.

That said, while automatic, I can put it in "I shift mode". Don't need it much though. It shifts under full power just fine.

It's likely irreversible in that there wasn't a way to recover it. Chances are the only reason the data still exists is because of... backups. You know, the things companies do.

It's why things like GPDR make it hard because you can ask them to delete all your data just fine - they can delete it from the databases they have and it's irrecoverable.

But the problem is your data exists on backup tapes - likely on daily and weekly sets maintained on-prem and cycled monthly to offsite storage. Chances are there are transaction logs as well that can be used to bring those backups up to date.

It's why deleting data is often quite hard - and once it hits backup it's basically impossible.

The data was irrecoverable - just like deleting a file off an SSD is nowadays (it gets TRIMmed so even data recovery tools cannot get it back the SSD will return zeroes). To get it back they likely had to send for a backup tape and then manually restore it and extract his record out. Of course it costs money to do since the tape has to be retrieved, restored to a spare and the database record exported so it can be re-imported, and they don't want it to be a regular thing.

Of course, going forward the "deleted" flag is likely going to just be another database flag so you can "delete" an account, but it'll still be hanging around to save the need to restore from backup.

Doesn't matter that you don't "own" the Whitehouse, a con artist once sold the Eiffel Tower, and almost got away with selling it twice. Just say you're authorized to sell the Whitehouse because Trump doesn't like it anymore and the ballroom costs too much, and someone will believe you and buy it because at this point why wouldn't they.

What do you think happened to the East Wing? He sold the lawn as well (his birthday bash ruined it, of course, a no-bid got the contract to re-sod it).

At this point the only reason he hasn't sold the rest of the White House is he's living in it and worried whoever buys it might kick him out.

The next guy might find it cheaper to ask the Canadians to burn it down again so tit can be rebuilt than to try to fix whatever's left.

I regret to inform you that you have woefully underestimated it. The actual retail rate offered to consumers is closer to $2200 US per gallon. Sources: internet-ink.com, cbc.ca. This $14 million fine is only worth like, seven thousand gallons, or less than 200 oil barrels of ink.

That puts it among the most expensive liquids around. It beats things like Dom Perignon (champagne), human blood, spider and snake venom (used in making anti-venom), and horseshoe crab blood (blue blood) which is used in medicine.

Printer ink is one of the most expensive liquids out there, beating out many liquids used to create lifesaving medications.

Aside from Onedrive, there are people out there who "store" all their photos on Facebook. Then they wonder why they are all messed up when they want to say, make a print. For myself, I have a couple Time Machine backups, so even if one of the drives fails, I have the other, backups of backups.

Speaking of workflows, on my W11 laptop, I have scripts for launching some programs that need launched in a particular sequence. Somehow an update changed the sequence and required everything be changed - didn't take much time to change, took time to troubleshoot though. Knocked out a USB trackpad, and where the hell did Bluetooth go? Changed the audio settings, more troubleshooting, more wasted time, more downtime.

I think the Einsteins at Microsoft actually came to understand they FUBAR'd, as the next day another update came in, and I at least got Bluetooth back.

Not to mention the system instabilities that happen when a downloaded update is ready to be installed. More wasted time.

Windows is not functional IMO.

I still need the laptop for the classes I teach, and there is one program that is only on Windows, but I'm experimenting now with a VM that might be able to run it on my Mac (UTM). So far, it's all good except for the SDR radio, it needed to connect to, but I think I have that worked out.

The last one, about hardware stopping function is a real killer. I teach some emergency communications classes. Smart people who just need exposure, digging into their computers a bit to have their systems run. Much of the software is on multiple platforms, but most use Windows 11. Back when Windows 7 was in its heyday, it took two class sessions to get everyone running, then we'd delve into the details of the software. Windows 10 wasn't too much of a problem, after some weird audio driver issues were ironed out.

Windows 11? It was a disaster. Took several sessions to get things working, then an update would come along and bollix things up. Sometimes even during class sessions, someone's computer would stop working. Seemed almost random at times. The question asked was "What if I need to pass data and forms, and the computer suddenly stops working". Good question. The answer was you don't. So after a few months, never getting to the details of using the software, Me running the software on my Mac so I didn't have to join the dysfunctional fun, the guys and gals really wanted to try Linux, especially since one of the ladies was already a Mac and Linux guru. We disbanded for a while to put together a new class plan.

The results? Two classes and everything ran. It stayed running. The aforementioned woman helped, and we accomplished every task in a short time. Created a new batch of Linux lovers. Even had some starting to enjoy installation from source, as they found out a lot of the anti-linux stuff was just propaganda.

tl;dr When the state of W11 is for all intents malfunctioning, sometimes ya gotta start using an alternative.

Yes, and of course, with the longitudinal areas varying in east to west length, and north to south as you note, in a sort of jumble, so in some places there is quite a difference in sunrise and sunset over the lower latitudes, and eventually nothing at the poles, but the lower latitudes don't matter as much - we can end up with a hella headache! Spherical trig anyone?

We can use Universal time - I do a lot, but it still has to be correlated with local time, especially since some places it is tomorrow at times, still today here. The complications of a connected globe I suppose. tl;dr - the people who came up with DST were not stupid. Not remotely. They knew whatever system they came up with was a compromise. But they knew enough that it was needed.

Permanent DST is one of those topics that strains credulity. Some crew, usually those nearer the equator, know for an absolute fact that the worst idea ever foisted on humanity was DST, as there is not, nor has there ever been a need for it. It is their personal unassailable truth. Because the daylight and dark times of the day don't change much over the year, no one needs to ever change the time, anywhere for any reason.

Others, living at higher latitudes, have a deep experienced understanding just how much an adjustment is needed, because of the wild swings in daylight and night in those regions.

And some others among us realize the need for it at those higher latitudes, based on the physics of the situation, and find that going on permanent DST is like thinking we can make a piece of cloth longer by cutting off the bottom and sewing it to the top.

Finally, let's not forget that during the early 1970's oil embargo, the US did go on permanent DST. Most of the public hated it. Didn't save anything either, just changed the times of energy use. We dropped it like an unredacted Epstein file. Even now there are people demanding not permanent DST, but permanent Standard time. This is one of the never-ending topics that deserves ridicule.

Not for nothing, there is one country on Permanent DST, the Russian Federation.