> But they're now looking at bacterial toxin as the main culprit.
Well toxin anyway, without knowing what that toxin is and what is producing it, even to say it is bacterial is unknown. It could be a yeast, man made, or even a plant (pollen?). However, it does seem to be unlikely to come from an agricultural source with frozen ground.... maybe the ocean?
That would be some mega-disaster fodder right there.... a worldwide bloom of toxic phytoplankton.....they gave us breath, now they have come to take it away. Trapped by the seas around japan, now global warming unleashes them on the world.
I am thinking, some solution involving finding asteroids made of saltpeter and diverting them to the earths oceans to overfeed them with fertilizer and use up all the oceanic oxygen....saving humanity... and causing bumper crops the world over next year....some solace as the world struggles with the repercussions of killing the ocean to save the land.
Or at least imply all that in the montages between the action shots and trite dialogue.
So I think its long enough ago that I don't have to worry about telling the details of this story..... anyway, more than a decade has passed.... (am I getting old? Someone told me I am middle aged now....damnit). In any case, it illustrates your point:
So there was a point where I was making a lot less money at my day job, and tired of how much I was spending on pot. I was a drug dealer for about a month. It ended for entirely unrelated reasons to this story (no I didn't get arrested; I did have, lets say, some bad experiences with unscrupulous people).... but anyway in that time, the most expensive item in my apartment was a bit less than a pound of marijuana. It was in a brown paper bag, in the bottom of a dresser drawer. In my night stand, was my pipe and my "head stash", about 7 grams of pot.
So during that time, my apartment was robbed. They took 3 things, 1 of which I reported to the police. That is, they stole the laptop I was issued by my workplace. It was slightly broken (screen was fucked up) and ran linux, but was about 5 years before disk encryption became an option in the linux installs.... so they didn't get much there.
The other things they took.... my head stash and my pipe (first glass pipe I ever owned....assholes)! They never found the rest of the pound....which was all of 2 feet away (I had a very small bedroom at the time).
That said, they did put in some effort more than you would expect to get in....I think they saw the laptop through a window from the fire escape. They actually tried the door and failed to get in, took one of the wooden spokes from the banister, came around the other side of the house and up the fire escape....and used that to break the plexiglass window (actually the wood frame around it)....this was all on the third floor.
You may feel that way about it, I certainly don't. He is a victim. Would you consider him liable if someone stole his car and ran someone down? Stole his chainsaw and cut up a body? I see no reason gun owners deserve some special onus on them.
No matter what happens from the point its stolen, its not his fault. Now if he sabotaged the gun so anyone using without knowing how to fix it first, it would be injured....then their injury would be his fault. However, he can't be considered honestly responsible for any decision he was not party to.
I don't care what you or your laws, or your courts say....I will never personally hold guilt against a victim of theft for what is later done with his property; and I will hold guilt against those who do.
Not only that but there is a real hidden trust issue here.
What is the difference between The US government collecting this sort of data and North Korea doing it? If someone came out with evidence that the DPRK was doing exactly this same stuff both to their own people and abroad (and don't get me wrong, to some extent they likely are...even if its unlikely they have the same level of capability) What is the difference?
The answer is very simple: Policy. we are protected, to some extent, by policies which try to prevent some of the worst abuses. The problem is, policy can be skirted or changed. It isn't a question of whether we trust Keith's boys. Its a question of whether we trust them, and the people who will replace them and the people who will replace them. Can we really be certain that this capability would necessarily be destroyed before those policies could ever change or be subverted?
Fact is we already know they can be subverted, and that no system has ever prevented abuses. We know they have templates for abusing it ("Parallel construction") and have defended the use of that template for far lesser issues than "terrorism".
....and in the end, you might still spend more on those cameras and guards than the reduction in theft; possibly even more than the total of all the theft, including the part you didn't stop.
Bruce Schnieir made a nice observation in one of his newsletters a while back about how security never makes money for anyone but security folks....for everyone else it is a cost...always a cost. A cost that may mitigate other costs, but, its always a cost itself....in fact, it can ONLY be a benefit up to the extent that it mitigates other costs.
That is, if you lose $10,000 a year to theft.... the absolute maximum you can ever save by implementing security is $10,000 a year, and every dollar you spend on that security reduces that benefit. If you hire a security gaurd for $40k/year... you are actually losing 4 times the maximum benefit his job can provide, before he even provides any benefit.... which is likely to only be a portion of that maximum.
So the absolute maximum benefit of all this surveillance, of all this tampering with equipment, of invading privacy and creating a massive database that would be the wet dream of the Stasi and only needs a change in policy to be used to terrible effect....the likely unachievable maximum benefit is bound.....well really fucking small.
> So, there definitely seems to be a need for a different kind of legislation to target this anonymous payment method.
Well you have only shown that it has been done for cash, not really that there is need for that kind of control or even that such controls actually accomplish anything as they exist today.
The only real change I have seen that has decreased the use of cash is the convinence and ubiquity of cards as an alternative; which is far more carrot than stick.
Actually it has a built in ability to allow for fairly arbitrary spend conditions, including multiple keys, no keys at all( not recomended but if you did want to just toss some bitcoins out for grabs....you could), static passwords for keys.
All places have restrictions on density, you can only build so many houses so fast, and it requires infrastructure expansion to expand. Its not so much density as price. Its very simple, young professionals are prefered tennants for all sorts of reasons that you would have to be an idiot to not see. They are at the bottom of their income curve and make slightly more than the poor people who are at the top of their curve.... so they are willing to pay a bit more and more likely to be able to afford the rent and pay regularly.
Who wouldn't take more money for providing the same service? Its called gentrification (that word I was hinting at).... I know most people invoke it as if its some sort of society destroying greed or something. Personally, I see it as little more than a factual description of how some areas of cities evolve and expand. Its the reasonable prices that attract the interest, that grow the local economy, that cause formerly cheap areas to become expensive ones, and people who can't afford to live in the new paradigm move elsewhere.... and if conditions are right, this process will happen there too....not all areas will be gentrified, but some will, and do, and have.
Shit, I have watched it happen in the neighborhoods around mine. A lot of people moved in in the past decade or two and the density of the population had nowhere to go (we are bordered by other cities on all sides). Where you used to see a lot of immigrants and working class locals, now you see young professionals and the beginnings of the families they are creating.
> we will always want to say the basic level of usage at a sufficiently high level that the vast majority of our > customers are not implicated by the usage-based billing plan.'"
Divide and conqor. As long as most users are unaffected, they wont give a flying fuck what you do to the rest..... since the high bandwith people cost them the most, they are more than happy to lose those customers to another service.
Someone pointed this out to me after I started badmouthing ziplink (I am pretty sure I only just dated myself to other old fogies here) after they told me there was a cap on the "unlimited" service I had signed up for.....i left their service after that..... never really thinking that...its exactly what they wanted.... they didn't want people who used the service they offered, they wanted to have their cake and eat it too....and I let them by leaving like they wanted.
I should have stuck to my guns and told them to go get a fucking dictionary and look up two words "unlimited" and "fraud".
Its almost as if... economic prosperity in one area driving up prices eventually reaches a point where it encourages new business to move elswhere. You would almost expect to see similar effects where young professionals on entry level salaries get appartments in poor neighborhoods. Has anyone else ever heard of a process by which young professionals competing for lower income housing drive up the prices and price out those with less money?
Nah.... if that ever happened someone would have noticed and made up a word for it already.
Cars already mostly roll through stop signs unless there is a cop nearby watching, or another car that has right of way. Even so, if its just two cars both can usually go without nary a full second of stop between them. As long as even one of them is actually paying attention it works fine (though sometimes less smoothly)
It seems to me like red lights could use some optimization too. Right turn on red works, you give the right of way to the car moving straight...and it works fine. I don't see why a similar sort of "if the intersection is clear, then go" rule can't work.....certainly make more sense at some hours.
> and get to work faster than any other method (unless I commuted by helicopter).
That wouldn't help your gas mileage AT ALL. Plus, a good friend of mine clued me in on one of his rules for living a long life: Never ride in a helicopter... or as the non-copter pilots say: If the wings are moving faster than the body, its either in a spin, or a helicopter, either way its probably not safe
I don't see how the extra word adds anything here unless somehow confusion about whether driver control or specific internals of the transmission was even reasonable to assume. An automatic transmission may or may not have a clutch, but it is certainly not a driver accessible control, so whether its implemented with one or more clutches or not is pretty irrelevant.
In emergency situations where a life and death decision must be made, any organism should be assumed to want to self preserve. The car is not an organism but is the tool of one, its only directive should be to protect that organism to the best of its ability.
The very idea that it can or should even try to make such determinations is ridiculous. A better solution, is don't make that sort of information available. If it chooses one object over another make it strictly based on the properties of the object and outcome of the crash to the occupant solely.
Ethics is great, up to a point, its entirely crossed over into navel gazing philosophy.
No they are doing it right. Their customer has a nearly unlimited budget which needs to be spent and which they prefer to overspend because it gives them a way to expand their budget in the next cycle.
If they want to pay $20,000 for a hammer that is individually serial numbered, and wrapped, then you are an idiot for not stamping serial numbers on each one, bagging them up, and charging them 20k.
Not specifically illegal, however, if you are caught with it, it can be confiscated and accused of being part of a drug crime. Then, being a civil suit, the standards of evidence require that you to show that the property was not used in a crime, as the standard of guilt is significantly lower.
As an added bonus, if its more than one bill, some portion of the money certainly will test positive for cocaine or some other drug, so there is already evidence to be used against you if they feel they need it.
> If they have people there smarter than me (and I guess they do) they'll be using that info to link potentially > different cookies as suspect same cookies.
Actually if they have people smarter than me, then they realize its just random noise and the real customers are paying for volume of data with no way to judge its real quality anyway, so a little poison is just as good as clean grain?
I mean sure they could climb for the higher hanging fruit, but...when they get paid as much even if they pick it up off the ground.... why bother with ladders?
Clearly they both understand bitcoin enough to explain it in their own words:
Himanshu Arora: The biggest concern associated with Bitcoin is the anonymity built into the virtual currency's architecture. Although transactions are public, the parties involved are kept anonymous. Bitcoins can allow illegal operations with the ease and speed of the Internet, but with the secrecy of a cash deal.
Ryan W Neal: At the heart of the concern is the anonymity built into the bitcoin architecture. While every bitcoin transaction is public, the parties involved are kept anonymous. With bitcoins, illegal operations can be made with the speed and ease of the Internet and with the secrecy of cash.
So this is what high school english teachers spend their time reading, sections of the text book, barely edited.
ROTFL sure, well ok I forgot about that. However, most of the automatics I drove were setup so that doing this ran the real risk of throwing it too far and tossing it in reverse. I actually did this once in my exes car. Her shifter stuck a little bit, and when it came out of drive going down the hill it took enough force that I missed neutral and slammed it into reverse.
I quickly recovered, but the car made a rather bad sound....then my ex made some sounds, being rather unhappy about what I just did to her geo metro.
One of the things I like about the VW transmissions so far is that going into reverse requires an exta motion, you have to push down on the shifter to move it over there. So you really can't do it accidentally.
> Leave a little more space and you won't need as many clutch actions. Also, I often roll down hill on > the overpass-underpass routes in neutral.
I think I did a lot more clutching and riding people's asses in my old car. The one thing that broke me of all those bad habbits.... was the new cars MFI display that shows my current gas milage. I put that display on as I drive and it has totally changed my driving to a much less aggressive posture.
Giving people some space doesn't just prevent clutching, it saves gas by giving you a cushion to maintain a little speed, because nothing kills your efficiency like having to add more speed, especially if you lost that momentum at the bottom of a hill. I have seen my car report as low as 4 mpg when accelerating.
In fact, they say you should drive slower on the highway because of wind resistance but, I have found that the difference in MPG is far greater when it comes to hills and speed changes seem to be the real mpg killers.
My ride to work is slightly more uphill than downhill, so I seem to average about 15-20% better mileage coming back from work than going to, and whether it is heavy traffic or not makes another 15% difference.
Like I said, totally changed how I drive in just the 7 months or so I have had it.
Well yes and no. I am approaching middle age of course, and I did just by a nice car. However, I made the switch in my mid 20s after learning to ride a motorcycle. I got a VW jetta with a stick and drove that around until it died, which was last year; when I upgraded to the jetta turbodiesel.
I wouldn't doubt that, at this point, motorcycles are the main way young people learn to operate a clutch. I think automatic bikes exist, but they are hardly the low end or common.
I bought my car new last year. It has a clutch, and a 6 speed transmission....and its a station wagon.
as for age, I am 35, and while I did learn to drive on an automatic, I switched shortly after learning to ride a motorcycle taught me the basics of how to use a manual transmission.
Then when my car was in the shop and I got a loaner with manual/automatic that displayed the current gear on the dash....and everytime I stepped on the gas and felt it was being sluggish, I looked down at the dash and saw it was not in the gear I would have put it in, and realized why I had no interest in regressing back to trainer cars.
This makes a lot of sense, but another reliable fix is to simply.... not have a heavy keyring. The advice to not dangle every object you own off your car key has been around since I was a kid. I remember being told that having a heavy keyring could damage the car ignition switch....so I never attached my car key, for any of my cars, to my keyring (even though mine is relatively small and light compared to many)
Works great. I never understood why people consider being unable to dangle 13 keyrings full of keys and nick nacks from the ignition switch of the car was such a necessary feature.
Slashdot Mirror
> But they're now looking at bacterial toxin as the main culprit.
Well toxin anyway, without knowing what that toxin is and what is producing it, even to say it is bacterial is unknown. It could be a yeast, man made, or even a plant (pollen?). However, it does seem to be unlikely to come from an agricultural source with frozen ground.... maybe the ocean?
That would be some mega-disaster fodder right there.... a worldwide bloom of toxic phytoplankton.....they gave us breath, now they have come to take it away. Trapped by the seas around japan, now global warming unleashes them on the world.
I am thinking, some solution involving finding asteroids made of saltpeter and diverting them to the earths oceans to overfeed them with fertilizer and use up all the oceanic oxygen....saving humanity... and causing bumper crops the world over next year....some solace as the world struggles with the repercussions of killing the ocean to save the land.
Or at least imply all that in the montages between the action shots and trite dialogue.
Then the law is wrong. Nothing new about that. The law is seldom very just.
So I think its long enough ago that I don't have to worry about telling the details of this story..... anyway, more than a decade has passed.... (am I getting old? Someone told me I am middle aged now....damnit). In any case, it illustrates your point:
So there was a point where I was making a lot less money at my day job, and tired of how much I was spending on pot. I was a drug dealer for about a month. It ended for entirely unrelated reasons to this story (no I didn't get arrested; I did have, lets say, some bad experiences with unscrupulous people).... but anyway in that time, the most expensive item in my apartment was a bit less than a pound of marijuana. It was in a brown paper bag, in the bottom of a dresser drawer. In my night stand, was my pipe and my "head stash", about 7 grams of pot.
So during that time, my apartment was robbed. They took 3 things, 1 of which I reported to the police. That is, they stole the laptop I was issued by my workplace. It was slightly broken (screen was fucked up) and ran linux, but was about 5 years before disk encryption became an option in the linux installs.... so they didn't get much there.
The other things they took.... my head stash and my pipe (first glass pipe I ever owned....assholes)! They never found the rest of the pound....which was all of 2 feet away (I had a very small bedroom at the time).
That said, they did put in some effort more than you would expect to get in....I think they saw the laptop through a window from the fire escape. They actually tried the door and failed to get in, took one of the wooden spokes from the banister, came around the other side of the house and up the fire escape....and used that to break the plexiglass window (actually the wood frame around it)....this was all on the third floor.
You may feel that way about it, I certainly don't. He is a victim. Would you consider him liable if someone stole his car and ran someone down? Stole his chainsaw and cut up a body? I see no reason gun owners deserve some special onus on them.
No matter what happens from the point its stolen, its not his fault. Now if he sabotaged the gun so anyone using without knowing how to fix it first, it would be injured....then their injury would be his fault. However, he can't be considered honestly responsible for any decision he was not party to.
I don't care what you or your laws, or your courts say....I will never personally hold guilt against a victim of theft for what is later done with his property; and I will hold guilt against those who do.
Not only that but there is a real hidden trust issue here.
What is the difference between The US government collecting this sort of data and North Korea doing it? If someone came out with evidence that the DPRK was doing exactly this same stuff both to their own people and abroad (and don't get me wrong, to some extent they likely are...even if its unlikely they have the same level of capability) What is the difference?
The answer is very simple: Policy. we are protected, to some extent, by policies which try to prevent some of the worst abuses. The problem is, policy can be skirted or changed. It isn't a question of whether we trust Keith's boys. Its a question of whether we trust them, and the people who will replace them and the people who will replace them. Can we really be certain that this capability would necessarily be destroyed before those policies could ever change or be subverted?
Fact is we already know they can be subverted, and that no system has ever prevented abuses. We know they have templates for abusing it ("Parallel construction") and have defended the use of that template for far lesser issues than "terrorism".
Can we really afford to trust them that much?
....and in the end, you might still spend more on those cameras and guards than the reduction in theft; possibly even more than the total of all the theft, including the part you didn't stop.
Bruce Schnieir made a nice observation in one of his newsletters a while back about how security never makes money for anyone but security folks....for everyone else it is a cost...always a cost. A cost that may mitigate other costs, but, its always a cost itself....in fact, it can ONLY be a benefit up to the extent that it mitigates other costs.
That is, if you lose $10,000 a year to theft.... the absolute maximum you can ever save by implementing security is $10,000 a year, and every dollar you spend on that security reduces that benefit. If you hire a security gaurd for $40k/year... you are actually losing 4 times the maximum benefit his job can provide, before he even provides any benefit.... which is likely to only be a portion of that maximum.
So the absolute maximum benefit of all this surveillance, of all this tampering with equipment, of invading privacy and creating a massive database that would be the wet dream of the Stasi and only needs a change in policy to be used to terrible effect....the likely unachievable maximum benefit is bound.....well really fucking small.
> So, there definitely seems to be a need for a different kind of legislation to target this anonymous payment method.
Well you have only shown that it has been done for cash, not really that there is need for that kind of control or even that such controls actually accomplish anything as they exist today.
The only real change I have seen that has decreased the use of cash is the convinence and ubiquity of cards as an alternative; which is far more carrot than stick.
Actually it has a built in ability to allow for fairly arbitrary spend conditions, including multiple keys, no keys at all( not recomended but if you did want to just toss some bitcoins out for grabs....you could), static passwords for keys.
All places have restrictions on density, you can only build so many houses so fast, and it requires infrastructure expansion to expand. Its not so much density as price. Its very simple, young professionals are prefered tennants for all sorts of reasons that you would have to be an idiot to not see. They are at the bottom of their income curve and make slightly more than the poor people who are at the top of their curve.... so they are willing to pay a bit more and more likely to be able to afford the rent and pay regularly.
Who wouldn't take more money for providing the same service? Its called gentrification (that word I was hinting at).... I know most people invoke it as if its some sort of society destroying greed or something. Personally, I see it as little more than a factual description of how some areas of cities evolve and expand. Its the reasonable prices that attract the interest, that grow the local economy, that cause formerly cheap areas to become expensive ones, and people who can't afford to live in the new paradigm move elsewhere.... and if conditions are right, this process will happen there too....not all areas will be gentrified, but some will, and do, and have.
Shit, I have watched it happen in the neighborhoods around mine. A lot of people moved in in the past decade or two and the density of the population had nowhere to go (we are bordered by other cities on all sides). Where you used to see a lot of immigrants and working class locals, now you see young professionals and the beginnings of the families they are creating.
> we will always want to say the basic level of usage at a sufficiently high level that the vast majority of our
> customers are not implicated by the usage-based billing plan.'"
Divide and conqor. As long as most users are unaffected, they wont give a flying fuck what you do to the rest..... since the high bandwith people cost them the most, they are more than happy to lose those customers to another service.
Someone pointed this out to me after I started badmouthing ziplink (I am pretty sure I only just dated myself to other old fogies here) after they told me there was a cap on the "unlimited" service I had signed up for.....i left their service after that..... never really thinking that...its exactly what they wanted.... they didn't want people who used the service they offered, they wanted to have their cake and eat it too....and I let them by leaving like they wanted.
I should have stuck to my guns and told them to go get a fucking dictionary and look up two words "unlimited" and "fraud".
Its almost as if... economic prosperity in one area driving up prices eventually reaches a point where it encourages new business to move elswhere. You would almost expect to see similar effects where young professionals on entry level salaries get appartments in poor neighborhoods. Has anyone else ever heard of a process by which young professionals competing for lower income housing drive up the prices and price out those with less money?
Nah.... if that ever happened someone would have noticed and made up a word for it already.
Cars already mostly roll through stop signs unless there is a cop nearby watching, or another car that has right of way. Even so, if its just two cars both can usually go without nary a full second of stop between them. As long as even one of them is actually paying attention it works fine (though sometimes less smoothly)
It seems to me like red lights could use some optimization too. Right turn on red works, you give the right of way to the car moving straight...and it works fine. I don't see why a similar sort of "if the intersection is clear, then go" rule can't work.....certainly make more sense at some hours.
> and get to work faster than any other method (unless I commuted by helicopter).
That wouldn't help your gas mileage AT ALL. Plus, a good friend of mine clued me in on one of his rules for living a long life: Never ride in a helicopter... or as the non-copter pilots say: If the wings are moving faster than the body, its either in a spin, or a helicopter, either way its probably not safe
I don't see how the extra word adds anything here unless somehow confusion about whether driver control or specific internals of the transmission was even reasonable to assume. An automatic transmission may or may not have a clutch, but it is certainly not a driver accessible control, so whether its implemented with one or more clutches or not is pretty irrelevant.
In emergency situations where a life and death decision must be made, any organism should be assumed to want to self preserve. The car is not an organism but is the tool of one, its only directive should be to protect that organism to the best of its ability.
The very idea that it can or should even try to make such determinations is ridiculous. A better solution, is don't make that sort of information available. If it chooses one object over another make it strictly based on the properties of the object and outcome of the crash to the occupant solely.
Ethics is great, up to a point, its entirely crossed over into navel gazing philosophy.
> You are doing it wrong
No they are doing it right. Their customer has a nearly unlimited budget which needs to be spent and which they prefer to overspend because it gives them a way to expand their budget in the next cycle.
If they want to pay $20,000 for a hammer that is individually serial numbered, and wrapped, then you are an idiot for not stamping serial numbers on each one, bagging them up, and charging them 20k.
Not specifically illegal, however, if you are caught with it, it can be confiscated and accused of being part of a drug crime. Then, being a civil suit, the standards of evidence require that you to show that the property was not used in a crime, as the standard of guilt is significantly lower.
As an added bonus, if its more than one bill, some portion of the money certainly will test positive for cocaine or some other drug, so there is already evidence to be used against you if they feel they need it.
> If they have people there smarter than me (and I guess they do) they'll be using that info to link potentially
> different cookies as suspect same cookies.
Actually if they have people smarter than me, then they realize its just random noise and the real customers are paying for volume of data with no way to judge its real quality anyway, so a little poison is just as good as clean grain?
I mean sure they could climb for the higher hanging fruit, but...when they get paid as much even if they pick it up off the ground.... why bother with ladders?
Clearly they both understand bitcoin enough to explain it in their own words:
So this is what high school english teachers spend their time reading, sections of the text book, barely edited.
ROTFL sure, well ok I forgot about that. However, most of the automatics I drove were setup so that doing this ran the real risk of throwing it too far and tossing it in reverse. I actually did this once in my exes car. Her shifter stuck a little bit, and when it came out of drive going down the hill it took enough force that I missed neutral and slammed it into reverse.
I quickly recovered, but the car made a rather bad sound....then my ex made some sounds, being rather unhappy about what I just did to her geo metro.
One of the things I like about the VW transmissions so far is that going into reverse requires an exta motion, you have to push down on the shifter to move it over there. So you really can't do it accidentally.
> Leave a little more space and you won't need as many clutch actions. Also, I often roll down hill on
> the overpass-underpass routes in neutral.
I think I did a lot more clutching and riding people's asses in my old car. The one thing that broke me of all those bad habbits.... was the new cars MFI display that shows my current gas milage. I put that display on as I drive and it has totally changed my driving to a much less aggressive posture.
Giving people some space doesn't just prevent clutching, it saves gas by giving you a cushion to maintain a little speed, because nothing kills your efficiency like having to add more speed, especially if you lost that momentum at the bottom of a hill. I have seen my car report as low as 4 mpg when accelerating.
In fact, they say you should drive slower on the highway because of wind resistance but, I have found that the difference in MPG is far greater when it comes to hills and speed changes seem to be the real mpg killers.
My ride to work is slightly more uphill than downhill, so I seem to average about 15-20% better mileage coming back from work than going to, and whether it is heavy traffic or not makes another 15% difference.
Like I said, totally changed how I drive in just the 7 months or so I have had it.
Well yes and no. I am approaching middle age of course, and I did just by a nice car. However, I made the switch in my mid 20s after learning to ride a motorcycle. I got a VW jetta with a stick and drove that around until it died, which was last year; when I upgraded to the jetta turbodiesel.
I wouldn't doubt that, at this point, motorcycles are the main way young people learn to operate a clutch. I think automatic bikes exist, but they are hardly the low end or common.
I bought my car new last year. It has a clutch, and a 6 speed transmission....and its a station wagon.
as for age, I am 35, and while I did learn to drive on an automatic, I switched shortly after learning to ride a motorcycle taught me the basics of how to use a manual transmission.
Then when my car was in the shop and I got a loaner with manual/automatic that displayed the current gear on the dash....and everytime I stepped on the gas and felt it was being sluggish, I looked down at the dash and saw it was not in the gear I would have put it in, and realized why I had no interest in regressing back to trainer cars.
This makes a lot of sense, but another reliable fix is to simply.... not have a heavy keyring. The advice to not dangle every object you own off your car key has been around since I was a kid. I remember being told that having a heavy keyring could damage the car ignition switch....so I never attached my car key, for any of my cars, to my keyring (even though mine is relatively small and light compared to many)
Works great. I never understood why people consider being unable to dangle 13 keyrings full of keys and nick nacks from the ignition switch of the car was such a necessary feature.
Yup and there was a case of this in m8y state which was hilarious: http://www.masslive.com/news/i...
but a quick google search shows: https://www.google.com/search?...
Just on the first page of google we see similar incidents in Florida, New Jersey, DC.... ROTFL.