I've noticed that the apple news ads target sensitive issues. The retirement one is a good example of that. I've seen ads that appear to already know my financial status and health conditions. I tried the option to reset my advertising identifier, it doesn't seem to make much impact.

I did, I don't want the hassle of anything being blocked, and I don't want to upload identity details as they have the potential for misuse.

I notice that some tech companies claim they are "trusted" or have "trusted third parties", I don't trust them at all, I'm not sure why they think I do.

They trust themselves to do whatever increases the shareholder value. Is that not trust enough for you? /s

This is a good moment to try to take Microsoft customers, as they're putting a lot of machines out of support.

The interfaces look like they wanted to be graphical, as they have windows and drop down menus, and they wanted to have multi-tasking, as they implemented the overlay tools in Borland Sidekick. They wanted those things but they were limited to staying in text mode because widespread adoption of any real graphical interface was slow.

It seems a little humorous now that professionals were stuck for several years doing their day to day word processing, spreadsheets and databases in text mode, where getting different sized text or different fonts was almost impossible. This also wasn't just in the 80s, it was still somewhat true in the early 90s, not very long before the beginning of the internet as we know it.

Still, I wonder if things are really any better now, as we're all using software interfaces built on something else that's not really appropriate for the job. HTML.

The world-wide-web is becoming more and more only-your-country-web.

I noticed that some of his choices contributed to his problem. I haven't been forced into accepting AI (so far) while I've been using duckduckgo for search, libreoffice, protonmail, and linux.

even ddg has integrated AI now and while it can be disabled, the privacy aspect seems to mean that ddg regularily forgets my settings and re-enables the ai features.

maybe i'm doing something wrong here, but even ddg is annoying me with this.

I agree it’s annoying that the setting seem to change all the time, but you can use noai.duckduckgo.com

Wow! Thank you for that url, I didn't know that. Changed my default search engine to this and am - finally - rid of ddg settings getting annoyingly reset all the time!

The settings don’t change, but they are stored in anonymous local storage, so if that is cleared they go away. If you use our browsers though this is managed through the browser.

I've always wondered if the burning batteries and electronics in the drones have any significant environmental impact when compared to conventional weapons.

I'd rather have old fibre cables and lithium batteries than old unexploded ordinance

(If wishes were horses I'd rather Russia hadn't invaded a sovereign country in the first place, but we are where we are)

According to the article, you will get BOTH of those, no? Some of the bombs on the drones don't explode.

Any self respecting alien would send the signal every 42 minutes.

It says the burst lasts 2 minutes, so it would be 42 minutes of silence followed by 2 minutes of signal for a 44 minute cycle.

Has anyone checked the local planning office on alpha centauri for vogon announcements recently?

After I get my towel.

you've got to think deeper.

the concept of self respect itself may be alien to "aliens".

it's a human construct / concept.

also, stop calling them aliens. it is disrespectful.

(otherwise they might zap us with their thought cannon, compared to which light sabers are like toothpicks.)

they have as much right to be in this universe as we have. the term "alien" is a human and sci-fi construct. and sci-fi is, well, fi(ction).

call them extra terrestrial beings, or just other beings.

we need to realise that other beings can have other sets of values than we do, or even none. heck, they may not even have the concept of values. and there is nothing wrong with that.

i can go on, but I'll stop here. my other being friends are calling me for a get together.

Well, they are alien to us, but that doesn't mean we need to alienate them.

A being is also a human construct / concept.

>Well, they are alien to us, but that doesn't mean we need to alienate them.

True. I didn't see anyone saying that here.

>A being is also a human construct / concept.

Yep. It can be an alien one too, though.

I mean, there are humans without values. We don’t have to go far.

if you mean hitler, he was an alien.

Maybe there's more redshift than they intended!

See ya soon and please be ready with the fish!

Many aliens would have to have computed the Answer independently as the news from Douglas haven't reached them yet.

I think it worked as defined, it hogged the POST requests?

I think I heard that moving from 99.99% unavailability to 99.999% unavailability costs ten times more.