One is under your control. The other is being passed through a script on the server that may be doing who-knows-what in addition to redirecting you.

(Better if you just drop Google altogether.)

You realize what this suggests about Trump’s hair . . .

I have the cables I might conceivably need again some day sorted into labeled plastic bins (USB, ethernet, etc.) The serial cables and other stuff I doubt I’ll ever touch again unless something odd happens are coiled, bound neatly with twine, and stuffed in a cardboard box in a semi-inaccessible corner where I don’t have to worry about them.

This is one of the few times I’ve thought it unfortunate that we have a loser-pays system in our civil courts. That means we can only bankrupt at most one of them. But in this case, SOCAN seems the lesser evil. By a very narrow margin.

So once it’s bankrupted you, where does it ship you off to?

I wouldn’t put one in charge of a water treatment plant or a set of traffic lights, but even if it stuffed up and killed people, the responsibility would still not be the AI’s. The responsibility would lie with those who built it, trained it, and prompted it, just as, if a bunch of people are fried by a nuclear missile, the responsibility lies with the person who pushed the button rather than with the missile itself. It’s a piece of software. It does what it’s told. It may be complex enough to display unexpected emergent behaviour, but so is Dwarf Fortress. Any destruction it accomplishes is just the real-world version of !!Fun!!, disgusting concept though that may be.

I’m sure there’s some government bean counter who is right now working on how long it will take the Gripens’ lower operational costs to earn back any F-35 cancellation fees.

The short version: Most of them spammed people, except possibly for the one that slept 70% of the time. None of them came up with a product or service anyone sensible would buy even if a human was providing it. Alas, none of them ordered tungsten cubes, either. It was a bunch of particularly boring fails.

All this money, all these resources, to produce artificial con artists. As though we didn’t have enough of the natural organic sort.

Startpage uses Google’s index, or used to. At very least, it seems to have more and different results than DuckDuckGo.

Fine. We’ll sell to the rest of the world while your domestic industry builds planes that have a nasty habit of falling out of the sky.

The link could very well lead to malicious javascript or a phishing site, yes. You could be a hacker, troll, or foreign rabble-rouser. We can’t tell. And the audience on Lemmy has a lot more sysadmins, programmers, and other IT people than the average. A lot of us have had to clean up a corporate network after a ransomware attack. We’re aware of the risks of clicking on the wrong thing in a way you may not be.

The site you linked to looks suspicious because it’s unfamiliar, it shows only a login screen to anyone not logged in (and nothing at all if you visit it with Javascript off, which is a wise precaution for dubious sites if you’re going to visit them anyway). Now, granted, if you are not the owner of the site, this is not your fault. It just doesn’t help your case.

If you had a history on Lemmy, we’d have some basis for determining whether or not you were legit. Since you have none, we have to guess, and the default is to not trust people.

It isn’t that you did anything wrong, exactly. It’s just that many of us aren’t willing to take the chance.

Given the memory requirement, my guess is that they’re not removing anything, just hiding it. And adding more useless crap on top.

The Gripen is apparently quite a bit cheaper than the F-35, both in terms of what it costs to buy the plane and what it costs to keep it in the air.

I apologize for phrasing things so poorly that several people seem to have missed my actual point, which was: no one else with an auto-update feature requires any information about you, therefore if they claim that’s their reason for asking for users’ personal information, they’re lying. They may have other reasons, which they have not stated. They may even be good reasons, although I’m not holding my breath.

And yes, I have compiled my own copy with that nonsense switched off, thanks for asking. However, it’s the job of people who understand that this is overreach to push back against it on behalf of the people who lack the knowledge, time, or energy to investigate it. I don’t like throwing even Windows users under the bus.

Sorry to break this to you, but these days, most GenXers are 50+, and we were never in charge of anything.

Why would I want an auto-update mechanism in the software? That’s what my distro’s package manager is for. And it doesn’t care who I am or where I’m from. Nor has any other software I’ve encountered with such a useless-to-Linux-users mechanism demanded any information about me.

In short, that rationale is obvious nonsense. That may be why they claim they’re doing it, but it doesn’t hold up.

Also, their website actually works.

[Hits “Zap style sheets” bookmarklet to make it possible to get at least a minimal amount of information out of the page]

Ugh, they still actually think the cloud shite is a feature.

Thus making their vehicles even more difficult to sell outside their own country.

Step one is getting the easy cases housed, the ones whose issues are largely just financial or who want to do necessary meds, therapy, etc. and are just waiting for the opportunity. Then we can work on the hard cases, and yes, we need more services than just housing there. But if we never do step one, we won’t get to step two.