Last time I went to CCC I was greeted with a giant Antifaschistische Aktion banner at the entrance. That made me feel pretty safe about the event (unironically).
TLS or SSL never meant that kind of safety in the first place. Even before LE, there was no guarantee that HTTPS means it's not a scam, and the PKI system has never been meant to guarantee that anyway! Let's Encrypt didn't change anything here, and they're doing exactly what they or any other CA is supposed to do.
That's a lot of text without giving any motivation for your main point. What makes an app package created by the app developer more "commercial" and anti-FOSS than an app package created by a distro-specific packager? What's the difference between an RPM package and a Flatpak package? Proprietary software and FOSS software both get distributed in both kinds of packages.
I don't know what kind of hoops Snap require to access files. Flatpak, however, has a pretty simple system for a fully sandboxed app to open a file or a directory: it just opens a file or directory picker, you pick a file or directory, and the app gets access to that file or directory without getting access to anything outside what you picked. Behind the scenes this is done via the XDG Portal system, but that's irrelevant to the end user who only sees a normal file open dialog.
Then for apps that have dotfile-type directories where you can put config files and other stuff, those simply exist in app-specific directories under .var in your home directory, so they're not difficult to find either.
The 1541 was slow because the VIC-20 shipped with faulty hardware that couldn't move data on the serial port at full speed, so they patched their software to get it working at a much slower speed. The C64 didn't come with faulty hardware but still retained the same software routines for backwards-compatibility. Those fast loaders then replaced these slow compatible routines with full speed ones.
Putin said in his recent speech that he thinks Lenin made a mistake in breaking up the Russian Empire into independent nations (that then joined the USSR). I think Putin is more after restoring the old Russian Empire than restoring the USSR.
GPT-3 and these kind of natural language generators in general can already present opinions if prompted to do so. Depending on what you mean by "opinion", you might also require some memory to let it be consistent in what opinions it presents to you. (Not that humans are always consistent either.)
If you dig any further than this into the question, you quickly get back to the age-old question of "when is it 'real' consciousness and not just an automaton that acts and sounds conscious?"
As unintuitive as it may seem, 3D printers are actually way simpler to DIY than 2D paper printers. An almost modern 3D printer could have been put together by a hacker in their basement in the 90s. The only reasons they didn't trend until the 2010s is that patents prevented them from being commercially possible until the 2010s, and then it's taken hobbyists many years to gather the knowledge about what to do and not to do. The mechanical construction is not complicated, and the necessary components and materials have been around and readily available for decades.
2D paper printers, on the other hand, are way more complicated and require specialized components that make it very unlikely for anyone to be able to DIY a working laser or ink jet printer. If you want a "free" paper printer, then a much more viable alternative is to hack a "closed" printer to work as you want. With 3D printers, if you want a "free" printer the most viable alternative is actually the opposite: you can just build one yourself since the construction is so simple.
Clippy is a linter. You don't use linters by mechanically following its warnings as gospel, you use it by double-checking the code wherever it warns and removing the warning from that function if it's a false positive.
This process requires no requests, no processing, nothing at all. It's literally asking the user "do you want us to make extra requests and data processing, or not do anything at all?", so choosing the "no" option should result in nothing at all being done "behind the scenes".
"freely giving away their data" is a misrepresentation. People are either putting up with their data being collected, or unaware that it is happening, because that is the only way many services can be accessed nowadays. I bet you couldn't find a single person off the street who would answer "yes" if asked whether they go on the internet specifically to give personal information to ad companies.
Or, to put it more briefly: "How is it spying when the White House employees freely hung up our gift painting with the bug in it on their wall?"
Nothing can prove the negative. But if any shred of evidence comes out that they didn't comply, there will be severe consequences for them, which makes it at least reasonably safe to assume they will comply. It's hard to keep a secret like that.
The issue is that GDPR isn't fundamentally about online data collection or tracking, it's about all data collection in general. You can't ban everyone from collecting data about anyone in all situations, because there are many cases where people legitimately want or need their personal information to be collected and processed by someone else. For example medical records, magazine subscriptions, bank accounts, etc. These are all covered by the GDPR, in addition to illegitimate data collection for the purpose of ad tracking.
So how do you define, in law, when a person legitimately wants a company to process their personal information, and when it should count as illegal tracking? The GDPR actually makes an attempt at defining this (doesn't just leave it blank), but many adtech companies just ignore this and break that law. See the article for an example.
Mass produced bread can be produced like that. There's nothing about the concept of mass production that forbids products from taking a long time to produce.
Maybe in the US, nobody mass produces bread like that.
I live in Finland, and simply by Googling in Finnish I can find several companies reselling used company laptops, and there's at least one local one that I can physically go to (I've bought a used monitor from there, and they always have stacks of ThinkPads in the store when I go in).