One with principles. Just look at the mobile landscape to see where not sticking to principles brings us, everything is "Open Source" yet everything is locked down and you can't even boot your own OS. Or Firefox where they claim to be about privacy, yet load the browser full of cloud stuff you can't even easily get rid of.

That said, I don't consider Stallman a good leader in this day and age. His principles are fundamentally correct, but he is stuck in the 90s. The software world has changed dramatically since then. More often than not, you no longer even own the hardware the software is running on, not just due to evil cooperation, but simply due to the way networked services work. The principles of Free Software fall apart in that case, as even having access to source code helps you little to none in that case when you don't own the server that the software is running and that is storing the data. The FSF has largely failed to address those issue, both in terms of plain philosophy as well as in terms of additional licenses. The question of how you gain back user freedom in a heavily interconnected world is largely unanswered.

And that's disappointing, as it feels like there is a lot that could be done. The GDPR for example gives a lot of freedoms back to the user that didn't exit before (e.g. data export, right of deletion), but it's a European law. If I wanted to provide similar rights to users outside of Europe there is no Free Software license I can use, even AGPL only addresses the source code, not the actual user data that is being processed. I think it would be a good time to start developing licenses for the flow of data, instead of just worrying about the software, but as far as I can tell, that's not happening at the FSF or in the few cases were it is, I don't feel it's quite going in the right direction (e.g. too much focus on federation as a solution, which is still ripe for abuse without any kind of rules to regulate the dataflow).

I find it deeply disturbing that so many companies and organisations openly support this vile attack, which is nothing more than bulling and slander. Like sure, you might not like Stallman as leader of the FSF, I have my issues with that guy too, but the reason they give are nothing more than unfounded lies that completely fall apart when you look into the quotes they are based on. Actual evidence of anything bad he has done isn't even provide. And all of that under the guise of "inclusion" while they want to throw a guy under the bus that did nothing more than not follow the cult like group think. Disgusting.

It's not about buying an item, it's about buying ownership. The items are for most part already in the public anyway, e.g. digital goods, images, video, etc. that everybody can access and copy. But since digital goods are trivial to copy it's normally impossible to own them in the same sense you can own a physical item. That's the problem NFT tries to address.

NFTs are basically a blockchain-based equivalent to copyright, i.e. something the artists owns and can sell. Though the ownership that NFT grands only exist in the NFT-universe, actual real world copyright is not transferred and stays with the artist.

The few clicks that it takes to activate 3rd party sources is all that it takes to drive the overwhelming majority of the users to the Google Play Store. These minor conveniences are worth a lot when you are dealing with as many users as Android has. See Firefox, just having it set by default to Google Search is worth around a million dollar per day. In the EU Google got fined 2.42€ billion because they had their shopping search too prominently featured in their Google Search, a comparably minor violation to the impact the Play Store has.

As for how to do it properly, I think what Microsoft did for web browser after their monopoly lawsuit was quite reasonable. Instead of having a hardcoded
default, the user got a randomized list of browsers to chose from.

Valved killed their movie section back in Feb 2019.

The N64 used optical encoder wheels, basically the same mechanics as where used in all ball mice, just with a stick instead of a ball. The whole mechanism was however quite bulky. The old Microsoft Siderwinder flightsticks also used some form of optical tracking, though not sure on the mechanism. These days most of the higher end flight sticks use hall-effect sensors, which is also contact-less, even some game controllers use them now, e.g. WMR controller use them for the analogue trigger.

That said, there is nothing wrong with the old potentiometer based analog sticks, they have been used quite successfully ever since Playstation1 DualShock controllers and never had much of an issue. Only now with Nintendo and Valve's Index Controller they seem to cause quite major problems.

GDPR is about giving people back control over their data. It applies globally. US or EU doesn't make much of a difference. And breaking up monopolies is not the primary goal. What it however does is soften monopolies a little, as it requires companies to give the user access to their data and allow exporting or deleting it, which in turn makes it much easier to switch services. Prior to the GDPR data export functions were rarely seen. Even in the noble world of Free Software such functions were rare, e.g. GNU's Savannah was missing one for years and years. Now with the GDPR in place everybody is required to have one.

The enforcement of the GDPR is lagging a bit behind, as for example there are currently a ton of consent forms for data collection that are clear violations of the GDPR. But overall I'd say the GDPR is a huge success. It's easily one of the most important and impactful bits of Internet regulation we have seen in decades and once they start enforcing it a bit more it's only going to get better.

That's not to say that the EU hasn't had it's fair share of nonsense regulation over the years, the Cookie Law that preceded the GDPR was a trainwreak. Did nothing to protect your data, but ensured an annoying popup on every webpage. But GDPR seems to do exactly what it was designed to do and is already hurting companies were it matters. The "coupling prohibition" for example is the reason why there is no Facebook Quest2 being sold in Germany right now.

While the administration is certainly not doing a good job, it's worth keeping in mind that most other western nation are doing just as bad. Germany for example is currently sitting at 7 deaths per million per day, UK at 8, Italy at 11, while the USA is at 9. Meanwhile China has been effectively at 0 for the last 8 months. This is a far bigger issue than just Trump being bad at leadership, almost all the western nation seem to be incapable of implementing measures that actually work or simply following scientific advice. Even going through the first wave did nothing to alleviate their ignorance, they just repeated all the mistakes from the first time even harder on the second wave.