You're confusing "totalitarian" with "authoritarian". Authoritarianism is the lack of limits on state power. Totalitarianism is when the state actually uses that lack of limits to institute a pervasive, total control of the populace in all aspects of their lives. Remember that the word was actually used in its proper meaning in a positive sense by the very people that we recognize as the first conscious totalitarians today: Italian fascists. Mussolini defined it as "everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state".

How doesn't it work? When you press the Win button (or click Start) and then start typing in Win10, what you get is exactly that - a search. And, indeed, I've just tried it, and typing in "vi" brings up VS 2015 as the very first entry, and pressing Enter will launch it.

I think my point is ultimately this: if you're seriously afraid that people will vote for a far-right party in sufficient numbers that they will end up exercising considerable power, to the extent that proportional representation (i.e. accurate expression of those people's will) is undesirable, then the society itself is badly broken for whatever reason. You can postpone the inevitable trainwreck for a while by suppressing that vote or rendering it useless, but ultimately you'll lose that game anyway, except that all that anger will get released over a much shorter period of time.

I don't have an answer as to what to do with such a society, though. Especially when you're on the inside.

I'm not the OP, and I wasn't saying that Stasi literally had "truckloads of harddisks". Just that you're probably just as wrong in assuming that they had none or so little that it's not worth mentioning, as he is in assuming that they had most of their data on them.

The article submitter is asking about his specific problem. If he's an "average Joe", he's on the wrong website.

Such as?

Did you even read the articles that you've linked to? They talk about privacy issues with default settings (that is, "Express" install). If you're a regular member of the Slashdot audience, you will certainly pick "Customize" during installation anyway, and you'll get individual switches for all these things combined on the very first screen that you'll see after that, from advertising ID to Cortana. Just disable it all, and you're good to go. For bonus points, use a local user account rather than Microsoft ID.

Not necessarily. Parties like these thrive on populist rhetoric, and when they actually get power (even if it's local and limited in nature) and can't really deliver, their support plummets quickly. The only case where it doesn't work is when mainstream parties are even more demonstrably incompetent, but then the real problem is there.

Can you clarify "here"?

I have to ask: which basic rights does the distribution (as opposed to creation) of child porn impinge, that a snuff video, or, say, a video of an ISIS burning a man alive, does not?

If citizens of countries other than France pass laws that deal with this problem, then all is well and good - and you should be working to convince them to do so.

Why should other countries, the citizens of which have decided that free speech is more important, be affected by that, though?

If EU want to "protect" their citizens against some nasty information, they're welcome to build a EU-wide firewall and enjoy their virtual ghetto behind it.

In US, a criminal wouldn't do it because there's no point. If you want to steal a gun, just break into a random house while the owners aren't there, you have basically a 1 out of 3 chance that it'll have at least one.

By 1989, Soviets and their client states definitely had desktop PCs and associated devices, including hard drives. Mostly copies of Western tech of a few years before then, so we're talking about 5Mb hard drives here, but still. In fact, GDR was the one Warsaw Pact country where most of that stuff was made for use by the others - look up "VEB Robotron". And of all places to actually get them, I would imagine that Stasi would be the first on the list.

That's how it used to work in Win8. Now, though, it'll just pop up a dialog telling you that you need to open Settings, and where you need to go there, to change defaults. It doesn't automatically open it for you anymore.