"They have an elaborate arsenal in place of high-tech surveillance equipment that really seems overpowered for what their day-to-day needs are, and also incredibly expensive."

Someone had to sign off on this, presumably someone accountable. Who? As far as the police are concerned it's "boys and their toys" but they are not the ones footing the bill (unless they use this to stalk their ex-wives, but that's a different matter).

General Franco was Spain's dictator between the late 1930s and the mid 1970s which was when he died. He came out as the victor in the Spanish Civil War with substantial assistance from Adolf Hitler, he was an admirer of Adolf Hitler, not least because of that help (not that Hitler felt the same way about Franco *). It was for this reason that Franco aligned his Timezone with Germany's, something which would be equivalent to permanent DST except that Germany also has DST so Spain now has "Double DST" for 7 months a year.
The Spanish have adapted and overcome, they get up late and go to bed even later.

* During the war, Franco wanted Hitler to help Spain take Gibraltar. No.
  Hitler wanted Spain to join the war rather than remain neutral. No.
  Hitler really disliked Franco's reedy voice.

The said proposal, though yet to be passed as it must survive further parliamentary scrutiny,

Let's hope this lunacy ends there. I occasionally travel to or through France and I don't leave my phone at home.

per gigabyte sent to French users in the country

I don't know about French users, but most of the data I receive is solicited - I trigger the process and have some control over the data quantities. This tax only makes sense if it is on the end users. Does Mozilla have to pay if I update my Firefox or Thunderbird? Does Microsoft have to pay if I update my (non-existent) Windows?
If it was April 1 I'd understand this, Stoopid in concept.

Of course I'm often sitting in some form of public transport and the person next to me is looking at a video on his phone, but why should that be a problem?

That's because creating (or recycling) Agencies is "business as usual" for the federal government, as is sending troops abroad. The "troops abroad" part is supposed to be time-limited but we know how that went.
I know there were some howls of disgust when the gummint helped GM out - presumably from the GOP - but I thought those loans had been repaid. Are there precedents for the gummint buying into companies like that?

I had Intel and AMD shares for several years, Intel went over a year ago (before they shot up when Trump announced the US government was going to buy in), AMD around six weeks ago - close to the peak (got lucky!). I've been avoiding tech shares for a while now, this is my pension and I really don't want to lose it when the AI bubble bursts.
Intel have lost around 30% day-on-day as of right now, how much is this crash going to cost the taxpayer?

If that comment is based on what Britta Gustafson said, you are deliberately misinterpreting it.

"We're not really looking for what's true," Britta Gustafson, who has been editing Wikipedia since 2001, told me. "We're looking for what's verifiable."

They are removing "factoids" for which there is no proof, along with articles they think nobody wants to read (but presumably they can check for that). I'm not upset, I share my first+last names with so many people, I could claim to be one of them (and if called on it, "the editors cancelled me").

I wonder about artcraft, while the 13 apps are very impressive I don't see how it is done by them, as the plan directory is local.

Be careful what you ask for, apparently Google's AI agent is indistinguishable from their normal web-search crawler and who wants to be invisible to Google? I don't know if the same applies to Microsoft and Bing.

Though, you can configure KDE6 to get you the KDE3 experience.

But how exactly did they do it, what is the setup?

I remember several sites crashing at that time.
Someone had tested a Linux setup in advance and had triggered a crash, a fix was released. A fair number of sites did not apply the critical fix before it was needed and a fair number of admins had to answer the question "why". One of those sites was Amadeus and that affected me so I noticed.

In all the years of Linux use on the Desktop I never caught a Virus. I know that they do exist but it doesnot appear to be a friendly environment for these creatures. What does Defender want to catch or is that just a backdoor for US agencies on your machine?

I wonder If someone would vibe code Windows or at least cocoa (gnustep?) for the Mac OS X experience, I only use my Windows these days to repair my external harddisc after mounted to the blueray player. It is time to end the ERA of proprietary Operaring systems

Yeah, PC sales were artificially high in 2025 because of the Windows 11 requirements, now prices have rocketed so sales are artificially low. The next step is presumably when the AI companies - and their investors - realise that they are not going to make a profit on all those tokens and some go belly-up. The Chinese are also going to be making more RAM and SSDs for their own market to avoid sanctions, prices are going to have to drop.