I remember someone giving a lecture on software engineering methodologies who gave a pretty good summary by saying that "The methods are there to help your brain, not to replace your brain."
I guess everything is relative, but I'm not sure I would say the economic damage is minimal. Maybe in comparison with other countries, but I'm not sure how clear that is. Especially if other countries can go South Korean style and get back to full speed faster, Sweden could very well be left behind in terms of the economy as well.
Number of deaths so far is very high compared to the neighbouring countries, and there is still a long way to go before herd immunity.
In general, it seems to me quite insane that Sweden already in the beginning of March basically had decided to infect millions of people with a virus we only had a month of experience with or something like that.
IANAL but I think the GDPR does not just look at the data in isolation, but considers the data and what it is used for.
Thus if I give a company access to my data it does not give them a carte blanche to use it however they see fit, instead I have allowed usage of the data for a set of purposes.
I guess I could have been more clear. I was not primarily discussing this particular case of what Discord is doing. Instead of I was against the notion that I cannot have any expectations because something is free.
If you want to argue that Discords measure in this case are fair then I'm fine with that, but just something like "STFU the service is free" is not enough when it comes to these companies with massive impact on society, IMO at least.
Edit: After thinking about this a bit more, I guess the point is that if they are just dropping (potentially) malicious data, or in your case not letting a gorilla through the door. This does not have anything to do with the service being free as far as I can see, they can be argued for independently.
Instead I see people defending questionable behavior by pointing out that the service is free. And the point I tried to make originally was that I would like to at least be informed about the questionable behavior, so I have a chance to take this extra "cost" into account when I select a product.
I find this notion that you should be absolved of all responsibilities just because you give it away for free to be completely wrong. They should still be transparent about what they are doing.
This notion also does not translate very well to things which are not related to IT. I use a very large number of things in my daily life which I am not paying for but I still expect them to work and be safe. Or would be it be fine if I take an elevator and it falls down and kills me? Or whoops, I got a free candy which turned out to contain toxins. I guess I didn't pay for the service so why do I have some expectations for it to work or be safe?
This case reminds me a bit about the US embassy in Moscow, where the US let the Soviet provide them with premade concrete pieces for the construction [1]. The idea was that it would be enough to inspect them to detect if any bugs had been inserted.
This plan didn't work out in the embassy case, but I'm not any kind of expert on electronics, so maybe the lessons learned doesn't translate exactly to the PCB situation.
I'm not sure why you do not just provide a citation for this claim that Swedish law prevented the investigation from proceeding. The claim which seems to be the closest to this seems to be "In 2010, the prosecutor in charge of the case, Marianne Ny, said Swedish law prevented her from questioning anyone by video link or in the London embassy.". However, the very next sentence in the article goes on to say that "She later admitted it was legally possible, but refused to budge, saying that questioning him in the embassy 'would lower the quality of the interview'."
With regards to the policy change, to some extent I dont care if they apply it consistently to other people now as well. Just that they changed the policy when they were chasing a guy who had pissed of and embarrassed the most powerful nation in the world seems very, well, convenient.
Perhaps more importantly, I'm not sure I am convinced that there has been such a massive policy shift as such. I would like to hear more about these other people that are being chased all around Europe by the Swedish prosecutor authority, but we don't hear about because they are not globally infamous.
I should perhaps add that just because Assange is (possibly) treated differently, this does not prove that there is some conspiracy against him or whatever. This case has gathered a lot of media attention and whatnot. In many ways a conspiracy seems unlikely, or at least unnecessary. Many of the actors involved seems to just follow the path of least resistance and/or acting in their own interest. Sweden does not have much to lose by doing this, certainly relations between US and Sweden are not damaged by this. Marianne Ny seems like a somewhat crazy feminist who IIRC has made statements that the methods she has developed for investigating crimes against women has "good effect on the perpetrator even in those cases where he is not found guilty by a court of law".
As explained in the answer to a sibling post, the question of if he is "locked" in the embassy or not seems mostly a philosophical one. Just imagine I used a different word if you do not like it.
The point I tired to make when I wrote this was that in some cases the Swedish prosecutor authority felt it was too inconvenient to even file European Arrest Warrants in the first place, and a prosecutor saying that this was only done in stuff like murder cases. Then in another case they are keeping a guy in house arrest for 7 years. I made this comment in reply to a request for how Assange was being treated differently compared to other people.
The second point about criminal investigations in absentia mostly seems like a "fun fact", and I dont really see anything I can reply to. Sorry if I'm missing something here.
Regarding the third point, yes, that was my whole point that Assange has shown that he seems to have genuine fear of being the victim of some form of human rights violations should he be extradited to the US. Since if he had no such fears, he could go to Sweden, and even if he loses the case he would be out walking in maybe as little as 8 months. Now he has spent 7 years in an embassy. It seems to me clear that he has demonstrated that he is not hiding in the embassy because he is afraid of the rape allegations in Sweden. If his fears are justified or not, I am not in a position to give any kind of serious answer to.
I am unable to find any support in the linked article that Sweden did not pursue criminal cases against foreigners outside of Sweden. But if you have any such evidence, and that there was a policy change with regards to Assange, then this is highly relevant in that it shows that Assange is not treated the same as others. In the tabloid article I linked the prosecutor seem to claim that for example in murder cases an international arrest warrant would be issued.
I'm not sure in what sense the prosecutor was railed for letting Assange go. And if so, which prosecutory? In fact, the Åland island case and Assange seem rather similar. Assange too was permitted to leave Sweden, according to the article you linked [1]
[1]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-14/julian-assange-to-be-... Section "What happened next?", relevant paragraph "By the time a Swedish court ruled that Mr Assange should be detained for questioning, he had flown back to London (after being granted permission to do so by Swedish authorities). "
Firstly, I was replying to a post which asked for in which concrete ways Assange was being treated differently from other people in similar situations. I have a bit of a hard time understanding why this phrasing of mine which is not terribly important need to be debated, but OK.
I have in all honestly not followed the Assange case that closely. But my understanding of the situation was that he went to the embassy because he feared he would be extradited to the US and face possible human rights violations if that were the case. Maybe he is de jure "free" to leave the embassy, but it is not as clear that he is de facto free to leave.
Simple example, suppose we just get rid of all the governments etc, and everyone is just "free" to do whatever they want. So in this fantastic world, maybe you are "free" to do whatever you want, but if you do certain things then some big bad guy comes and turns you into minced meat. Are you then "free" to do whatever you want, maybe this can be argued, I am not an expert in philosophy. But if you find it shocking that some (most?) people do not consider this to make you free to do these things, then I'm not sure what to say.
Secondly, you do not allow people to make different interpretations of the situation. You claim that this was a "futile attempt to avoid potential US charges he wasn't then facing", and sure, if you can prove this beyond reasonable doubt then of course there is nothing to discuss here. However, I see no such proof, not even an attempt at such a thing.
More concretely, are you going to tell me with a straight face that if you were in the position of Assange you would without batting an eye just go to Sweden and risk being extradited to the US? Like the US runs Guantanamo, bombs countries left right and center without UN approval, Snowden who exposed government lies and breaking of laws lives in exile, etc. Please note, my point here isn't that the US is terrible or anything, but just that Assange can have a justified fear of being treated poorly there given the circumstances.
So the question isn't really "which way is it", will Assange face human rights violations if he is extradited to the US? Rather the question seems to me to be something like, is it "completly insane" for Assange to think that he might face these violations.
There is an article from a Swedish tabloid which could be of interest [1], unfortunately only available in Swedish AFAIK. The reason this article is of interest is mainly that it shows that the Swedish prosecutors seem to be extremely reluctant to issue arrest warrants for people in other EU countries.
In summary, and I hope I do not misrepresent the article too much, a man from Sweden went on a one-day cruise to the Åland Islands. After being out partying on the ship he goes back to his cabin. On his way there he meets two musicians (temporarily) employed by the cruise company and somehow get into a fight with them. (The article is very sparse on details on how the fight started, for the record.)
Note that the fight takes place in front of a CCTV camera, and supposedly one can see on the surveillance photos one of the musicians taking charge and stomping the victim five times in the head, with full force. After briefly leaving, the musicians then returns and kicks him in the face, twice.
The article then discusses the subpar response from the security guards employed by the cruise company.
The musicians are later arrested by the Åland police, their identities checked, but are later released. According to the article they are released because the possible crime was committed in Swedish territory and they are not Finnish citizens [2]. The musicians then return home to Ireland.
However, Swedish police or prosecutors do not seem interested in investigating this case. When pressed on why the prosecutor does not issue an arrest warrant for the men, their identities and whereabouts are supposedly known, he responds by saying that the Swedish prosecutor authority cannot go chasing people all across Europe and they only issue arrest warrants for very serious crimes, like murder.
To summarize the timeline. These events took place in October 2009, if I understand correctly. The Assange case started in August 2010. The news paper article was published in late October 2010.
So, according to this tabloid story, this is an open and shut case for a fairly serious crime, and still the prosecutor authority cannot even be arsed to issue an arrest warrant. At the same time they keep Assange locked in an embassy far longer than he could even be sentenced to for the crime he is accused of commiting. And the Assange case certainly seems much more flimsy, I'm not even sure what he is accused of, exactly. But it certainly seems to boil down to some he-said, she-said situation that will be completely impossible to get to the bottom of.
IIRC he can at most be sentenced to 4 years in prison for the sex crimes he is accused of in Sweden. But in practice he will be released after serving two thirds of this sentence, so he would spend at most 2.6 years in prison. Note also that it seems to me EXTREMLY unlikely that he would recieve a sentence of 4 years, at the very most 2 years but 1 year seems more probable. So if he just left the embassy, went to Sweden and lost the case, then he would most likely be a free man after just 8 months. So his actions certainly seem to indicate that he fears something more than just being found guilty of "less-severe rape". (Sounds a bit weird but is the crime he is accused of IIUC.)
Just to reiterate, he has spent close to 7 years in the embassy for a crime which he would quite likely serve 8 months in prison for.
With the caveat that I am now a lawyer, and whatnot. Quite possibly I've screwed something up in this last part of the analysis.
Edit: To further clarify the point, I guess it is that there is maybe not anything wrong with how he is being treated if one looks at this case in isolation. But when one combines this with how other cases seem to be handled, as well as considering proportionality, things are less clear.
Having been forced to dabble in the Microsoft world I have in general found documentation to, at least in some cases, be very sparse. Or maybe I've just not found the right resources?
For example, I was looking for some documentation on how to tune the CLR, and performance tips for writing C# in general. In Java there are lots of books on the topic, and I know of some blogs on the JVM internals, but for .Net all I could find was one small (selfpublished?) book. I'm not sure it would be fair for me to judge the state of the blogs and online resources, but at least I did not find what I was looking for at the time.
Similarly, I had to try some stuff with Service Fabric, and it felt more or less impossible to get it working with the publicly available documentation. I'm really not sure how they think one is supposed to learn how to use that technology.
Lastly I've been dealing with shipping and releasing natively compiled binaries for Windows etc, and here I've found online resources, but mostly unofficial ones. This whole area seems rather hairy and it feels a bit scary to rely on some random blogpost or stackoverflow answers for what (not) to do.
In general from what I've seen is that the Microsoft documentation is very much How-To focused. But there is often a lack for more comprehensive documentation like a man page, and in particular I've found it hard to get "sharp" information, like what are the exact guarantees for this thing.
So, OK, taking a step back and thinking about this. So my impression from the public debate and so on in the western world is that discrimination is seen as unacceptable and really not at all OK. From the impression I get it is probably something like a less severe human rights violation or something like that. Of course, not comparable to truly horrible things, but still it has no real place in any civilized society. So this the background I'm coming from, I'm not sure if I've misunderstood something, I'm not sure.
So based on this, society then wants to discriminate men as an extraordinary measure, because women has been discriminated in the past and there is a feeling this needs to be done in order to give women a fair chance etc etc etc. And so far I'm following the story and it seems at least understandable.
But now I'm starting to see a situation where it is very unclear to me what "advantage" men have over women. In particular, one thing I tried to raise with my previous post, even if I did not spell this out explicitly, was the question of proportionality. And again, maybe I'm missing something, but to me the discrimination against men seem very much out of proportion to any problems a modern day girl/woman have. (To be clear, say someone in their early/mid 20s.) In particular, given the amount of discrimination we are talking about I would expect something a lot more solid and rigorous than the explanations I'm seeing (e.g. men as a group being more advantaged, whatever this means).
In particular, given the background I give in the first paragraph, I'm honestly a bit shocked to see discrimination being proposed more as some kind of policy tool used to get society to where some people want it to go. Like let's raise the taxes on the rich and discriminate men a bit more. Again, I guess I have misunderstood something, because this conclusion certainly seems absurd, at best.
tl;dr either discrimination is really not OK, but then there needs to be a very good reason why we can discriminate men. Or, discrimination is not a big deal, but then why is this even a question up for discussion?
Not the person you were talking to, but to me this just feels like a MASSIVE straw man. If you can show that some company prefers men and actually discriminates against women, I think most people would agree with taking action against this. Unfortunately, you are very far from being able to show such a thing AFAICS. Instead it seems you are working backwards and inferring that there must be some discrimination because the outcomes are so skewed.
For large parts of my life I've seen massive and explicit discrimination against men. In junior high/high school various programs intended to increase interest in tech enforced a quota on 50% girls. Of course, this quota was never written down in public anywhere, I just accidentally overheard the organizers talking about this. Then at university I had male friends who wanted to help out on a similar program, and apparently their applications were "lost". Then the next year the organizers added text in small print somewhere that they were going to enforce a quota on the genders. Similarly, I've heard professors comment on hiring decisions with saying that if they don't hire a woman, then they've basically failed.
Again, at work I very often hear similar things when people talk about hiring in both private and even more in public sector, "Wouldn't it be very nice if we hired a woman", "You know it will look very good if had a few more women on the team", bla bla bla.
I can't say I've ever heard anything remotely similar to this which is negative to women. Maybe I'm wrong or biased here, idk. Maybe this discrimination occurs in different places/positions in the organizations to where I am at. I'm trying to keep an open mind about this, but nothing really comes to mind.
I think there are two things which concerns me. Firstly, there is the difference between how explicit and clear the discrimination against men are when you are "backstage". From this side it is completely clear and there is no real attempt to hide it. But from the side of the person applying for the job/position/program, it really isn't very visible at all in most cases. If you are lucky there is some fine print somewhere. From my experience, like I write above, the discrimination against men/whatever is extremely frequent and pervasive in today's society, but of course, I just have my own observations and maybe it's different in other companies, etc.
Secondly, I feel the proponents of discrimination against men never point to anything remotely specific. It's always just "oh, there isn't enough women in tech", there is some "glass ceiling" stopping women, there are "hidden structures acting against women", etc. And at some point this starts to get ridiculous, like I've pointed out above, for more or less my whole life I've seen massive and completely open discrimination against men, and now I'm supposed to believe in some "invisible structure" which is acting against women all over the place?
Let me just finish by saying that I don't really claim to know why the world works the way it does, or why things are the way they are. And I don't think one should pay too much attention to all of these biology based explanations for why there are fewer women than men in tech. To me they are more just like "this could be one possible explanation for the phenomena as well". The main take away from them should, in my opinion at least, be that we don't understand this area very well. Unfortunately, I think people who propose biology based explanations often pushes these theories like we know they are true and that this is the explanation. I have not looked at the studies they refer to in any detail, but I have a hard time believing this is the case.
I'm not 100% sure about this, but IIRC it'll be quite a while before they plan to rework Volumes 1-3 for MMIX (the new assembly language). Instead two smaller updates have been published, "TAOCP Volume 1, Fascicle 1: MMIX" and "The MMIX Supplement" by Martin Ruckert.
Regarding if it's justified, you might want to look at Knuth's forword to The MMIX Supplement. In short, he says that it's important to have some understanding of all the layers in the computer, and thus learning assembly is time well spent even if you never use it as such.