Indeed. A law is just a text in a hierachy of norms, and so is this text. Accordingly, its weight may vary from country to country in the EU, first because the relationship between the Constitution of a country and the EU norms may not be the same. Moreover, one should not forget that enforcing a law requires a whole judicial system, and once again, this judicial system may vary from country to country in the EU. Think of the GDPR as a program : it runs with some privileges in a given software context and requires some hardware ressources to run.
IMHO, as an EU citizen, an American perspective would be welcome. A text must fit the local hierarchy of norms and the local judicial system.
I code myself. I've watched it. Pretty good learning platform (never had a look at a MOOC before): I am impressed (but I will take a look at other MOOCs mentioned in this discussion and I will certainly be less impressed very soon). Finished the first week. Right now, I find it a good introduction for someone who has no knowledge of code and statistics. IMHO, the main advantage would be that such a person may learn what coding and statistical reasoning looks like. The main disadvantage would be that this person think he has learned enough and keeps not trying to learn more about those topics. What an enlightening free week for the people: first look at "Do you trust this computer?", then attend this MOOC "Data8.1x"?
Interesting, but IMHO the main problem that Facebook faces today is not that people discover that it uses personnal data to get richer, but that Facebook is a leaking boat (should try a new logo, what about this one ? https://i.pinimg.com/564x/3c/42/87/3c42873bfdd5fec3cb163fdc4...). Even if its business model relies on an abusive use of personnal data and that people may be surprised to learn about his, people are more surely suprised to learn that Facebook did not secured the way it keeps those data. There is still some room for a firm offering services to people in exchange of personnal data, as long as this firm shows that it will use those data carefully. Obviously, Facebook won't be that firm, because this business model will be anti-Facebook by definition.
MC68000 assembly language was so much fun on the great Commodore Amiga. It gave you the opportunity not only to code quickly nice video effects, but also to learn a lot about what is the architecture of a computer, how the CPU works with other coprocesseors (there were many on the Amiga, among which the Blitter to copy data blocks / draw lines / fill shapes, and the amazing Copper to control the video).
I recently decided to code again some stuff because I wanted to write some articles for the retro section of a magazine, and it was so pleasant that I coded some more and documented it (here for those interested, in french at this time, but there are pictures: http://www.stashofcode.fr/category/retrocoding/).
I hope people still have the opportunity to have a look at assembly language at school. The article is interesting. It reminds me also that I always heard that coding in assembly language was hard. Well, I would not have say that back in 1996. x86 was a pain in the ass because of the lack of registers and the way memory was managed, but Mx68x00 was very simple indeed. IMO, what was a bit difficult was that if you wanted to code assembly, you had to learn about how what was around the CPU did work.
IMHO, as an EU citizen, an American perspective would be welcome. A text must fit the local hierarchy of norms and the local judicial system.
You may read this article related to this point of view : https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21739961-gdprs-premis...