I suggest you investigate your own question, because your current understanding is incorrect. An image containing copyrighted materials within it does fall under that copyrights restrictions, even tho the image may be owned by someone else.
I rather like being able to trivially switch the device I'm using without any help from my network - I wouldn't have been able to start this contract period off with a Nokia N900, end it with an iPhone 4S, and have also used an iPhone 3G and a HTC Desire in between. All without my network provider knowing any different.
Precisely this. Remember that "A does not necessarily equal B", in this case digital cash does not automatically mean an anonymous currency - all money these days is digital in actuality, as no major currency is backed by a gold or silver standard anymore - new money is created by issuing it to an account in a computer, and it suddenly exists because the computer network says it does. Central banks move money to regional, trading and public banks by transferring it electronically, not by moving huge piles of notes around. Only when you actually take some physical money out of an ATM does it stop being digital.
And it's all traceable.
Remember that BitCoin also had several PR failures recently because of its irreversible feature - BitCoins were stolen, but there is no way to cancel that transaction even tho you can see where the money went because there is no way to reverse the procedure. Sort of the worst of both worlds, semi traceable but totally useless at the same time. Both better than and worse than cash at the same time.
To answer your points, it all comes down to how land is used - in the early American period you highlight, you had a population the size of 1% of modern Uganda spreading across land 500% the size of current Uganda. Land that was almost totally untouched.
One of the things that strikes you when you travel in rural Uganda is that every bit if land that can be used, is. And te vast majority of that usage is food crops for your own consumption. Old growth wood, the type you need for log cabins, went centuries ago - the land was cleared for food crops. The trees that remain usually produce something for someone to eat - nuts, bananas, etc.
Animals take a huge amount of land and feed to grow, much more than a comparable meal of vegetables does, so invariably they are only owned by rich people - who can own a lot of grazing land. The number of cattle a person has is still used in Uganda as a measure of how rich they are.
Land use is restricted purely because here we have an old population, which made its claim to plots 1000 years ago and from then on has been handing down parcels to each generations offspring, so the average villager can't afford to chop down trees, or graze cattle, or whatever.
It's also worth noting that there is a huge size and build difference between cattle and food animals in third world countries and the type we westerners buy in supermarkets - a chicken in Uganda will barely feed one person, while a chicken in the UK will usually feed a family of four. A sheep is like a medium sized dog, and a cow is around half the size of what we have in fields here. And that's all down to how well they are fed.
I applaud your stance, however its completely impractical - raising up a billion people from poverty to the same level as the lowest American worker would devastate the sociological balance of the world, and actually cause a lot more harm than good. You would eliminate issues like Foxconn, but immediately introduce massive criminality that would prey on those with new found wealth.
The populace largely has to do it themselves - go from basics to Foxconn-level of external employment, and then want more - Foxconn will generate entrepeneurs who are now capable of actually doing something due to their actual ability to earn. Gradually the workforce that started off as Foxconn will expand and digress into other arenas.
If you are interested, here is a Flickr photo set of my visit to Kisiizi Hospital during that trip - its really worth a look to see the level of healthcare over there that the locals actually are extremely grateful for.
If you are interested, here are some photos of the visit - included is the visit to Kisiizi Hospital, which is really the best level of medical care these people expect to receive (and infact they are extremely grateful for it).
Its well worth a look, because what you see is quite shocking:( Open sewers next to a ward, a patient that has just had major surgery being wheeled back to the ward across a dirt path etc.
It means these peoples lives are significantly better than what they could be - and you have to be *very* careful not to fall into the trap that I did before I saw Ugandan way of life for myself. The base line in these countries is very very bad, any step up is a step up, but no step up is going to be good enough if you use a western benchmark.
Out of interest, how much money is Foxconn sitting on? You mention Apples pile of cash, but Apple doesn't have a contract with these workers - they have a contract with Foxconn, and Foxconn is the employer. How much profit is Foxconn diverting from the workers pockets into its own? How much more could Foxconn pay the workers from the current contract revenue?
I never see that line of enquiry brought up at all.
In places like Uganda, the difference between a dollar a day and a dollar a fortnight is things like these jobs. And thats a huge increase to these people, it enables them to do so much more.
So people need to get off their high horses about just how bad these jobs are, and start thinking about the real situation these people are in. The idea is not to create a western level of prosperity in these workers, thats totally unrealistic - why go to Foxconn if the work is going to cost as much as doing it locally?
And thats the crux of the issue - some people think the benchmark for these jobs is the western equivalent. Its not - because once you go down that road, the only valid outcome is a 1:1 ratio for wages, environment and opportunity between Foxconn jobs and their western equivalents, and thats not going to happen.
The benchmark can only be how much these jobs raise the local populace out of the local poverty - how much benefit do these jobs give the locals?
I have to agree with this post - my experience isn't quite China, but I think it does carry over.
At the end of January, start of February this year, I spent nearly three weeks in Uganda - and this wasn't all nice hotels and B&Bs in cushy areas of towns and cities, this was staying with some native Ugandan friends in their normal settings.
On a social level, these friends were our (myself and my wife) equals - in Ugandan social levels they earned the equivalent of what we did, they held a roughly equal level of job and such. And their "standard" of living, be it *very* good for their setting, is basically the equivalent of one step up from complete poverty in the UK.
Their kitchen was a basic stone (cast concrete) sink, and a single electrical hotplate on the floor. And thats a step up from what the neighbours used - the outdoor cooking facilities (basically, a fire pit), but only because my friends saved up and bought this for themselves.
Their bathroom was indoors, but extremely basic. Because they paid a lot more in rent. Others on the same site had to make do with outdoor facilities.
So we got settled into this - and then we visited our hosts father in his village. Thats a huge huge step down from the comparative luxury our hosts lived in.
Our hosts father is a vicar in a traditional Ugandan hilltop village, thirty miles from running water, a hundred miles from electricity, and a hundred and fifty miles from an actual paved road. Still lives in a mud hut, the roof covered with well used corrogated tin sheets and (funnily enough, Sainsburies) plastic grocery bags. He eats meat once a month, but still managed to serve his "honoured guests" two types of meat - that would have cost him two months wages, all gone in a single meal for us. His wash facilities is an old plastic jerry can, his toilet a long drop hole in the floor. He and his wife have to travel 9 miles each day to get fresh water, and then gather the wood to make the fire.
This man sold off 90% of his ancestral lands in order to put his first child through nursing school - and that child had to pay for the next two. He actually really struggled to sell the land as well, because it was seen as "the wrong thing to do" by his fellow villagers.
And the final place we stayed was with a Bishop of the Church of Uganda. No better really than our hosts - nothing to shout about at all.
And believe me, these people were seriously well off in the scheme of things. Meeting children who are never going to have a prospect of going to school, who are wearing sack cloth for clothes (I saw that dozens of times just in one 3 hour road trip, and then more turned up at the vicars house), or wearing "GAP" sweaters that have obviously been through at least two generations already. A 4 year old carrying a 2 pint plastic milk carton of water behind his older sibling, on a road where we hadn't seen a house for two miles before, and didn't see one for another two miles.
I never really thought poverty actually existed, or at least thats what I now think I thought - it just doesn't sink in until you see these things in the real world for yourself.
One of the huge things that struck me was the fact that you could never trust meat sold anywhere - if you wanted to make sure the meat you are eating hasn't been sitting on the butchers stall for a week then you have to kill the animal yourself, and store the parts you aren't going to eat immediately. The chicken and goat we ate at the vicars was killed shortly after we arrived, basically right in front of us.
You can't really judge the sort of step up that people in these situations get from jobs like Foxconn, its literally stepping from one world into another. You can shout all you can about how the standards don't match up with western ones, but when seeing the sort of standards these people are coming from you can see why there are thousands lining up whenever there is a mere hint of a job available. It really is the difference to them between "su
A single license can be time shared between 20 or 30 users, it just has to be on its own machine.
I've done the whole MS licensing dance, as part of a budget where I was responsible for $1.5million of buying, and to be fair MS licensing is fine in 99% of cases, but it's that other 1% which you need help for. And this falls into that 1%, because neither OnLive nor this guy want to do what most other businesses want to do.
And again, that doesn't contradict what I have said - VDA requires you to issue a license to a given device, it doesnt allow you to swap licenses around between devices ad hoc. That means you cannot provision a virtualised Windows 7 license for a hosted service, in the way that this guy wants - he would have to have one Win 7 license associated with each end user device.
Again, there is no current license which allows you to sell a virtualised Win 7 hosted service.
The other way to look at it is that OnLive have been poking around this concept for several years, and are engaged in a private dialog with MS, while this bloke has only been public for a few months and has only talked to the wrong people (the Ars comments point out that he only talked to the RDP guys at MS, not any licensing specialists).
No, you aren't completely informed. No generally available MS license currently allows for the virtualised provision of Windows 7 as a hosted service - only the Server 2008 licenses allow virtualised service provision. He could do what he wants with the right Windows Server license, but he can't offer a virtualised Win 7 instance in the same manner.
The fuel efficiency of the F119s on the F-22 isn't all that better than the Olympus's on Concorde, and Concorde could push all the way to Mach 2 without reheat but it's more fuel efficient to use reheat than not (using reheat means Concorde spends less time in the transsonic region of high drag). What the F-22 has in its favour is its thrust to weight ratio, which is a lot better than Concordes...
Remember, civil operators have an entirely different set of criteria to military operators, and military operators are more than willing to sacrifice some elements of efficiency to achieve better survivability. For civil operators, efficiency means more revenue and profit.
Well, it isn't going to do anything, because they don't want the tunnels collapsing...
This isn't like pumping water, gas or oil out from under the ground - the tunnels need to be servicable and usable after the fact, otherwise there isn't any point in making them, so they get lined with concrete or some other material which keeps them rigid and bearing the weight of the ground above them.
Bear in mind that they've been doing this in London for 200 years or more, what with the London Underground, service tunnels, Royal Mail tunnels, BT telecommunications tunnels etc etc etc. London is criscrossed with tunnels already, 99% of them not having any issue on the surface at all. They've got experience in this.
And what's so bad about putting the Plus 1 button on the page regardless?
They wanted you to be able to +1 ads if you like them. I kind of doubt the third party websites would be happy to see a redirect from their website to the Google+ sign in page in the event someone is not signed in.
I don't care what they want you to be able to do, your point is ludicrous.
Taking a random page off of Autosport.com (a site I currently have open), gives me a Twitter button which redirects to a sign in page when clicked, a LinkedIn button which redirects when clicked, a Facebook button which redirects when clicked, and indeed a Google +1 button which, surprise surprise, redirects anyway because I'm logged into a Google+ account which is not my own (business account) and requests permission to continue.
And all redirect in a new tab or window.
So your claim that it is unacceptably disruptive to Google us just fanboyism, IMHO.
You keep assuming that they "went out of their way" to do this somehow. More likely chain of events is that they designed it to use cookies in the first place, then someone realized it wasn't working properly on Safari and implemented a work around. Submitting a form is far, far, far less work than figuring out how to make the whole thing to not use cookies, adding a redirect to the sign in page and otherwise redesigning the UX.
Come on, that's just a stupid justification - cookies are not required to allow someone to say "I like this" at all, you can do that based on the click itself.
Google went out of their way to make it work,no matter how you try and justify it, that's what they did. And you can bet that this isn't an isolated developer going "that's odd, let's fix that".
Google are in the wrong here, no matter how much you try to justify it.
And what's so bad about putting the Plus 1 button on the page regardless? I get the Facebook Like button (and a load of others) and I don't even have an account, so what makes Google special?
The entire way in which they did this screams "we want to track you", despite your protestations to the contrary. No one needs to provide evidence that there is an actual database behind it, the implementation they went out of their way to use specifically allows for it when they don't need to do it that way at all.
Uhm, it is tracking because Google, by virtue of accessing that cookie, gets to know you visited that website - they get passed the unique cookie associated with your account and they also get the referrer ID of the website. Tracking.
If they didn't explicitly want to track you, they could implement a completely cookieless implementation of their Plus 1 button which only associates you with your account when you actually click it. But they didn't, because they want the info regardless of whether you clicked or not.
Google isn't being held to the promises Safari has made, Google is being held to the agreement it had with the DoJ because in the course of collecting data about the user they deliberately circumvented, admittedly fairly weak, restrictions the user placed on their actions within the browser.
There are two entirely different issues at hand here - Safari needs to be fixed somehow (although someone further down the thread suggests this isnt an easy fix) and Google got caught with its hand in the cookie jar when it probably shouldn't have had it there.
Just because your window is open doesn't mean people are allowed to climb through it to circumvent the locked door.
You seem to think that "value" has to be monetary all the time. In a bank note the value is certainly monetary, and that value is lost when you photocopy it. However, the value of the CD is attached to the content it holds because thats why you bought it in the first place, so if you copy your CD, the copy you make still has value to you and others that listen to it, because the value inherent in it is due to the content and nothing else - and the content is an integral part of the copy, meaning you can gain all the enjoyment of listening to the copy in place of the original.
So my point stands - in one case the value of the item is lost in the duplication, while in the other the value remains after the duplication, due to the types of value each have. People desire the content, not the thing, just as they desire the buying power of the nite rather than the thing.
The only way in which your example was to be equal would be if you photocopied the CD rather than copying it - that way the copy loses the inherent value attached to it just the same way as the banknote.
I disagree, access to the content has value to the recipient, be it in an original form or a copy. I don't buy an MP3 so I can admire the filename on my hard disk, I buy it to listen to the content it represents - and for the same reason, people don't torrent MP3s for the way they look on their filesystems, they torrent them for the content.
So yes, the copy has inherent value, because the thing with the value is the content.
Slashdot Mirror
I suggest you investigate your own question, because your current understanding is incorrect. An image containing copyrighted materials within it does fall under that copyrights restrictions, even tho the image may be owned by someone else.
I rather like being able to trivially switch the device I'm using without any help from my network - I wouldn't have been able to start this contract period off with a Nokia N900, end it with an iPhone 4S, and have also used an iPhone 3G and a HTC Desire in between. All without my network provider knowing any different.
Precisely this. Remember that "A does not necessarily equal B", in this case digital cash does not automatically mean an anonymous currency - all money these days is digital in actuality, as no major currency is backed by a gold or silver standard anymore - new money is created by issuing it to an account in a computer, and it suddenly exists because the computer network says it does. Central banks move money to regional, trading and public banks by transferring it electronically, not by moving huge piles of notes around. Only when you actually take some physical money out of an ATM does it stop being digital.
And it's all traceable.
Remember that BitCoin also had several PR failures recently because of its irreversible feature - BitCoins were stolen, but there is no way to cancel that transaction even tho you can see where the money went because there is no way to reverse the procedure. Sort of the worst of both worlds, semi traceable but totally useless at the same time. Both better than and worse than cash at the same time.
To answer your points, it all comes down to how land is used - in the early American period you highlight, you had a population the size of 1% of modern Uganda spreading across land 500% the size of current Uganda. Land that was almost totally untouched.
One of the things that strikes you when you travel in rural Uganda is that every bit if land that can be used, is. And te vast majority of that usage is food crops for your own consumption. Old growth wood, the type you need for log cabins, went centuries ago - the land was cleared for food crops. The trees that remain usually produce something for someone to eat - nuts, bananas, etc.
Animals take a huge amount of land and feed to grow, much more than a comparable meal of vegetables does, so invariably they are only owned by rich people - who can own a lot of grazing land. The number of cattle a person has is still used in Uganda as a measure of how rich they are.
Land use is restricted purely because here we have an old population, which made its claim to plots 1000 years ago and from then on has been handing down parcels to each generations offspring, so the average villager can't afford to chop down trees, or graze cattle, or whatever.
It's also worth noting that there is a huge size and build difference between cattle and food animals in third world countries and the type we westerners buy in supermarkets - a chicken in Uganda will barely feed one person, while a chicken in the UK will usually feed a family of four. A sheep is like a medium sized dog, and a cow is around half the size of what we have in fields here. And that's all down to how well they are fed.
I applaud your stance, however its completely impractical - raising up a billion people from poverty to the same level as the lowest American worker would devastate the sociological balance of the world, and actually cause a lot more harm than good. You would eliminate issues like Foxconn, but immediately introduce massive criminality that would prey on those with new found wealth.
The populace largely has to do it themselves - go from basics to Foxconn-level of external employment, and then want more - Foxconn will generate entrepeneurs who are now capable of actually doing something due to their actual ability to earn. Gradually the workforce that started off as Foxconn will expand and digress into other arenas.
Or thats the hope.
Thanks :)
If you are interested, here is a Flickr photo set of my visit to Kisiizi Hospital during that trip - its really worth a look to see the level of healthcare over there that the locals actually are extremely grateful for.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/27807900@N03/sets/72157629263212592/
Thanks :)
If you are interested, here are some photos of the visit - included is the visit to Kisiizi Hospital, which is really the best level of medical care these people expect to receive (and infact they are extremely grateful for it).
Its well worth a look, because what you see is quite shocking :( Open sewers next to a ward, a patient that has just had major surgery being wheeled back to the ward across a dirt path etc.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/27807900@N03/sets/72157629263212592/
The entire reason for my visit was to pick a spot to set up a hospital run by myself, my wife and about a dozen others.
The plan is to open it in 2015 or 2016.
It means these peoples lives are significantly better than what they could be - and you have to be *very* careful not to fall into the trap that I did before I saw Ugandan way of life for myself. The base line in these countries is very very bad, any step up is a step up, but no step up is going to be good enough if you use a western benchmark.
Out of interest, how much money is Foxconn sitting on? You mention Apples pile of cash, but Apple doesn't have a contract with these workers - they have a contract with Foxconn, and Foxconn is the employer. How much profit is Foxconn diverting from the workers pockets into its own? How much more could Foxconn pay the workers from the current contract revenue?
I never see that line of enquiry brought up at all.
In places like Uganda, the difference between a dollar a day and a dollar a fortnight is things like these jobs. And thats a huge increase to these people, it enables them to do so much more.
So people need to get off their high horses about just how bad these jobs are, and start thinking about the real situation these people are in. The idea is not to create a western level of prosperity in these workers, thats totally unrealistic - why go to Foxconn if the work is going to cost as much as doing it locally?
And thats the crux of the issue - some people think the benchmark for these jobs is the western equivalent. Its not - because once you go down that road, the only valid outcome is a 1:1 ratio for wages, environment and opportunity between Foxconn jobs and their western equivalents, and thats not going to happen.
The benchmark can only be how much these jobs raise the local populace out of the local poverty - how much benefit do these jobs give the locals?
I have to agree with this post - my experience isn't quite China, but I think it does carry over.
At the end of January, start of February this year, I spent nearly three weeks in Uganda - and this wasn't all nice hotels and B&Bs in cushy areas of towns and cities, this was staying with some native Ugandan friends in their normal settings.
On a social level, these friends were our (myself and my wife) equals - in Ugandan social levels they earned the equivalent of what we did, they held a roughly equal level of job and such. And their "standard" of living, be it *very* good for their setting, is basically the equivalent of one step up from complete poverty in the UK.
Their kitchen was a basic stone (cast concrete) sink, and a single electrical hotplate on the floor. And thats a step up from what the neighbours used - the outdoor cooking facilities (basically, a fire pit), but only because my friends saved up and bought this for themselves.
Their bathroom was indoors, but extremely basic. Because they paid a lot more in rent. Others on the same site had to make do with outdoor facilities.
So we got settled into this - and then we visited our hosts father in his village. Thats a huge huge step down from the comparative luxury our hosts lived in.
Our hosts father is a vicar in a traditional Ugandan hilltop village, thirty miles from running water, a hundred miles from electricity, and a hundred and fifty miles from an actual paved road. Still lives in a mud hut, the roof covered with well used corrogated tin sheets and (funnily enough, Sainsburies) plastic grocery bags. He eats meat once a month, but still managed to serve his "honoured guests" two types of meat - that would have cost him two months wages, all gone in a single meal for us. His wash facilities is an old plastic jerry can, his toilet a long drop hole in the floor. He and his wife have to travel 9 miles each day to get fresh water, and then gather the wood to make the fire.
This man sold off 90% of his ancestral lands in order to put his first child through nursing school - and that child had to pay for the next two. He actually really struggled to sell the land as well, because it was seen as "the wrong thing to do" by his fellow villagers.
And the final place we stayed was with a Bishop of the Church of Uganda. No better really than our hosts - nothing to shout about at all.
And believe me, these people were seriously well off in the scheme of things. Meeting children who are never going to have a prospect of going to school, who are wearing sack cloth for clothes (I saw that dozens of times just in one 3 hour road trip, and then more turned up at the vicars house), or wearing "GAP" sweaters that have obviously been through at least two generations already. A 4 year old carrying a 2 pint plastic milk carton of water behind his older sibling, on a road where we hadn't seen a house for two miles before, and didn't see one for another two miles.
I never really thought poverty actually existed, or at least thats what I now think I thought - it just doesn't sink in until you see these things in the real world for yourself.
One of the huge things that struck me was the fact that you could never trust meat sold anywhere - if you wanted to make sure the meat you are eating hasn't been sitting on the butchers stall for a week then you have to kill the animal yourself, and store the parts you aren't going to eat immediately. The chicken and goat we ate at the vicars was killed shortly after we arrived, basically right in front of us.
You can't really judge the sort of step up that people in these situations get from jobs like Foxconn, its literally stepping from one world into another. You can shout all you can about how the standards don't match up with western ones, but when seeing the sort of standards these people are coming from you can see why there are thousands lining up whenever there is a mere hint of a job available. It really is the difference to them between "su
A single license can be time shared between 20 or 30 users, it just has to be on its own machine.
I've done the whole MS licensing dance, as part of a budget where I was responsible for $1.5million of buying, and to be fair MS licensing is fine in 99% of cases, but it's that other 1% which you need help for. And this falls into that 1%, because neither OnLive nor this guy want to do what most other businesses want to do.
And again, that doesn't contradict what I have said - VDA requires you to issue a license to a given device, it doesnt allow you to swap licenses around between devices ad hoc. That means you cannot provision a virtualised Windows 7 license for a hosted service, in the way that this guy wants - he would have to have one Win 7 license associated with each end user device.
Again, there is no current license which allows you to sell a virtualised Win 7 hosted service.
actually, there is specific licensing for virtualized desktops. try looking here http://download.microsoft.com/download/C/6/7/C673E444-6DDD-40B8-B29F-625354F2A8F7/Licensing_Windows_for_Virtual_Desktops_Whitepaper.pdf
And nothing in that white paper actually contradicts what I say - read it :)
The other way to look at it is that OnLive have been poking around this concept for several years, and are engaged in a private dialog with MS, while this bloke has only been public for a few months and has only talked to the wrong people (the Ars comments point out that he only talked to the RDP guys at MS, not any licensing specialists).
No, you aren't completely informed. No generally available MS license currently allows for the virtualised provision of Windows 7 as a hosted service - only the Server 2008 licenses allow virtualised service provision. He could do what he wants with the right Windows Server license, but he can't offer a virtualised Win 7 instance in the same manner.
The fuel efficiency of the F119s on the F-22 isn't all that better than the Olympus's on Concorde, and Concorde could push all the way to Mach 2 without reheat but it's more fuel efficient to use reheat than not (using reheat means Concorde spends less time in the transsonic region of high drag). What the F-22 has in its favour is its thrust to weight ratio, which is a lot better than Concordes...
Remember, civil operators have an entirely different set of criteria to military operators, and military operators are more than willing to sacrifice some elements of efficiency to achieve better survivability. For civil operators, efficiency means more revenue and profit.
Microsoft Press have all sorts of technical books out. Most are of a very high standard.
Well, it isn't going to do anything, because they don't want the tunnels collapsing...
This isn't like pumping water, gas or oil out from under the ground - the tunnels need to be servicable and usable after the fact, otherwise there isn't any point in making them, so they get lined with concrete or some other material which keeps them rigid and bearing the weight of the ground above them.
Bear in mind that they've been doing this in London for 200 years or more, what with the London Underground, service tunnels, Royal Mail tunnels, BT telecommunications tunnels etc etc etc. London is criscrossed with tunnels already, 99% of them not having any issue on the surface at all. They've got experience in this.
And what's so bad about putting the Plus 1 button on the page regardless?
They wanted you to be able to +1 ads if you like them. I kind of doubt the third party websites would be happy to see a redirect from their website to the Google+ sign in page in the event someone is not signed in.
I don't care what they want you to be able to do, your point is ludicrous.
Taking a random page off of Autosport.com (a site I currently have open), gives me a Twitter button which redirects to a sign in page when clicked, a LinkedIn button which redirects when clicked, a Facebook button which redirects when clicked, and indeed a Google +1 button which, surprise surprise, redirects anyway because I'm logged into a Google+ account which is not my own (business account) and requests permission to continue.
And all redirect in a new tab or window.
So your claim that it is unacceptably disruptive to Google us just fanboyism, IMHO.
You keep assuming that they "went out of their way" to do this somehow. More likely chain of events is that they designed it to use cookies in the first place, then someone realized it wasn't working properly on Safari and implemented a work around. Submitting a form is far, far, far less work than figuring out how to make the whole thing to not use cookies, adding a redirect to the sign in page and otherwise redesigning the UX.
Come on, that's just a stupid justification - cookies are not required to allow someone to say "I like this" at all, you can do that based on the click itself.
Google went out of their way to make it work,no matter how you try and justify it, that's what they did. And you can bet that this isn't an isolated developer going "that's odd, let's fix that".
Google are in the wrong here, no matter how much you try to justify it.
Oh look, someone using this as more justification for their sense of entitlement...
And what's so bad about putting the Plus 1 button on the page regardless? I get the Facebook Like button (and a load of others) and I don't even have an account, so what makes Google special?
The entire way in which they did this screams "we want to track you", despite your protestations to the contrary. No one needs to provide evidence that there is an actual database behind it, the implementation they went out of their way to use specifically allows for it when they don't need to do it that way at all.
Uhm, it is tracking because Google, by virtue of accessing that cookie, gets to know you visited that website - they get passed the unique cookie associated with your account and they also get the referrer ID of the website. Tracking.
If they didn't explicitly want to track you, they could implement a completely cookieless implementation of their Plus 1 button which only associates you with your account when you actually click it. But they didn't, because they want the info regardless of whether you clicked or not.
Google isn't being held to the promises Safari has made, Google is being held to the agreement it had with the DoJ because in the course of collecting data about the user they deliberately circumvented, admittedly fairly weak, restrictions the user placed on their actions within the browser.
There are two entirely different issues at hand here - Safari needs to be fixed somehow (although someone further down the thread suggests this isnt an easy fix) and Google got caught with its hand in the cookie jar when it probably shouldn't have had it there.
Just because your window is open doesn't mean people are allowed to climb through it to circumvent the locked door.
You seem to think that "value" has to be monetary all the time. In a bank note the value is certainly monetary, and that value is lost when you photocopy it. However, the value of the CD is attached to the content it holds because thats why you bought it in the first place, so if you copy your CD, the copy you make still has value to you and others that listen to it, because the value inherent in it is due to the content and nothing else - and the content is an integral part of the copy, meaning you can gain all the enjoyment of listening to the copy in place of the original.
So my point stands - in one case the value of the item is lost in the duplication, while in the other the value remains after the duplication, due to the types of value each have. People desire the content, not the thing, just as they desire the buying power of the nite rather than the thing.
The only way in which your example was to be equal would be if you photocopied the CD rather than copying it - that way the copy loses the inherent value attached to it just the same way as the banknote.
I disagree, access to the content has value to the recipient, be it in an original form or a copy. I don't buy an MP3 so I can admire the filename on my hard disk, I buy it to listen to the content it represents - and for the same reason, people don't torrent MP3s for the way they look on their filesystems, they torrent them for the content.
So yes, the copy has inherent value, because the thing with the value is the content.