And yet apparently, some actually do have to regurgitate 1980's-era copy from a German automobile makers' successful advertising campaign in (at least) the British market. As though doing so were some kind of victory. Leaves me so sad.
The way I see it, the mirror does flip up and down, at least by the measure of the same experiment used to prove that it flips left and right.
To prove that it flips left and right, imagine a vertical pole between you and the mirror. The pole has a card attached to it with the front facing the mirror. The two dots, red and blue are painted on the card and you can see their reflection in the mirror.
In the reflection, the blue dot is on the right and the red dot is on the left.
If you rotate the pole so that is facing you and you can now see the front of the card you see that the blue dot is really on the left and the red dot on the right.
This proves that the mirror flips left and right.
To prove that it flips up and down, imagine the same pole in front of you with the card facing the mirror, but this time the pole is horizontal.
in the reflection you see that the blue dot is at the top and the red dot is at the bottom.
If you rotate the horizontal pole so that the card is now facing you, you see that the blue dot is really at the bottom and the red dot at the top.
"If you rotate the pole so that is facing you and you can now see the front of the card you see that the blue dot is really on the left and the red dot on the right.
This proves that the mirror flips left and right."
All it proves is that you've rotated the card. You've done the flipping, not the mirror.
Now, without doing any rotation to the card, if the card is seen from the perspective of the mirror, the blue dot is on the left, and the red on the right.
Depending on which perspective you're looking at an object from, one side will be on your left, and the other on your right. But no flipping takes place, unless you either move yourself to a different perspective, or rotate the object. A mirror does neither. It just reflects back exactly what's in front of it.. so you see whatever's on your right on your right, and whatever's on your left on your left. There is no flipping.
I see this also covers the use of Flash cookies, but I wonder about the use of Etags as a tracking mechanism.
If I recall correctly, some of these sites use cookies, Flash cookies and also unique Etags on an object in the browser cache to try to work around people blocking cookies from their domains.
Any technology causes client machines to store information for later access are within the scope of the law.
The exact wording is a person shall not store or gain
access to information stored, in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user unless the requirements ... are met.
In practical terms though, all they're storing is a key. The actual data is held elsewhere. In the same way, an entity tag on a cached object is like a key to identify whether the object has been modified on the server since the last time it was sent.
How would it be possible to spot that it was being used for tracking a user rather than just part of the normal functioning of the browser?
That's really an enforcement problem, not a legislative problem.
Even so, I think the answer is clear: it depends on whether you store data that permits you to infer privacy-intruding things about the user. If you store a cookie that just encodes preferences and you store no persistent data about the cookie on your side, you should be fine. It's the making a relationship between client local state and your customer profiles that's key.
This is a long-standing argument of mine. Some of our users maintain that they are only interested in the functionality rather than the quality of the code/design/integration etc.
Then, six months later, when they need an enhancement and find that it is going to take twice as long/cost twice as much to build something on top of the quick & hacky solution that they originally insisted on, they still make unhappy noises.
Exactly, and while it would be great if things were standardized to make this job easier, we have to live in reality and do what is necessary for our users.
One thing that I struggle with to always keep in mind is that our users are not stupid people. I keep the image of my father in my head -- an incredibly brilliant man who taught me everything I know about arithmetic by the time I was 5, algebra by the time I was 8, then stepped back as I voraciously consumed all of the math books he bought for me, thereby basically ensuring my current success in my current field -- and he can't remember how to send links to websites to his friends. Actually, it's not that he can't remember, it's that he can't decide on the best way, between IMing, or posting on Facebook, or emailing (and if he emails, will he email the link or the HTML itself, and then will it be just the HTML, or a web archive, and will the web archive work for his brother who has always ran Apple hardware, etc. etc.).
Our users aren't dumb, for the most part. It's absolutely our failure as an industry to hold each other to a standard of professionalism (and I mean professionalism in the sense of Engineers, not MBAs) to ensure that things are actually usable and adhering to standards. We were cursed by our early adoption by counter culturalists.
