No, but I close my browser regularly enough that using session cookies for tracking is bloody stupid. Which is why nobody does it. The rest of your post is just more ranting about cookies, without addressing the distinction between session cookies and persistent ones. This EU law doesn't appear to distinguish between the two either, and is therefore, just as stupid as you.

Except that this article wasn't talking about informing people; it was talking about restricting their knowledge, because increasing it leads them to conclusions the author doesn't want them to hold. That's why I used the phrase "manipulating information" rather than "education" - education implies increasing the student's knowledge; "manipulating information" means either increasing or restricting their knowledge, based on the goals you're attempting to implement.

So, advertising on your own site is anti-trust. Ok, thanks for playing.

You do know what an antitrust complaint is about don't you? It's not about having a monopoly, it's about abusing one. When has Google abused its search monopoly?

Err, no, that would be persistent cookies. Session cookies are deleted whenever the browser session ends, so it makes tracking rather pointless. The cookies Google (and every other company) uses to track are set to expire years in the future.

I'm betting at least one slashdotter will start posting pre-emptive strawman arguments too.

That's a weakness in democracy in general. Witness how the politicians break out the "campaign promises" in election season. At least it'll be novel in that the voting public will receive the bribes, rather than them being concentrated at the candidate level.

Australia, New Zealand and Canada are not independent nations - they're all a part of the British commonwealth, and the head of state for all three is the Queen of England, represented by a Governor General.

Are there any soceties that didn't begin through violence and bloodshed? We don't really know the origins of all societies, but of those that we do, I can only recall stories of invasion or rebellion.

Not a parallel example. A parallel example would be that you knew that Media Production students, if taught Shannon's entropy equations, would kill a kitten. You like kittens, so you modify your syllabus to exclude entropy equations. You're creating desired behaviour by manipulating the information presented, not changing the form or manner in which information is presented to make it more interesting to your audience. The latter is prompted by a desire for the target to gain access to new information; the former for a desire to control the target.