By boomlinde
> I think “regardless regardless of what positive effects it might have had otherwise” is generally the foil in accepting the full FSF position on political topics.
I don’t mean to say that these effects are irrelevant in any general sense, I am saying that in the context of listing disadvantages of Amazon e-books, it’s relevant to mention that the contract that their customers have with them allows them to delete their books at their discretion, and that they have been doing so. I certainly don’t see how they went “over the top” by just mentioning it.
> [...] you’re missing out on the collective benefits that make the current transition to shared, administered, cloud-based technologies so powerful for the users that adopt them.
Just in the interest of not being extremely vague about what exactly those benefits are, let’s look at the case in point. Amazon pulled two books from customers that had paid for them, from what I understand over a rights dispute. The books were not only “in the cloud”, but had already been retrieved and stored on the customers’ devices for consumption, and Amazon went out of their way to delete them from the devices as well, using a backdoor. What exactly was the collective benefit of the cloud in this case? How did the shared, administered, cloud-based technologies empower the users in this instance, if we take “users” in this case to mean the affected customers? Is a deliberate backdoor into your device an inevitable aspect of cloud based technologies?
Who did benefit from the action? The winners in this were probably Amazon and the claimant in the dispute. It certainly wasn’t the customers. If it was your intention to address the case in point in the above quote, I think that you are conflating “cloud-based technologies” with a generally shitty customer rights, as if the two need to go hand in hand. Meanwhile, tons of people are using “cloud-based technologies” illegally to download books in without agreements and format and device lock-downs that completely screw them over at the whim of the distributor.
> Users are willing to accept a massive spike in convenience and utility for the drastically-less-than-1% chance that Amazon kills their favorite book from their device, without their consent, with a refund.
Some are not, or may not be if they had the effects detrimental to their rights listed to them.
> That’s not evil; it’s the nature of progress
What do you mean by progress here? In the most general sense of the word this is a rather meaningless conclusion. I don’t see how the tax analogy explains it. When I pay taxes, I do it for the benefit of society. The money I pay actually go towards infrastructure and welfare. When Amazon removes a book from my library, how does it benefit society? Would Amazon go bankrupt if they did not do these things?
Read more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10401505
boomlinde comments on "The Danger of E-Books"
No comments:
Post a Comment