Amazon S3 discrimination protest!

it's not just LBGT stuff they've delisted, large swathes of feminist literature, and tons of things that even middle schools got over banning LONG ago.

someone found a great example of a book in more than one edition... the edition with the word 'lesbian' in it was delisted, the others weren't.

Something good's come of it then.

Pep (Whose wife wastes a lot of the household alcohol budget on chicklit)

I have to wonder if there would be the outrage if works by Neo Nutzis or other undesirables were delisted. Or does freedom of speech only apply when your own ox is being gored?

/me hugs a fellow Stephenson fan.

Well, personally I see a bit of a difference between people who harm nobody (homosexuals for example) and those who propagate hatred and violance. "Freedom of speech" sounds nice, but in my eyes it ends where it is abused to harm others.

Ask again when that happens.

I agree that must be a huge waste (what with her not killing you), and as a bonus Playboys centerfold retrospective was never delisted (because, unlike Lady Chatterly's Lover, it's ART.....) so you should be pleased as....pie?

Amazon spokesperson Drew Herdener:

"This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles – in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon's main product search.

Many books have now been fixed and we're in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future."

Twitter, of course, will take credit for the getting the mistake resolved, when in fact it is in Amazon's best fiscal interest to return 57K popular titles to their lists. To me, the whipped-up hysteria in floods of tweets over the weekend was a powerful argument for shutting down my twitter account. The groupthink was alarming - I can totally see crazies monitoring twitter to follow people and harm them.

Plus, even on a normal non-hysterical day, why should I invite into my life a horde of people so self-involved that they really believe others want to follow their every thought?

I don't know, but then I've never even looked at the Twitter homepage (or plurk or facebook).

That can pretty much be said of SL, this forum or any online venue, can't it?

I don't use any of those things, and I can see people using MyFaceBookSpace to a degree, but I find the concept of Twitter and Plurk pretty much useless, for the reasons you just described. Just my personal view. But then again, I have 17,000 posts on a computer game forum, so what do I know?

I've personally used MySpace to look at band music pages and listen to free music. I do not have a page myself, though.

I just wanted to be the first to use the term 'bulshytt' in the forums..

Except that this had been going on for a couple of months, had been mentioned to Amazon by more then one author and was resolved in about 8 hours time with Twitter. It probably was a mistake but it was a mistake that was not being addressed.


Do you really use Twitter? I am asking because there is no flood of messages coming to you from just anyone, only the people you elect to follow. There is no one forcing you to follow anyone and you can unfollow someone with a click of a button. Twitter is for friends or work or people you like or people that have something to say in a field you are interested in. You also have the option of making your tweets invisible except to people you approve of.

I have a wide ranging group of people I follow and that follow me. A couple of stars from the show Heroes because I like that show. Ashton Kutcher because I find his tweets; amusing, childish, sweet, loving etc., netflix tweets, security bulletins, SL friends, various Lindens. And I have elected to unfollow some that do seem to use it for nothing more then self promotion. I follow President Obama's tweets even thou the tweets are rare now that he is president. Had the amusing treat of receiving the email stating he is following my tweets(along with a half million other people ), but amusing none-the-less!

I belong to a few organizations that've begun to use Twitter, and for such purposes it's very like email, because tweets are infrequent. However, to see what the service is really like I've also tuned into a few song artists and people tweeting about popular news stories, and those have been carnivals.

I'm a little crotchety, I guess, with respect to media personalities like Ashton Kutcher. I tend to regard their twitter feeds as marketing streams, not sources of insight.
.

Twitter = stalking people who want to be stalked

Pep (Or more accurately, their PR people)

Yes, unfortunately not everyone can be mild mannered like me with an almost Zen-like control over my emotions

NP and glad you are using Twitter for good also! And as far as Ashon; I think of him as kind of the verbal equivalent to a lolcat. For example, from the other day:

I must be ovr the hill then and up the crest of the next- no tweetiring here- i looked at it when it first came got talked about- but found it a ridiculous concept. There are newsfeeds for things that might actually impact me- when joe schmoe is having pizza or politico wannabes planning global domination rub two brain cells together is not fascinating to me. As I am sure my thoughts leave much to be desired to the world at large.

Oh she has tried - she's a terrible driver!

Sorry to disappoint you, but I find words significantly more arousing than visuals, which is why I get so upset when they are abused and misused.


Pie's my uncynical persona, actually . . .

Pep (so he's irrationally pleased all the time)

I'm a little puzzled by the "ham-fisted" description of the error and wonder if Amazon has been any more specific about the actual root cause.

It's always possible that it wasn't completely an accident at whatever level the situation actually arose, but it's pretty implausible that anybody at the company-wide level ever approved any such happenings.

Bezos may not be the brightest bulb in Davos, but he's not self-destructive, and just when his company is trying to promote itself as the natural home of "cloud computing," he wouldn't choose to remind his potential customers that all their cloud-borne data will be one click from oblivion should he decide he doesn't like their kind.

(On the other hand, it's not a bad reminder of that vulnerability. Dvorak must be positively beside himself.)

I'd feel the same way about Obama's

To play devil's advocate for a moment. I imagine that a Christian Fundamentalist could contend that homosexuality is harmful as it propagates immorality and sexual promiscuity. In their eyes, the mere fact that you can openly display such behavior is poison to their children. For some, their distaste for such behavior may very well be as passionate as your distaste for the neo-nazis.

As I said, devil's advocate... but consider things from their point of view. It's not so drastically different.

Hey it was worth it just for this:



A source of endless amusement!

I just put in a BIG order with Amazon last nite.. LOVE that place!

Only way I wouldnt shop there is if the prices were to high

I'll protest in my own way... I'll buy everything even remotely gay that they've got available. That'll show em, right?

My problem is with their shipping department. I'm still holding a couple grudges against those guys.