How is it abuse when you're using the service as advertised? Google didn't call it "a reasonably large amount of storage, sufficient for most people", they called it unlimited.
I think its a little less clear for ISPs where large amounts of data usage is normal for average users but in the case of storage, people dumping petabytes of data they don't even care about is clearly misuse. If the drink place stepped in to stop you after 5 drinks that would probably be false advertising.
Yes maybe Google was wrong about calling it unlimited and now they are fixing that by making it not unlimited. That doesn't change the fact that people were actually misusing it
How do you know that?
Turn the tables; say that as a customer you agree to a company charging you an unlimited fee each month for a service. Do you think they'd charge just $1 because they 'know' you didn't mean all of your salary?
If you offer unlimited and only give 2 drinks / person, you're lying, shame on you. If you drink more than 10 people combined, you're drunk with questionable social compass. When you take more than 100 or even 1000 people, then you are technically correct - the best kind of correct for a sociopath.
An unlimited storage offer is intended to store as much data as you want. The difference is that there is a low natural limit to how much you can drink.
People aren't wrong for storing unlimited amounts of data in the unlimited amount storage space they pay for. They don't have to evaluate if Google's offer makes business sense for it, that's Google's responsibility.
1. The letter of the service being offered
2. The spirit of the service being offered
Personally, I've always thought #2 was more important than #1. Unfortunately, #1 is often the one that gets enforced, especially when lawyers get involved, which is why legalese exists because when you know people argue from the standpoint of #1, you have to make sure there aren't any loopholes. But I'm digressing a bit here...
Look, just because a company offers something "unlimited" doesn't necessarily mean it can't be abused. To argue otherwise is bad faith, IMO. We can argue over where the line is, but that's just a pointless distraction.
But I think everyone would agree that storing a petabyte of data with a service that offers "unlimited" storage for $12/month is abuse.
A: "We'll store all your data, no limit!"
B: "Ok, here's all my data."
A: "Abuse!"
Doesn't really make sense to me.
"help yourself to the drinks" carts your entire refrigerator and larder's supply home
Similarly, if we reserve the word "unlimited" for things that are actually, y'know, unlimited, then the word again becomes more useful.
Flagrant disregard for commonly understood definitions of words when it's convenient to one's cause is a concrete example of a tragedy of the commons that makes a language less useful overall.
It sounds like you object to the standard usage of these words, which doesn’t seem like a productive position. Olive Garden isn’t actually going to give you unlimited breadsticks either.
Google advertised unlimited. By definition that means without limits. To then put limits is to make the plan limited. Instead of doing thesemental gymnastics to defend Google might I suggest that the people storing petabytes of data are taking advantage of Google's goodwill but not doing anything inherently wrong. That being said Google calling the people who use petabytes abusive is hypocritical, and wrong. Google wants a certain type of user that overpays for "unlimited" and uses a pittance. Instead Google found that they advertised themselves into a pickle and are trying to blame people using the service as advertised.
Google can either advertise unlimited and live with the costs or advertise what they're actually willing to provide. Users using a service within the advertised constraints is not abuse.
I'm not talking about literal or pedantic correctness here.
The antonym of unlimited is limited. You're using some impressive mental gymnastics to justify advertising a product with one word while providing the opposite.
If the literal interpretation of whatever hogwash the marketing dept is spewing is obviously impossible then I posit that the companies who do so are deliberately misleading consumers for profit. That seems to me to be an open shut textbook example of false advertising. But then neither my job depends on not understanding this distinction, nor am I overpaid lawyer employed to a company engaging in these patently fraudulent activities.
Olive Garden, after all, cannot actually provide you with “unlimited breadsticks” either.
So it's false advertising?
So, if you run into a "miracle doctor" that will charge you $1,000,000 per dose of their "miracle medicine" that "wipes away cancer, like, forever", the reasons why your claim will be denied are already stated clearly in the small print of your contract.
You want one term interpreted literally and the other figuratively? No.
If you offer something that you never intended to deliver is that not false advertising? It really doesn't matter how you go about denying the delivery. It doesn't matter that any given termination is legally in the clear. All that matters (IMO) is that you offered something when you knew up front that you were never going to deliver it.
And yes, the above would mean that marketing almost any service as "unlimited" would be false advertising. I do actually think that practice should be actively disallowed by regulators. I really don't think that having slick marketing terms is more important that having offerings that are truthfully and accurately advertised. A functional marketplace absolutely depends on the ability of participants to readily understand the services being offered.
Advertising a service that a supplier has no intention of providing is called fraud.
Similarly some software I wrote a couple years ago, that wrote a bunch of small files into a single S3 bucket caused a lot of grief at a 3rd party S3 like service because they never imagined someone would write a couple TB of data into a single bucket (actually it used multiple buckets but each one was a TB or two of <1k files).
CrashPlan lost some of my data some time in 2012/13, blaming it on how they work with Windows's Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS).
I should have stopped my subscription there and then, but I continued subscribing for another 2 years, probably because I was anxious about needing something else that was in the file retention history.
It wasn't a very good service anyway — slow to upload, often stopping mysteriously, and requiring 1GB of RAM for every 1TB backed up.
https://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/4/Configuring/Unsupport...
That means I've probably got a bit of duplication @ crashplan, but given the bulk of the data is a .jpg/mpeg dump from my cameras I don't care about the 5-10% of the archive which isn't compressed and likely has some duplication (the .git repos).
OTOH, crashplan isn't my only backup plan, so if they explode tomorrow I don't think it will cause me any grief outside of having to find another offsite/cloud backup solution.
(also as a further note, looking at my config log, it seems I need /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches bumped pretty hard just to keep it running).
It does not have to belong to the community to be a commons. It just has to affect the entire community.
>A common resource (or the "commons") is any scarce resource, such as water or pasture, that provides users with tangible benefits but which nobody in particular owns or has exclusive claim to.
Google owns their hard drive space.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons
>The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable earth. These resources are held in common, not owned privately.
Google owns their hard drive space. Also a commons has the implication of everyone having access to access said resource. You aren't entitled to access to googles hard disk space.
The important bit for a tragedy of the commons is that the users don’t have any meaningful ownership or motivation to fix the system.
The town commons where people grazed their livestock was literally owned by the government. Be it the government or a faceless company that doesn’t charge for it, it doesn’t make any difference from an economic perspective.
> Google owns their hard drive space. Also a commons has the implication of everyone having access to access said resource.
No it doesn’t. A commons has the implication that everyone in a particular community has access to something. A tragedy of the commons can easily occur within completely gated communities with the commons owned by a private corporation.
> The town commons where people grazed their livestock was literally owned by the government.
That's not really true; the pre-enclosure commons simply wasn't owned in the sense we'd understand it today, just as Native American land was administered in ways we wouldn't recognise as ownership. Treating land as akin to chattel is a relatively recent development.
The critical relationship in the tragedy of the commons is misaligned incentives between the users and the owners. Users have incentive to act greedy and the owner has no incentive to fix it because it doesn’t hurt them if the thing stops being useful for that activity.
Not really. Often there was simply no entity that exercised executive function over the land or its use, which is a large part of why even plainly dysfunctional arrangements persisted.
The idea that there must be an owner to incentivise is modern and ahistorical. As traditionally conceived, the tragedy occurs not because "the owner" has the wrong incentives but because there simply isn't an owner. Pre-modern states didn't have the capacity to administer land in that kind of detail, even if they'd wanted to.
Similarly, if you rent a hotel room, you have free access to common areas like the pool or lounge. Normally this works wonderfully, until a big party takes over the common space.