zimbabwe

I would have argued this position no matter what company had done it, because I think it's the right of the company. Mind you, if certain other companies has done this my stance would have been more along the lines of "They're allowed to do it, but they're assholes." Amazon, on the other hand, has never once done something to violate my trust. So when they do it, my reaction is "They're allowed to do it, and I can understand what made them do it."

I just said I was going to bow out of this conversation, so I'll end my line of thought with this: A company has the right to do what it wants with its products, and when that company is Amazon and has made countless innovations that help me find the stuff that I want, when it gave me my second-favorite gizmo, and when it has not once in the near-decade I've been a member violated my trust, when it's one above and beyond to make me happy, then I'm going to look with skepticism upon claims that Amazon's removing an illegal book and offering a refund equates to a sacrilege of justice. The people comparing this with 1984 are bizarrely wrong.

Personally, I see a hacker as somebody that changes things in an unexpected way. It's the unexpected that makes somebody a hacker instead of a coder or an entrepreneur.

(I'll also clear up, since I figure it'll be brought up in a moment anyway, that if Amazon had targeted copies of 1984 that weren't from their Whispernet store then I'd be more offended.)

We should firmly be on the lookout for abuses of this power, but in this case:

* Amazon found out that they were accidentally distributing something illegal

* Amazon happened to have the power to fix their problem entirely, without missing a single copy of the illegally-published book

* This happened near-instantaneously, without anybody's time being wasted

* Amazon refunded every single person their money back, so they lost no money whatsoever

Amazon doesn't look scary, they didn't come in armed with weapons, they didn't illegally access anything. If I was in Barnes & Noble and bought a book, then was approached by an employee saying "We weren't actually allowed to sell you that copy of the book, here's your money back," I might be disappointed at not having the book, but Barnes & Noble retains the right to take that book back from me if they're also returning my money.

You know how we like to loudly trumpet that PIRACY IS NOT STEALING! because there's no physical copy and therefore no cost to how many times a file can be replicated? Well, that works both ways. When you're dealing with a thin sliver of data which can be modified without even a chance of damage to any other data, and when you have a moral imperative to remove that data and can do it without harm to anybody, then you have every right to jump back in and edit that data, precisely because it isn't meatspace.

Anybody who wants to use social drugs should take a look at meditation and self-hypnosis, because you can get the same emotional states that you'd get with drugs through a little practice. As lionhearted mentioned, hallucinogens are the one exception.

Find me the story of somebody who was "lost" in LSD and I'll respond to it. Right now you're spreading FUD. There is proof of LSD flashback. There is no proof of people getting "lost" in trips. There certainly is proof of LSD aggravating people with mental instability, but instability exists without drugs.

Perhaps I don't have the same feelings regarding owning a copy of somebody else's work. I don't feel ownership towards ebooks. I feel ownership towards the money I spend, but if I get that back I wouldn't be mad at what Amazon did. That's a minority opinion, and I think it would be worth debating somewhere that's not here.

Doesn't work like that. If you're a major digital salesperson and somebody's transmitting data illegally, as they were in this case, then it's your responsibility to withdraw the book. Amazon should have been much more polite about what was happening, but letting people keep illegal content was out of the question here. I understand that.

If this had been a legal publisher of 1984 suddenly switching positions, I'd agree that the user should have the choice. Considering it wasn't an authorized publisher, Amazon did the one thing they could.

Nobody should EVER under any circumstance delete ANYTHING from my computer, even if I bought it or not, if it is pirated or not, if it is stolen or not.

Really? Because I've always thought that deleting pirated content would be a great punishment for piracy. If I've stolen something, I have no right to it. That's implicit in the idea of piracy. Deleting the stuff I pirated seems like a harmless punishment.

There are no overdose-related deaths in the history of marijuana. Ever. You could smoke your weight in weed and not die. Similarly, nobody's ever died from LSD (I can't think of another drug whose usage leads to "trips"), and I can't recall ever reading of a bad trip from which you "don't come back".

PLAYBOY: Ever take LSD?

GATES: My errant youth ended a long time ago.

PLAYBOY: What does that mean?

GATES: That means there were things I did under the age of 25 that I ended up not doing subsequently.

PLAYBOY: One LSD story involved you staring at a table and thinking the corner was going to plunge into your eye.

GATES: [Smiles]

PLAYBOY: Ah, a glimmer of recognition.

GATES: That was on the other side of that boundary. The young mind can deal with certain kinds of gooping around that I don't think at this age I could. I don't think you're as capable of handling lack of sleep or whatever challenges you throw at your body as you get older. However, I never missed a day of work.

Hopefully I don't have to provide evidence of Steve Jobs's drug-using past, since that's a famous part of hacker history. The Gates admission surprised me, though: I just discovered it a few days ago from the Hacker News post about Jobs's relationship with Timothy Leary.

I just don't like the suggestion that the customer is entitled to both the book and a refund at once.

Think of it like a doctor selling you a medicine, then calling you up and saying, "Oops, I wasn't authorized to give you those pills. I need them back, and I'll refund you entirely."

There's a difference between removing an e-book and refunding it.

Amazon needs to have a method of preventing people from illegally selling books they have no rights to.

If they want to provide us with their Kindle store, which 99% of the time is excellent and wonderful (I just got the Kindle iPhone app and I love that it syncs with my Kindle and with the web reader), they have to deal with publishers that are antique and ignorant and full of themselves. Think the RIAA is tyrannical? The publishing industry is ten times worse.

It sucks that Amazon had to do this, but given a choice between a terrific store that's subject to the whims of publishers and no store at all, I'll take the terrific store, and hope that my Shakespeare and Austen remain intact.

Amazon is one of the few companies that I trust almost wholeheartedly. I don't think they're fuck-something-up-proof, but I believe firmly that the company as a whole cares about its users and about giving them the best experience possible, even when it's at cost to them. I've never had a bad experience with Amazon, whether it was as a customer or as a seller. I understand the kneejerk impulse here, which is to call Amazon an Evil Big Corporation, but I find it sad that a decade of building trust can be so quickly thrown out the door.

I don't hold my mind's current state sacrosanct. That is to say, I respect my mind incredibly, but I don't have any belief that says my mind was built the way it was for a reason, or that there's something wrong with experimenting with it. That doesn't mean I abuse it incredibly, but I'm fine with drugs and find the infrequent experiences I have with them to be worth the negligible cost they have on my mind.

I won't say "drugs are good" because I think it's stupid to assign a moral value to drugs either way. Hence, the idea that the brain should be preserved and altering chemicals avoided isn't one that I find offensive in the least. But it's worth pointing out the beneficial effects they can have on you. For one thing, realizing the limits of your perception can be fascinating. Weed doesn't have that effect on me so much, but alcohol and salvia both certainly made me realize things I wouldn't have realized otherwise. Alcohol's emotional effects certainly taught me that our moods are tenuous and that we shouldn't equate our emotional states to any sort of logical truth about the world.

Regarding weed and dulled intelligence - yes, I feel like that sometimes. I feel like that without using weed. Right now I'm in an emotive state where I feel like I'm going to grow fat and die without ever moving. Weed has nothing to do with those downer feelings. Since I first took weed, though, last February, I wrote a novel, designed a handful of web sites that I'm proud of, finished a few projects, etc., and I did it in between infrequent weed hits. It's worth pointing out that many great artists were users - Miles Davis and heroin most famously - and that using drugs doesn't instantly make you less creative. It might make you creative in a different way, but creativity is not something which can be gained and lost. It is a potential that we all have regardless of intelligence. Think of it more as a muscle than as a trait.

We're affected by chemicals no matter how we live. You live your life according to a mixture of fats, proteins, carbohydrates, and nutrients. In my mind, worrying too much about weed is like worrying about eating fats - it's certainly possible that if you take too much, there'll be adverse effects, but assuming that a single contact with a substance will change you forever is silly.

Regarding the initial question, though, hacking on weed probably won't work too well. Weed affects the sort of focus you'd need. (For certain other activities, however, like playing music, weed can help. It's not a black-and-white all-or-nothing deal.)

My advice would be to try it, since you can't really be hurt trying, but if you decide not to then all power to you.

The magic secret of entrepreneurship is that the people with big ideas and strong work ethics know who they are already, and them doing drugs doesn't stop them from being themselves. Similarly, avoiding drugs doesn't instantly give you power.