Ken Rosenthal reporting Hell might be close to freezing over

It's pretty easy to play the starving coders line, which has some merit, but there's a difference in scope between pirating a $20-30 app like OOTP, that some poor guy labored over in his home for months/years, and pirating a $300 copy of MS Office that every 2-3 years will be outdated and will require a $200 upgrade.

I don't think anyone here is advocating pirating cheap apps, as much as the exorbitantly priced mainstream apps the conglomerates make.

Not that I advocate pirating in general... it's just that the scope and damage is not as black and white as the programmers side believe.

What is the difference?  Morally, technically nothing.  Fiscally, it's a lot less damaging to Adobe and Microsoft than it is to Markus Heinsohn.

I used to work in the Software section of Fry's where I would need to have a vast knowledge of numerous programs and games because nobody else in the department knew jack shit. If I wanted to be successful at my job then I would need to buy ten thousands of dollars of software just to answer the hundreds of questions that I was faced with each day.

So I downloaded all that stuff, gained a basic knowledge of the program then turned that into 10 times as many sales as I would have had if I just read off the back of the box. The same went for games.

When I stopped working there I stopped this practice but during my time there it felt like it was a necessary evil in order to do my job right. Looking back on my tenure at that store I realize that all I needed to be employed there were two legs and 5% brain activity, but that is a different story.

Use GIMP, which is free.  

I'm not saying piracy is acceptable, but only that I understand why it happens and why people do it, and that not all piracy is equally damaging per capita.  Sure, if every copy of Adobe or Microsoft whatever was pirated, both those companies would go in the hole, but there aren't nearly enough dishonest people for that to be the case.  It's not honest, but let's not act like a few people pirating a copy of MS Office is going to ruin the lives of several Powerpoint coders.

The only reason why I was downloading it was because my 360 scratched my XBOX version and they refused to replace it for me.

MVP 2005, C&C 3,all the NFS games, ect.

It's actually been a long time since I downloaded a game. Hell...now that I think about it, it's been a while since I downloaded anything really...no wait, I downloaded the latest Die Hard movie, but then ended up seeing it in theaters anyways right after me and some friends saw Transformers in theaters.

Most of things I download these days are music and small programs like Nero(though I have a legal older version of that laying around here somewhere...)