The post is about books/music etc but i'm going to add a note about software piracy. When I was younger of course I could not afford photoshop, nor could my father who worked at the post office. I downloaded it, played (took me several months) but soon I got good at it. Good enough to get a job using it, I was also still in high school. In addition I downloaded Visual Studio 6. I used that to learn C++ more specifically MFC. Soon I had a job programming. Today I'm a huge Microsoft advocate, and I've urged my previous 2 employers to purchase copies of photoshop for my desk. I'm not justifying what I did... it is still wrong. But they gave me a valuable skill set which i'm grateful for. While I have given them a good amount of additional business. I'll also add that today, now that I can afford it I proudly own (and bought from legitimate sources) most of the software I once had to download.
