I don't care what you're position is on emulators or Google. This guy tried to make money off of other people's work, his emulators were just based off of open source projects like snes9x. And he actually had the gall to try and play the sympathy card about how he's lost his primary source of income. You mean he might actually have to work, or come up with something original to earn money? How sad.

He deserved to get pulled.

I am intrigued by your comment about smoking. I'd like to learn more, but sadly googling cigarette and cancer brings up to many sites to go through :(

Can you provide some more information about it, or possibly even a link that explains it?

Thanks :)

Didn't even know they had any piracy on there. Maybe the porn is meant to distract people from noticing?

I like you. I bet you would have been fun to work for :)

I specialize in learning things extremely quickly, and coming up with simple elegant solutions to various problems. If you don't understand what I did or why I did it, than it is clearly neither simple nor elegant on my part.
I can and have on several occasions, accomplished something in days that someone else struggled with for a month.
I may whine about bad code, but I'd do so with a sparkle in my eye and a grin on my face, because there's absolutely nothing I enjoy more than making sense of things that make no sense.
If I were on your project, you would notice the code base slowly become easier to understand. The program would speed up dramatically. And every now and than, I would present you with a radical new feature that you either though wasn't possible, or you hadn't thought of at all, but you would certainly agree is the coolest thing ever.
I work well with just about everyone. I think its my job to make lives easier, not harder, so if I come up with a solution that requires you do something, I'll talk to you about it, and I'll feel super guilty about adding work to your load.

So, to the question, should you do whatever you can to keep me, even if I'm being a bad employee?

NO.

If I'm doing those things, than it means the challange has run out for me, and unfortunetely at that point I'm pretty much useless.

It happens. Especially as companies grow up. People like me tend to thrive in start up companies, where there's a ton of things that need to be done, new skills that need to be learned, and not enough people to do it all. Eventually that wears out. Most of the challenges have been finished, theres a large enough team that you don't have to learn new skills anymore, and maintenance tasks start having higher priorities over the interesting things. And once you get to the point where my strengths are no longer needed, the only thing left will be my weaknesses.

Easy or mundane tasks take me weeks to complete. My desire to be challenged and my desire to make things easier will be at odds with each other, and I'll continue to procrastinate even more.
I'm very undisciplined. I have poor time management skills.
I get restless when I'm not being challenged, and that could lead to disruptive behavior.

Its sad, since its such a strong contrast from before. And since I've been so helpful with everyone, than its hard not to think that it'd be worth doing anything to keep me on. I was extremely useful before, and maybe one day I would be again.

But the truth is nothing else will motivate me. Money, promotions, respect, fame, power, loyalty, even friends. None of that will get me back to the great employee you knew me as.

The challenges have run out. My skills are no longer neccessary. Its time to let me go.

I swear I've read this before, and the consensus was that when they compared people who got accepted to the school but didn't go to those who actually went to the school, there wasn't much of a difference in income. The very brighest just tend to make more money.

The only exception is if you're a minority, in which case you should do everything you can to get into the ivy league school.

I know a lot of you guys are AMD fans, but seriously I think you're being a little over dramatic about them having a higher market share...

Even though there's hardly digital comics you can purchase, people still take the time to manually scan each comic as it comes out.

For manga, people even take the time to TRANSLATE it before they release it.

Just like anything else, piracy is based on demand, not convienence. People don't do all that work just because its easy, they do it because people want them.

The demand for ebook piracy may increase as people get more and more used to the idea of reading digital books, but wether or not a publisher decides to sell their books digitally would have no bearing on the chances of it getting pirated.

Yeah, I remember getting my first black and white PDA like 9 years ago and being so excited that I could read books on it.

I still have them, thousands of downloaded books, sitting around in a folder somewhere probably taking less than 100 megs of space.

I managed to get all of the Discworld, Sword of truth series, and Douglas adam's books plus a couple of series that aren't in print anymore. All before the kindle was even a glint in Amazon's eye.

When you're dealing with that kind of dedication to scan information, Ebooks and piracy aren't linked. Sure, you're making it slightly easier for them to do so, but at least your giving legitimate customers the ability to purchase them.

what a useful site! If I knew how to mod you up, I totally would just for showing it to me :p

Making the internet less confusing, one user at a time

Blackberry's biggest strength is its secure email. That's why so many corporations allow it. Assuring paranoid corporate people that their email is safe with them is practically their entire business model!

I can't imagine it would be worth ruining that reputation just to keep such a small part of their market.

Take away that, and all they have left is their little keyboards.

That was fun! Do you have another?

I think this nails it perfectly.
The question is biased in its very nature. How could someone possibly prove piracy failed their company, when someone can always just counter with "you just didn't get enough exposure"
Which is very annoying, because thats basically what we all struggle to do. I don't think its ever the case that piracy caused something to fail, but its much more likely that it prevented the business from getting the chance to succeed.

(For the purpose of this debate, I'm ignoring the "collectors". I used to download everything under the sun, and I wouldn't have given a second thought if one of those companies died. Instead, I'm talking about the people who would have paid money for it had they not been able to find it for free. The "on the fence" people if you will, those are the ones that it really hurts to lose out on)

I run a small business selling software, and I can tell you that when my app got cracked, my sales dropped by more than 30%.

Ponder that for a second. Imagine walking into work one day, and finding out you got a 30% paycut. Because well, someone in China was just bored that day.

Right now, if things continue as they are, its unlikely I'll be able to continue doing this for more than a month or two, before the rest of my savings bleeds out, and I have to move on.

Of course, things could change, I could catch my lucky break. And I've obviously made some mistakes, it wasn't just piracy that put me in this position. But that doesn't change the fact that I would be more likely to survive if more of the people who downloaded it actually paid for it.

And that whole "piracy is a form of advertisement" is utter crap, because only the people who already know about the program pirate it. Its hard enough to get people to know about the program, but harder still when they leave your site to find it for free.

Now, you can look at my story and say, people might just be interest in my product. It's cold. But it may be true. I may have just gone after a market that wasn't there. So who cares if I fail?

And I think that's the deepest irony in all of this. Because you know who cares? The people who are pirating my program! Obviously, it fulfills a role they need, or they wouldn't download it. So, they have a need that they want fulfilled, but because they didn't pay for it, I can't improve the software they want to use.

My Comic reader app does all that on Windows Mobile phones right now.
http://forums.comicreader.mobi/showthread.php?347-One-Year-Aniversary!-Special-Feature-annoucement!

As cool as it is, I wouldn't even dare call that an original idea.

But, if they're not going to listen to empirical evidence, that's not much you can do :p

This sounds familiar. Didn't this exact same thing happen with the DRAM chip makers like 10 or 15 years ago?