What do governments usually do when they decide that a substance corrupts the society and influences people to commit crime? They ban that substance and device laws that give harsh punishments to the sellers of that substance. Like banning narcotics for recreational use and punishing their dealers with long multi-decade sentences. The analogy I am drawing to piracy here is that it's the MP3 players made by mega-corporations such as Apple and Sony that drives people to download music illegally. Say, an 80 GB ipod costs 200 dollars. So if each song takes an average 4 MB of space, then your ipod can hold 20,000 of them. Something which was unimaginable before you could store your music on a hard drive. This would need you to shell out 13,800 dollars at 69 cents per song. So if we just ban the sale of these MP3 player, our primary motivation to piracy will be gone. It could also serve as a good precedence for the future if the makers of these MP3 players are told to pay billions of dollars in retrospective fines for the losses they have caused to the music industry.

With only three years in the programming field with the backoffice of one of the top software companies in the world, I have got the feeling that most of the jobs do not require much mathematical skill. Especially in my kind of setup in this part of the world, because if you have the most rudimentary logical skills, then this is all you ever need to get your job done. Our team maintains a product which was developed five years ago by handful of people who have all moved on. Since this product has become so stable that the most of the requirements seldom requires us to cut into the muscle to fix anything. So our team spends all its time doing work which pretty much can be done by a high school grad or an arts student with little or no knowledge of, or inclination towards, mathematics. But does that give me a reason to think that Maths is not necessary at all for programming? No, because I know I can not go very far with where I want to go if I don't have strong logic and mathematical skills, and the desire to learn.