Take a pay cut, show the world that you're not in it for the money, you're in it for the future of technology in the USA.

Then call the BSA, report software piracy in a government office, collect the rest of your salary as the "reporting bonus".

Or, in another thought: It really had nothing to do with him. Just because you work with someone who does something stupid/illegal doesn't immediately make you guilty of also being involved in the stupidity/illegalities. Doesn't mean it doesn't, just means it doesn't have to be that he does. Or not.

Before anybody starts in on the "Yay, less employees!" style rant, please remember that there are GOOD people who work at bad companies... not everyone is an evil backstabbing conniving shrew with the goal of proving that everyone is evil and owes them billions of dollars.

Of course, I have no proof of this "decent people" there, but one can only assume there would be.

...that hasn't been hating Microsoft for the past couple years?

I mean, I like having to jump through hoops to get something simple to work in linux as much as the next guy (no sarcasm, this is /. after all.. who HASN'T spent a friday night recompiling software from source and swearing at the unavailability of required source libraries?), but sometimes it's just nice to "Click-click-click-done" of windows.

Sure, it may be buggy sometimes, is a target for viruses, isn't as fast or powerful as it should be, vista's a bloated pig, but I've got XP so it works and does what I tell it to, doesn't crash, runs everything I want natively, no fuss.

Office? Yeah, it sucks, trying too hard. SQL Server? S'ok. Exchange? Simple, works. IIS? Crap. Silverlight? Pass. Their X-Boxen? They f'cked up on the RROD issue, but working at correcting (C'mon baby, don't jinx it, keep bein' green!)

Am I the only one who isn't on with the hatred?

People need to remember that you CAN be pissed off at a poorly performing / defective / overly expensive / ugly products. It's perfectly OK to be angry.

What is NOT acceptable, under any conditions, is to take it out on the person who sold it (unless of course they were responsible for the construction / repair / destruction / damage / defilement / or it being vista). Gas is an ass-rape, but it's NOT the fault of the pump-jockey earning minimum wage.

The printer broke, it's not this guy's fault. He tried to sell the store's standard extended warranty, which would have saved aggravation (bad timing on the breakage), and unless this guy pointed it out in an asinine way ("If you bought the warranty like I told you to, you'd be fine, but you're cheap and screwed now, ain't ya?" type response), it was simply not his fault.

BTW: I don't work retail. I just sympathize with people getting blamed for things well beyond their control. I don't sympathize with them being dumber than dirt or the crappy attitudes many have.