nihil & the grunt:

good point, guess i didn't take that into account. forgot that for one, a lot of people worldwide don't have access to the internet, and secondly, most that do, aren't t1/cable/dsl, but are dialup however, if you were to try to download pirated software from a dialup, though it may take many days per program, you could always use bit torrent. can resume downloads and such and there are a TON of sites out there that supply clean pirated torrents.

anyways, back to the subject of availability, it's actually quite interesting for me (living in a college town) to hear about places where pirating is an actual business. still can't even imagine that! well, thanks for the insight!

-D