I think the point is that it's probably not worth the $500 unless you really don't have the time to get used to GIMP (which doesn't take much time at all) or if you're really good enough to use Photoshop at its full potential, which most people are not.

tl;dr --> For most people PS is a waste of money. For somebody very talented and with money to spend, go for it.

inb4 "but a really good artist could use GIMP well enough to have to use PS:" you can only be as good as the tool you have. There isn't an enormous difference between the two, but there certainly is a tangible one.

Now unless i'm grievously misunderstanding you here (which is entirely likely), i must disagree with this. That, or Paint is a really ♥♥♥♥ good tool (which by proxy makes GIMP and Photoshop even better), because i've seen artists doing god tier art with it. (case in point: Mona Lisa)
WITH THAT SAID, the same artist could probably do better things in Photoshop than he/she could in Paint, on the basis of having far more (and more flexible) tools to work with.

I think if you want to spend $500 on a tool that helps you do what you love to do / do for money, then you're goddamned free to do so. If you don't want to spend the money, there are free alternatives. And none of us should really try and convince you that one is better than the other, or one has more value.

Personally, I got the best of both worlds. Y'arrrr me mateys.

Well I got all of CS5 for free anyway so I don't have to care. :D

ALSO if you try to extend this argument to Adobe Media Encoder then you are ♥♥♥♥ wrong, I have never found any free solution that wasn't balls to the wall retarded.

I have no idea what that is but ffmpeg is a damn cool tool and everyone should learn how to use it.

I've never found an adequate replacement for Flash but there's nothing else by Adobe I'd ever need to use that doesn't have a free alternative that's just as good.

So uh, how did you guys get CS5 for free? I would really love to get my hands on After Effects.

Also Flash. I don't think there ever will be a program as good for animating.
Internet contest.

Hey guys.

Auto-aiming sniper rifle.

But it's less auto-aim, more taking the math out of the shot.

DON'T SHOOT THE ♥♥♥♥ ANIMAL, KILL A PERSON, HUMANS ARE EVIL AND SHOULD DIE
Anyways, that rifle is awesome. Although, it might be very glitch-y during a war. But I guess this is for the S.A.S, so it's okay.
It should be awesome to cover your friends while they stealthily storm a base.

They aren't going to be using this for anything they don't already do though
It just makes it very slightly easier

I'm surprised it hasn't been done before, to be honest. The tech's been here for forever.

Heh, being as how Shook mentioned the use of MSPaint I just found this tutorialon Tumblr
Lots of neat tips and tricks for Windows 7 paint, and a couple for XP paint, I literally had no idea about any of them until I saw the post

Hot damn, them's some nice tips! The only one i actually knew about was to hold down shift while drawing objects to make them fit in a square (also the brushes not giving clean edges, but those are a given), the rest were like yo wut? I didn't know Paint had that many hidden functions. :U

A good example showcasing both the stamp and stream techniques: