Just by the way, "virii" is a Latin word - the nominative plural of "virus." However, it can be found in two forms "virii" or "viri" with the two i's combined.
I share many of your fears but not your complete lack of hope. You are right on about the terrible consequences of a possible war with Iran. Such would most definitely result in the collapse of US global hegemony and domestic security.
These problems both domestic and foreign, stem from our current neo-conservative, ultra-nationalist world view (at least among our elected representatives, both Dem. and Rep., legislative and executive). I would point out that we put too much emphasis on the platitude "democracy" and not on freedoms (speech/expression, religion, from want) and rule of law. Autocracies and constitutional monarchies can sometimes provide these freedoms better than democracies (e.g. Wiemar Germany, the French Revolution, the current Iraqi "democracy"). Viewed in these terms, the global condition is nowhere nearly as dire as we now all think: the massive increase in quality of life in China, Russia, and many parts of the Middle East, though their regimes are not as "democratic" as the West.
Further establishing "democracies" or other governments that provide the freedoms and rule of law does not ensure that either the government or the people governed will agree with all US policy, contrary to the neo-conservative understanding that all "democracies" toe the US policy line. US citizens and their elected representatives are no exception with respect to the policy of the executive branch. And understanding that this disagreement is natural and may be completely innocent (i.e. one need not be an Islamic Fundamentalist to disagree with the government but could have a conflict of interest that is economic or social) will lead to less hard-line, no-holds-barred domestic and foreign policy.
When we think of things practically and take into account the other side's point of view, we begin to realize the benefit of more restrained policy both to ourselves and others. The more we can get others to think rationally, the more who will buy into it, including our own government and those of the Arab nations we are currently needlessly threatening (i.e. not all Arab nations hated the US before the Iraq, and still many depend on us to maintain a world order that makes them wealthy). We need fear mongering among neither the conservatives (i.e. "The whole united Muslim world wants to destroy the West") nor the liberals (i.e. "Put on your tin foil hat"), because both are equally hyperbolic and lead to dangerously extreme, reactionary behavior. I shared both your fear of Muslim reprisal and of Right Wing conspiracy. However, a careful, rational examination shows that the Muslim world is as fragmented and complex as the West, it has age old feuds and religious scisms as does the West (e.g. Al Qaeda/the Taliban and Iran almost went to war in the late 90s!). Further, right wing neo-conservative philosophy is less about conspiracy and more about a knee-jerk mass hysteria, ultra-nationalism, and near infinite greed. Simple, deliberate changes could begin to heal the rifts that we currently think are beyond repair. Just look at examples in history: France and England, the US and China.
I just recently read Ethical Realism: A Vision for America's Role in the World by John Hulsman and Anatlo Lieven (ISBN: 0375424458), and most of my opinions above are influenced by an Ethical Realist worldview. Though the book is more focused on foreign policy, its tenets of Ethical Realism could easily be applied to domestic policy as well. It was a fascinating read, and it illustrates the dangers of our current ultra-nationalist/fascist neo-conservative course, but also outlines some relatively sensible changes we could make to salvage both our foreign relations and our affairs at home.
Though I will never do it, I think it would be really cool to run a botnet. Seriously, a well-run botnet could serve as a pretty powerful distributed computing platform (think Google or Amazon but for free!).
Windows poor security provides the best opportunity for that.
P.S. Before the FBI comes knocking at my door, this post was offered mostly in jest, as I am intrigued by the academic aspects of distributed computing, and using it as a joke on script kiddies.
Though I will never do it, I think it would be really cool to run a botnet. Seriously, a well-run botnet could serve as a pretty powerful distributed-computing platform.
Windows poor security provides the best opportunity for that.
I do not quite understand Microsoft's strategy here, for many reasons, which I'll try to enumerate logically. I am not trying to troll. I am trying to be objective, and when I do criticize Microsoft I do so purely academically, so please do not turn this into a flame war.
Desktop market share: Microsoft has >90% of the desktop market, a number that I would guess might be higher in the business community (i.e. their strangle-hold on commodity computing). I really cannot imagine this slipping much more than 5% due to various factors: the high cost and lack of hardware options with Apple, the ease of use problems with Linux and Unix variants, the legacy DOS/Win9*/XP application base, employee familiarity with Windows, etc. As much as many may complain about Vista's shortcomings, there are really no suitable alternatives. Though many servers may be switching to Linux, I do not think that this will affect the desktop market, especially since there are many solutions for making Linux servers work with Windows desktops. Microsoft's bread and butter is not threatened, why the hard sell for a much smaller market?
Weak server solutions: I aim for objectivity here, so please do not misinterpret me as a troll. Microsoft offers weak server products. Some of this may be attributed to its rebuffing of existing standards implementing all their server solutions with their closed, proprietary protocols (e.g. URIs vs. CIFS URIs, TCP/IP vs. NetBEUI, DNS vs WINS, Back slash vs. Forward slash, etc.). Not only does this ensure that their solutions will not work with those provided by any other vendor (which is a legitimate problem when one wants a service that Microsoft does not offer) but leads to new buggy code/half-baked standards/security holes as they reinvent the wheel.
Further, the main buyers and users in this segment are not average users who need to use computers for nothing more than word processing, email, and web. They are power users who are well aware of the strengths and limitations provided by the different systems. They know first hand the problems of using Microsoft server solutions.
If they really want to capture this smaller market (again, I am not sure why they would except for the pursuit of total monopoly), it seems that they need more than a new sell technique. Instead, they should develop their new programs and services to inter-operate with existing standards and systems. As they develop server solutions for power users, they'll win over the server crowd with their commitment to excellent products, not some new half-hearted add campaign, which many (such as the/. crowd) will see through.
Virulently pro-OSS/anti-MSFT market: This is a different aspect of the previous point. Whereas Microsoft has objectively weak server solutions, there is a rather subjective opposition to Microsoft as a "Big, Evil Corporation" (TM). I am not commenting on whether this feeling may be right/wrong, but it is something they will to overcome (and I would argue with more than a selling campaign). Some moves of good faith (e.g. less restrictive computing, less aggressive anti-OSS talk from the CEO, etc.), to which Microsoft seems firmly opposed, could help "win the hearts and minds" of the server crowd much better than strongly stereotyped sell tactics for the Linux crowd.
I know I do not have all the answers, but I think that Microsoft is getting everything wrong here. It seems that capturing the server market has a very small return when compared to the desktop market. Additionally, the cost of "doing it right" with inter-operability-centered design of new products while maintaining backwards compatibility would greatly reduce margin (e.g. look what happened with all the grand ideas of Vista). Nevertheless, if Microsoft is determined to win this market, they need to do so with more steps of good faith and less aggressive talk about intellectual property (happy, willing customers are
What your campus IT dept. received was the same email/letter that any ISP receives about a DMCA infringement (do a WHOIS about any domain, and you'll find the listing for abuse, usually abuse@domain.tld, where such requests can be sent). The correspondence, from a watch dog group hired by the professional association (RIAA, MPAA, ESA, etc.), documents where and how they caught you pirating their copyrighted material (e.g. a log of you contributing to a torrent, or some files you were sharing on a DC++ server). It also serves as a cease and desist for the ISP. Your college/university may, as mine does, take it upon itself to enforce certain regulations for these offenses (e.g. my university will take disciplinary action on the second such infringement).
However, the fact that the university (or even your ISP) has taken some sort of internal action does not mean that the issue has been resolved with the professional organization. This organization can, and increasingly more often does, still subpoena the ISP for the personal information of the owner of the infringing computer/account. While you will be informed quite shortly about the DMCA abuse letter (within days), the subpoena can come much later (on the order of months).
Several years ago (about 3) I was caught for pirated material by the ESA. Luckily, they did nothing more than send the DMCA email. I've wisened up, and am much more careful about where/what I share. However, many other students have not. In the recent years over 100 students' identities have been subpoenaed, several months after receiving DMCA infringement notices about their individual abuses.
Language extensions for threading would be great, and I'm sure somebody is working on it. But until that magical threading language (maybe c++1x) comes along the current ones work just fine. Which "current ones"? Do POSIX threads work on Microsoft Windows?
The real application domain of multi-threading and data-level parallelism is stuff that one would never run on a Windows client: web servers, databases, scientific computing, ray tracing, etc. The improvement that these new paradigms offer is mostly in terms of throughput, not response time.
I would also add that to program on many of the new multi-core architectures, a programmer will want to be able to specify what runs on which core. Take for example the cell processor, where each SPE has only a 256KB local store with limited branch prediction. A miss in the store or a mispredicted branch would be catastrophic for performance. Instead, the programmer writes small specialized programs with that have minimal branching. To construct larger systems, programs on adjacent (note: adjacency is key!) SPEs pass their output down an assembly line of sorts, each adding a little bit of work to the output. To effectively utilize this system, a programmer will want very tight control over the assignment of threads to SPEs.
Even though modern desktops running XP/Vista are running multi-processor machines(Core 2s and 64 X2s), these are still quite far from state of the art in term of exploiting multi-threading. If you want to see what it's really about, look at the Sun T1: 8 cores, 4 physical threads per core.
If you are looking to speed up single-threaded applications (i.e. most of the stuff that consumers use) you should be looking to fight the "Memory Wall." Most of todays computers (even with the newly reduced pipelines) still spend most of their time stalling on cache misses (it's on the order of 10^2 cycles to retrieve from RAM). Looking for ways to maximize cache locality/residence would be much more fruitful in terms of turn around time, though again this tends to be something which must be done explicitly and cannot be abstracted behind a programming language.
Clippy was a good bowler, and a good man. He was one of us. He was a man who loved the outdoors... and bowling, and as a surfer he explored the beaches of Southern California, from La Jolla to Leo Carrillo and... up to... Pismo. He died, like so many young men of his generation, he died before his time. In your wisdom, Lord, you took him, as you took so many bright flowering young men at Khe Sanh, at Langdok, at Hill 364. These young men gave their lives. And so would Clippy. Donny, who loved bowling. And so, Stupid Microsoft Clippy, in accordance with what we think your dying wishes might well have been, we commit your final mortal remains to the bosom of the Pacific Ocean, which you loved so well. Good night, sweet prince.
Anyone with half a brain (which apparently does not include the Boston PD) would have immediately known that those objects were not bombs.
I don't think you listened to Ignignokt the first time: We are the Mooninites and our culture is advanced beyond all that you can possibly comprehend with 100% of your brain.
I saw this as I was coming into work this afternoon on our big screen (thank god for the military having most of their televisions permanently tuned to FOX NEWS for the "situational awareness" it provides...) and my jaw just dropped. It's really hitting me lately how much our country is changing, and there is very little that individuals can do about it. I feel like standing on top of a soap box and yelling at people till i'm blue in the face, but I know that's fruitless.
Here's something that you. Don't work for the military/defense department that is ruining the world. If no one worked for them, they wouldn't be able to do anything.
When you're working with stuff that kills other people, it's not "just a job."
It would be really great if the poster either under the "Anonymous Coward" post or by letting the editors update the main post told us:
1) What company he/she was joining?
2) What he/she will do/is doing/has done about the situation.
Thanks!
Interestingly enough, it was a Republican, Sen Specter, that challenged him on this. As the article comntinues "Gonzales's remark left Specter, the committee's ranking Republican, stammering."
So, if both parties don't want this, let's hope this guy gets canned, quickly.
The American political parties are not monolithic; they are extremely fragmented. Just watch back-stabbing that happens within both parties during the primaries. Then the primaries are won, and they come together for the post-convention election push.
Not all Republicans are Neo-Cons. As a matter of fact many old-school, classical, conservative Republicans (e.g. Trent Lott, who was ousted by Bush, Cheney, and Co. as Senate Majority Leader in 2002 and has now won back the position [well, thankfully it's Minority leader now] in the backlash of the 2006 elections) are strongly opposed to the Neo-Conservative agenda.
We are just a little confused by the idea of Republican infighting, because we have grown accustomed to the 2001-2005 GOP that was ruled with an iron fist by the Neo-Cons (DeLay, Cheney, Frist, etc.). The rank and file obeyed orders because they stood to gain much from riding Bush's Neo-Con coat tails (anyone remember the soft shoe McCain and Giuliani did for Bush during the 2004 elections?).
Now that the Neo-Con agenda is a bust, classical conservatives, like Specter and McCain, have elections to worry about winning for themselves. So just as blindly supporting Bush was the popular thing during 2001-2005, attacking him is just as popular in 2006-2007. They'll do what's popular, because they are elected by a popular vote.
Not to mention, the 20% must be either really stupid (I wonder if my Haxxored Windows copy will validate? Gee, let's try!) or, more likely, have misconfigured Windows systems or bugs in WGA that report them as invalid when they probably own a legitimate license.
Great marketing strategy though: punish your legit user-base as the pirates work around your system. Can't wait to see how Vista improves things. I'm excited to see what "advantage" I'm "genuinely" going to get.
Obviously, the brainchildren over at Microsoft never took a security course during their expensive college educations. The first thing any such course would have told them is that real enemies/threats go around security (in this case WGA) not through it. Anyone who is serious about pirating MS software will change his/her ways to not be affected by WGA. This will, however, catch some of the less tech-savvy pirates, those who, say, asked their geek friend to grab them a copy of Windows. However, I do genuinely (pun intended) believe that most of the 22% are false positives, as I highly questions the means of determining that a system is genuine (e.g. if they're looking at the hardware in a machine, that should be allowed to change without compromising the system's legitimacy).
I share your concerns, though. Microsoft is gonna wisen up with Vista, and will give users no choice but to go through WGA in order to use the system and will eventually shutdown/cripple the system if it is never validated. By then Microsoft needs to have any false positive cases COMPLETELY worked out, or customers will have their legitimate Vista copies locking down their personal computers. That would/will be a nightmare.
Slashdot Mirror
Better yet do you know that you're compiler isn't hardcoded to put backdoors in programs?
That must break poor PPK's heart.
Just by the way, "virii" is a Latin word - the nominative plural of "virus." However, it can be found in two forms "virii" or "viri" with the two i's combined.
That is all.
I share many of your fears but not your complete lack of hope. You are right on about the terrible consequences of a possible war with Iran. Such would most definitely result in the collapse of US global hegemony and domestic security.
These problems both domestic and foreign, stem from our current neo-conservative, ultra-nationalist world view (at least among our elected representatives, both Dem. and Rep., legislative and executive). I would point out that we put too much emphasis on the platitude "democracy" and not on freedoms (speech/expression, religion, from want) and rule of law. Autocracies and constitutional monarchies can sometimes provide these freedoms better than democracies (e.g. Wiemar Germany, the French Revolution, the current Iraqi "democracy"). Viewed in these terms, the global condition is nowhere nearly as dire as we now all think: the massive increase in quality of life in China, Russia, and many parts of the Middle East, though their regimes are not as "democratic" as the West.
Further establishing "democracies" or other governments that provide the freedoms and rule of law does not ensure that either the government or the people governed will agree with all US policy, contrary to the neo-conservative understanding that all "democracies" toe the US policy line. US citizens and their elected representatives are no exception with respect to the policy of the executive branch. And understanding that this disagreement is natural and may be completely innocent (i.e. one need not be an Islamic Fundamentalist to disagree with the government but could have a conflict of interest that is economic or social) will lead to less hard-line, no-holds-barred domestic and foreign policy.
When we think of things practically and take into account the other side's point of view, we begin to realize the benefit of more restrained policy both to ourselves and others. The more we can get others to think rationally, the more who will buy into it, including our own government and those of the Arab nations we are currently needlessly threatening (i.e. not all Arab nations hated the US before the Iraq, and still many depend on us to maintain a world order that makes them wealthy). We need fear mongering among neither the conservatives (i.e. "The whole united Muslim world wants to destroy the West") nor the liberals (i.e. "Put on your tin foil hat"), because both are equally hyperbolic and lead to dangerously extreme, reactionary behavior. I shared both your fear of Muslim reprisal and of Right Wing conspiracy. However, a careful, rational examination shows that the Muslim world is as fragmented and complex as the West, it has age old feuds and religious scisms as does the West (e.g. Al Qaeda/the Taliban and Iran almost went to war in the late 90s!). Further, right wing neo-conservative philosophy is less about conspiracy and more about a knee-jerk mass hysteria, ultra-nationalism, and near infinite greed. Simple, deliberate changes could begin to heal the rifts that we currently think are beyond repair. Just look at examples in history: France and England, the US and China.
I just recently read Ethical Realism: A Vision for America's Role in the World by John Hulsman and Anatlo Lieven (ISBN: 0375424458), and most of my opinions above are influenced by an Ethical Realist worldview. Though the book is more focused on foreign policy, its tenets of Ethical Realism could easily be applied to domestic policy as well. It was a fascinating read, and it illustrates the dangers of our current ultra-nationalist/fascist neo-conservative course, but also outlines some relatively sensible changes we could make to salvage both our foreign relations and our affairs at home.
And there ain't no doubt I love this land. God bless the USAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!</lee-greenwood>
Though I will never do it, I think it would be really cool to run a botnet. Seriously, a well-run botnet could serve as a pretty powerful distributed computing platform (think Google or Amazon but for free!).
Windows poor security provides the best opportunity for that.
P.S. Before the FBI comes knocking at my door, this post was offered mostly in jest, as I am intrigued by the academic aspects of distributed computing, and using it as a joke on script kiddies.
Though I will never do it, I think it would be really cool to run a botnet. Seriously, a well-run botnet could serve as a pretty powerful distributed-computing platform.
Windows poor security provides the best opportunity for that.
I do not quite understand Microsoft's strategy here, for many reasons, which I'll try to enumerate logically. I am not trying to troll. I am trying to be objective, and when I do criticize Microsoft I do so purely academically, so please do not turn this into a flame war.
Further, the main buyers and users in this segment are not average users who need to use computers for nothing more than word processing, email, and web. They are power users who are well aware of the strengths and limitations provided by the different systems. They know first hand the problems of using Microsoft server solutions.
If they really want to capture this smaller market (again, I am not sure why they would except for the pursuit of total monopoly), it seems that they need more than a new sell technique. Instead, they should develop their new programs and services to inter-operate with existing standards and systems. As they develop server solutions for power users, they'll win over the server crowd with their commitment to excellent products, not some new half-hearted add campaign, which many (such as the
I know I do not have all the answers, but I think that Microsoft is getting everything wrong here. It seems that capturing the server market has a very small return when compared to the desktop market. Additionally, the cost of "doing it right" with inter-operability-centered design of new products while maintaining backwards compatibility would greatly reduce margin (e.g. look what happened with all the grand ideas of Vista). Nevertheless, if Microsoft is determined to win this market, they need to do so with more steps of good faith and less aggressive talk about intellectual property (happy, willing customers are
Read the subject.
You're not out of the woods just yet, buster.
What your campus IT dept. received was the same email/letter that any ISP receives about a DMCA infringement (do a WHOIS about any domain, and you'll find the listing for abuse, usually abuse@domain.tld, where such requests can be sent). The correspondence, from a watch dog group hired by the professional association (RIAA, MPAA, ESA, etc.), documents where and how they caught you pirating their copyrighted material (e.g. a log of you contributing to a torrent, or some files you were sharing on a DC++ server). It also serves as a cease and desist for the ISP. Your college/university may, as mine does, take it upon itself to enforce certain regulations for these offenses (e.g. my university will take disciplinary action on the second such infringement).
However, the fact that the university (or even your ISP) has taken some sort of internal action does not mean that the issue has been resolved with the professional organization. This organization can, and increasingly more often does, still subpoena the ISP for the personal information of the owner of the infringing computer/account. While you will be informed quite shortly about the DMCA abuse letter (within days), the subpoena can come much later (on the order of months).
Several years ago (about 3) I was caught for pirated material by the ESA. Luckily, they did nothing more than send the DMCA email. I've wisened up, and am much more careful about where/what I share. However, many other students have not. In the recent years over 100 students' identities have been subpoenaed, several months after receiving DMCA infringement notices about their individual abuses.
I think you're forgetting that faith is a fact.
Am I the only one who remembers yesterday's "The Wii Is Over?" article?
Which is it, editors? Get your stories straight.
Ahem. I believe you meant to say "tubes," not "pipes."
Yeah, because NLP is a closed problem just like vision.
While you're at it, why don't you just power the thing with a perpetual motion machine.
The real application domain of multi-threading and data-level parallelism is stuff that one would never run on a Windows client: web servers, databases, scientific computing, ray tracing, etc. The improvement that these new paradigms offer is mostly in terms of throughput, not response time.
I would also add that to program on many of the new multi-core architectures, a programmer will want to be able to specify what runs on which core. Take for example the cell processor, where each SPE has only a 256KB local store with limited branch prediction. A miss in the store or a mispredicted branch would be catastrophic for performance. Instead, the programmer writes small specialized programs with that have minimal branching. To construct larger systems, programs on adjacent (note: adjacency is key!) SPEs pass their output down an assembly line of sorts, each adding a little bit of work to the output. To effectively utilize this system, a programmer will want very tight control over the assignment of threads to SPEs.
Even though modern desktops running XP/Vista are running multi-processor machines(Core 2s and 64 X2s), these are still quite far from state of the art in term of exploiting multi-threading. If you want to see what it's really about, look at the Sun T1: 8 cores, 4 physical threads per core.
If you are looking to speed up single-threaded applications (i.e. most of the stuff that consumers use) you should be looking to fight the "Memory Wall." Most of todays computers (even with the newly reduced pipelines) still spend most of their time stalling on cache misses (it's on the order of 10^2 cycles to retrieve from RAM). Looking for ways to maximize cache locality/residence would be much more fruitful in terms of turn around time, though again this tends to be something which must be done explicitly and cannot be abstracted behind a programming language.
Clippy was a good bowler, and a good man. He was one of us. He was a man who loved the outdoors... and bowling, and as a surfer he explored the beaches of Southern California, from La Jolla to Leo Carrillo and... up to... Pismo. He died, like so many young men of his generation, he died before his time. In your wisdom, Lord, you took him, as you took so many bright flowering young men at Khe Sanh, at Langdok, at Hill 364. These young men gave their lives. And so would Clippy. Donny, who loved bowling. And so, Stupid Microsoft Clippy, in accordance with what we think your dying wishes might well have been, we commit your final mortal remains to the bosom of the Pacific Ocean, which you loved so well. Good night, sweet prince.
On the moon innocent CEOs have their pants pulled down and they are spanked with moon rocks.
I don't think you listened to Ignignokt the first time: We are the Mooninites and our culture is advanced beyond all that you can possibly comprehend with 100% of your brain.
That's what I get for not previewing.
Here's something that you.Here's something that you can do.
I may get modded flame, but I don't care.
I saw this as I was coming into work this afternoon on our big screen (thank god for the military having most of their televisions permanently tuned to FOX NEWS for the "situational awareness" it provides...) and my jaw just dropped. It's really hitting me lately how much our country is changing, and there is very little that individuals can do about it. I feel like standing on top of a soap box and yelling at people till i'm blue in the face, but I know that's fruitless.Here's something that you. Don't work for the military/defense department that is ruining the world. If no one worked for them, they wouldn't be able to do anything.
When you're working with stuff that kills other people, it's not "just a job."
No one can defeat the quad-laser!
It would be really great if the poster either under the "Anonymous Coward" post or by letting the editors update the main post told us: 1) What company he/she was joining? 2) What he/she will do/is doing/has done about the situation. Thanks!
Actually, Franklin didn't say it. And the guy who most likely did say it, Richard Jackson, said it thus:
So, if both parties don't want this, let's hope this guy gets canned, quickly.
The American political parties are not monolithic; they are extremely fragmented. Just watch back-stabbing that happens within both parties during the primaries. Then the primaries are won, and they come together for the post-convention election push.
Not all Republicans are Neo-Cons. As a matter of fact many old-school, classical, conservative Republicans (e.g. Trent Lott, who was ousted by Bush, Cheney, and Co. as Senate Majority Leader in 2002 and has now won back the position [well, thankfully it's Minority leader now] in the backlash of the 2006 elections) are strongly opposed to the Neo-Conservative agenda.
We are just a little confused by the idea of Republican infighting, because we have grown accustomed to the 2001-2005 GOP that was ruled with an iron fist by the Neo-Cons (DeLay, Cheney, Frist, etc.). The rank and file obeyed orders because they stood to gain much from riding Bush's Neo-Con coat tails (anyone remember the soft shoe McCain and Giuliani did for Bush during the 2004 elections?).
Now that the Neo-Con agenda is a bust, classical conservatives, like Specter and McCain, have elections to worry about winning for themselves. So just as blindly supporting Bush was the popular thing during 2001-2005, attacking him is just as popular in 2006-2007. They'll do what's popular, because they are elected by a popular vote.
Great marketing strategy though: punish your legit user-base as the pirates work around your system. Can't wait to see how Vista improves things. I'm excited to see what "advantage" I'm "genuinely" going to get.
Obviously, the brainchildren over at Microsoft never took a security course during their expensive college educations. The first thing any such course would have told them is that real enemies/threats go around security (in this case WGA) not through it. Anyone who is serious about pirating MS software will change his/her ways to not be affected by WGA. This will, however, catch some of the less tech-savvy pirates, those who, say, asked their geek friend to grab them a copy of Windows. However, I do genuinely (pun intended) believe that most of the 22% are false positives, as I highly questions the means of determining that a system is genuine (e.g. if they're looking at the hardware in a machine, that should be allowed to change without compromising the system's legitimacy).
I share your concerns, though. Microsoft is gonna wisen up with Vista, and will give users no choice but to go through WGA in order to use the system and will eventually shutdown/cripple the system if it is never validated. By then Microsoft needs to have any false positive cases COMPLETELY worked out, or customers will have their legitimate Vista copies locking down their personal computers. That would/will be a nightmare.