HeyBub said:
I can.
It discourages and prevents theft. That keeps the price down for all of us.
By insisting on a genuine MS product, the chances of imbedded nastiness is
eliminated. Some of this imbedded malware can hurt millions - such as
trojans that propagate spam.
I'm an end-user. I'm also a MS stockholder. Keeping dividends up obviously
benefits me.
That's three.
As any statistician will write, WPA, upon which WGA depends, has a very
serious flaw. There are no unique identifiers associated with WPA such
that one can definitively prove that a product being activated is truly
genuine or not. For all of the MS products that require WPA, perhaps a
few dozen or so have the same identifier in the WPA database in any given
120-day period and this generates the false-positive reports. It would
have been better to have MS assign unique activation numbers to each
legitimate product key issued and use this method to police illegitimate
activity. And don't tell me what MS's own SQL or even its Office Access
applications cannot accomplish this job. I have nothing against product
registration and activation, simultaneously. It also legitimizes the
user for support and this covers the budgetary considerations for lower
pricing...something which a haphazard WPA/WGA/WGA(N) system cannot do.
Nor does WGA eliminate the potential of malware infestation since it
may well have discouraged the offended, legitimate users from going
to the Windows Update site, even when critical updates are supposed
to be downloaded without harassment. My business has picked up due to
increased calls to do more offline updates than the user doing it by
themselves. (DST-patching, for example, has been good to me.)
Finally, I'd keep a close eye on MS stock. I'd sell mine if it were not
for the capital gains tax that I would have to pay in liquidating. And
true, dividends might not last forever.
