Heyyo,
Tyler, you're quite paranoid with pirating... did you have a bad pirating experience? and are suffering withdrawl?
I for one know that p2p can be good, or bad. good, some indie bands use it to distribute demo's of their cds like a few songs or so. Bad, as p2p's become popular, riaa gets interested, hackers put viruses on files, or ad companies create installers that install rediculous amounts of spam on your computer. It's hit-or-miss big time at this point.
Now, lol, I've never heard of a copied os cd with bad files, unless you probably have a bad internet connection that craps out on ya when downloading.
Aright.. let's settle how m$'s works for pirating. There's 2 ways they handle this: licence checks, and coprorate takedowns.
Licences checks, obivously by name isin't as painful (especially physically, lol) on you as corporate takedowns. This is their suttle way of handling pirating for people with illegal copies of windows OS. Just a simple "oops! bad copy, no updates for you. Go pay me now."
And then, there's the corporate takedowns. If you're illegally trafficing huge amounts of windows OS, m$ will get you. They will take you down. I remember that one dude that ran a whole warez trafficing ring from his momma's basement, and the police busted in, took him down, hard. and cordoned off the house, took photos, the media did too. the whole shabang. He was sued like... half a million or more I think since he's been doing it for years. Needless to say, that would suck, harshly.
Now, the story earlier for that government? I don't doupt it. It's a kind approach, definately the lawyers planned that one out to keep foreign relations healthy and help promote windows OS as a nice one.
If the price were lower? I'm sure more people would be more inclined to buying it.. espeically the office suite.. you see the price tag on 2003!? like $300 cad? like a personal user would get it.
I'm sure if longhorn legal lincences sold online for under $110 cad I'd get one gladly.. but from what I'm betting.... yeah.
m$ should learn to be nicer to the public that made them so rich. Ya know? like a thank you, enjoy longhorn at a very satisfying price. But odds are... they want profits.. oh they'll want profits. big ass price-tag on this one. big.