It's hard to take them seriously when they imply the mess that threads are is somehow acceptable and necessary, but nicer, less error prone and simpler fork isn't. Threads are a nasty hack and a liability for the modern programmer to use. And systems researchers really should acknowledge that their continued existence as first class OS primitives is holding back systems research much more, than fork. I guess they are looking to spread FUD and justify the mess that Windows got itself into, not doing actual research.
Aliasable, mutable memory (ie race conditions) is evil, and threads perfuse the entire programming environment with it. This is a dirty implementation detail that operating system kernels have to deal with, and we should be burying it in the same hole as memory swapping and TCP retransmits, not making it a fundamental hazard every application developer has to worry about.
