Okay, we suspected that Bill Gates was high on something when he claimed last week that spam would be completely eradicated by 2006, but now we're 100% certain that the World's Richest Man is completely wasted whenever he gets up on stage to address the public. You all know about that MyDoom worm that's unleashing a world of hurt on the world's email inboxes, right? Heck, a lot of you probably spent a good portion of yesterday shoveling infected attachment-laden messages into your trash by the dozen. Now, given that this latest Windows virusy thing was raging in full force yesterday in what was arguably the most visible embarrassment of Microsoft's "Trustworthy Computing" initiative since Blaster and its variants, wouldn't Billy-Boy have to have been stoned to get up and talk about how Windows is so much more secure than anything else out there?

See, faithful viewer Tony Martie directed us to a CNET article which reports that, even as MyDoom raged around him, Gates actually said that "a high-volume system like (Windows) that has been thoroughly tested will be far the most secure." Now, technically, we suppose that's true, as long as he was indeed talking about a "system like Windows" that "has been thoroughly tested," as opposed to Windows itself, which was evidently tested by one intern who confirmed that it can, in fact, run Minesweeper fully half the time without being infected by more than three new viruses. Somehow, though, we doubt that's what Bill meant.

See, get this: he also went invoking that old "security through obscurity" malarkey, implying that competing operating systems like Linux and our own beloved Mac OS X (you know, the ones that weren't infected by MyDoom yesterday and emailing copies of the worm to everyone else on the planet) are somehow less secure than Windows, because "to say a system is secure because no one is attacking it is very dangerous." Okay, first of all, it's been shown time and time again that Mac OS X is more secure than Windows because it ships with fewer network services running, it requires administrator passwords to mess with system files, etc., so on the one hand, from a purely technical standpoint, he's just flat-out wrong.

Secondly, even if "security through obscurity" doesn't mean an operating system can't be violated, isn't it still nice knowing that people are less likely to try? Bill can prattle on all he wants about false senses of security because no one is attacking Mac OS X (in between mentioning that his hands are huge, he can hear colors buzzing through the air, and every atom in his thumbnail is actually a whole tiny universe and our entire universe is just an atom in the thumbnail of some really big dude), but what exactly is wrong with a situationally-reduced risk? If you live in a quiet suburb with a really low crime rate, you're no less impervious to bullets, but does that mean you might as well move to the inner city and take long walks alone at night through dark alleyways while waving a wad of twenties up over your head? (We'd challenge Bill to prove his beliefs by packing up his family and moving to Crack City, but he's probably stoned enough to take us up on it, and we've got no quarrel with his kids.)

Ah, whatever. Seriously, how can you have a reasonable argument with a guy who's so baked he actually said out loud that "hackers are good for maturation" of Windows, because they prompt Microsoft to fix problems that shouldn't have been there in the first place? The customers must love hearing that; we bet all over the world IT managers are saying, "well, my company has lost millions in productivity due to virus infections over the past year or so, but hey, as long as they're good for Microsoft." Suppose Bill will remember any of this after he sleeps it off?

By the way, someone grab his car keys-- we may not like the guy, but we still don't want him plowing his Gatesmobile into a heavily-occupied schoolyard because he thought he saw a Rainbow Monster talking to a giant walking fish.

Let us set one thing straight: the odor emanating from Bill Gates in London as he publicly casts wildly unsupported (and unsupportable) aspersions on the security in Mac OS X is not fear. Bill isn't scared of Mac OS X, because Microsoft is way too huge an entity to be seriously threatened by, well, anything at this point, so what you're smelling off of Bill is presumably whatever substance he ingests that lets him stand up in front of a crowd and tell them that Windows is so much more secure than Mac OS X or Linux even as people in his audience are scrambling from the room to answer frantic emergency pages about havoc caused by the MyDoom worm. (We don't know what that substance is, but it smells a little like Otto's jacket.)

No, the piquant stench of raw, unadulterated fear is instead wafting this way from a city about 600ish miles to London's south-southeast, so aim your Smelloscopes at Cannes, France-- and please, no tired jokes about French cowardice; that's so 2003. And none of those "stinky French" gags either! After all, the source of this particular odor isn't even native to the area: it's Napster CEO and (apparently) U.S. citizen Chris Gorog. According to a Macworld UK article brought to our attention by faithful viewer Eric Beyer, Gorog in is Cannes at the Midem international music fair and he actually "warned music delegates... to 'stay off the Apple platform.'" Ohhhh, so that's what fear smells like!

See, Gorog's desperate gambit is to try to persuade music executives to "make their record catalogs available on Napster rather than Apple" by affirming that Napster's Windows Media format "is compatible with two-thirds of all the mobile music devices currently available." Oh, sure, that's a valid argument. Yeah, great, WMA is compatible with two-thirds of the players on the market-- just not the one single player that everyone's actually buying and using. Is Gorog hoping that these music execs don't realize that the iPod is still tops in unit sales? Trust us, they know-- heck, most of them probably have iPods. Given the level of devotion out there, we bet at least one or two of those music execs have married their 'Pods by now.

And even supposing that a music publisher agrees with Gorog and decides that licensing its catalog to Napster for sale in the WMA format is a smart business move, what's preventing the same publisher from also licensing the same music to Apple so it'll work on the iPod? This isn't an "either-or" situation; if it were, all of the other music services here in the U.S. would be in serious trouble (well, okay, more serious trouble), because Apple had those original 200,000 songs first. Napster's virtual shelves would be mighty empty if the company couldn't license music that Apple already sells. "Welcome to the new Napster: twelve songs and counting!" So waving WMA around as a reason to "steer clear of Apple" doesn't even make sense.

Talk about your Hail Mary plays, there; something tells us that Napster isn't selling nearly as many songs as it had hoped. Heck, even Gorog's publicity photo betrays a high level of anxiety-- is that a sheen of terror sweat we see? No wonder we can smell the fear from 3,800 miles away. By the way, who knew that fear smells like sardines and Pine-Sol?

Okay, we're going to keep this short, because frankly, we're feeling a little too queasy to continue for much longer. What was the one thing at the top of your Christmas list that you almost certainly didn't get? A brand spankin' new dual-processor Power Mac G5, right? Two PowerPCs and nine fans humming away beneath a sexy layer of perforated aluminum: one of the fastest personal computers money can buy, and it's a Mac, to boot. Of course, no one actually bought it for you because it costs some serious moolah, but you added it to your Wish List anyway, because dreams are free.

But what if someone actually had gotten you a dual-processor Power Mac for Christmas? You'd be pretty stoked, right? Well, as incomprehensible as it sounds, there really are people who were lucky enough to receive one last month, but not all of them were grateful. Faithful viewer Devin Chalmers forwarded us the most blasphemous thing we've encountered in our short lives: a fella named Andy is blessed with the Best Parents Ever, who did indeed give him a G5 for Christmas, but-- and we realize this is the most insane thing you'll ever hear-- he "wanted a Dell." (Brain... hurts...) Says Andy, "I thought about selling it, but my parents would be upset with me. After all, this was a very expensive gift and it meant a lot to them to give to me." Awwww... isn't that sweet?

So instead of upsetting his parents by selling it, he just ripped out its guts and hacked a chunk out of the back of its aluminum case.

(Pause for screams)

Then Andy wedged in an Athlon motherboard, installed neon lamps ("It emits a green glow from the front and back," he says-- oh, joy!), and now he's got a generic Wintel in a G5 enclosure. That glows green. Yes, Virginia, there is a special place in hell for people who commit such atrocities, and when Andy passes on, it'll be occupied by him, Attila the Hun, and whoever greenlit the NBC remake of Coupling. For now, though, he says, "I have to say that I'm happy-- I can keep on using XP." Oh, the humanity. Or lack thereof.

Incidentally, he might be sent to that particular circle of hell by his own parents if they aren't as clueless as he thinks they are: "It's a good thing my parents don't know anything about computers, because I'm sure they would be really angry if they knew what I did." Gee, ya think?