Ahhh, polls! Nothing tells you more about what people are thinking than a nice, scientific, unbiased poll-- in theory, anyway. In AtAT's opinion, unbiased polls are sort of like leprechauns: few sober people actually claim to have seen one, but apparently some people still seem to think they exist. And the king of polls is the Gallup poll, long believed to be the finger on the pulse of the American public. At least, that's what we think that guy down at the bar told us, but he was slurring his words pretty badly, so we're not entirely sure.

Anyway, get this: according to an Associated Press article, "a new Gallup poll suggests that consumers side with [Microsoft] over the government, oppose a possible court-ordered breakup and respect the world's most famous billionaire more than ever." Gallup operatives called 1,011 adults at home and asked them various questions about the whole "Redmond Justice" thing. Reportedly 68% of those polled had "favorable" opinions of Gates, and two-thirds "saw Microsoft in a favorable light." When the data is confined only to the opinions of actual computer users, a whopping 78% saw Microsoft favorably. Given these numbers, we can only assume that Bill should be running for President right now, and the big issue in his platform should be a promise to replace the federal government with a new division of Microsoft.

That all sounded just a little fishy to us, so we decided to try our own unscientific "poll." An Alta Vista web search for the phrase "hate microsoft" yields 2,572 pages. Changing the search string to the more colorful "microsoft sucks" instead pulls up 5,979 pages. And on a more personal note, a search for "bill gates sucks" actually finds 4,454 distinct pages which use that exact phrase. By comparison, Alta Vista lists only 499 pages containing the phrase "clinton sucks", 102 pages with the phrase "bush sucks", and a scant 31 pages that use the phrase "hitler sucks"-- and Hitler's dead. (We think.) So we can only assume that Gallup called 1,011 of Mr. Gates' closest friends when compiling their data. Scientific, schmientific.