And speaking of the ILOVEYOU virus, given the sheer number of you who wrote in about it, we have to assume you've heard what our old friend Bill Gates said in this week's issue of Time Magazine, right? Faithful viewer Noah Daniels was the first to tip us off to Bill's latest... well, we're not quite sure how to describe it. If he were any other guy, we'd probably classify it as a "psychotic rant," but he's the richest man in the world (or thereabouts), so we believe the proper term to use is "eccentric viewpoint." Hey, this is America; having mountains of cash can offset any number of personal quirks and foibles, insanity being the least of them.

Anyway, as you pore through Bill's plea to avoid a Microsoft breakup, you may notice a few interesting concepts. For example, he claims that his company is working on a tablet PC, but "under the government's plan, ... Microsoft's tablet PC simply won't happen." Why? Because a breakup would put Microsoft's operating system developers in one company, and its applications developers in another. As we all know, it's impossible for a company to write applications unless it's also developing the operating system on which it's running, which is why the only applications software available for Windows is all written by Microsoft. Similarly, creating hardware that works with a particular operating system requires that the OS be developed alongside the hardware, which is why every Windows PC sold today is manufactured by Microsoft itself. It all makes sense, right? (If you ever find yourself face-to-face with Bill and he starts going on about this, don't make any sudden movements; just smile, nod, and back away slowly.)

But the really goofy stuff comes towards the end, when Bill predicts what The Register calls a "Love Bug apocalypse" if Microsoft is broken up. Bear with us for a second, here: his argument is that the best defense against virus writers is a "continually evolving" operating system; if Microsoft is broken up, there will be less "innovation" in the OS, and therefore virus authors like the ones who gave us ILOVEYOU will have a field day learning and exploiting the static holes in the system. We can only assume that Bill wrote this piece via voice dictation software, because it's tough to type while you're in a straitjacket and pumped full of Thorazine. (Believe us, we know.)

Meanwhile, conspiracy-minded folks realize there's more to this article than meets the eye. ILOVEYOU only hit, when, last Thursday? And mere days later, Bill's got an impeccably well-timed (if slightly foaming-at-the-mouth) article playing on people's Love Bug fears, saying that this sort of thing is exactly what we all can look forward to if Microsoft is split in two. Hmmm... has anyone checked Bill's bank records for large sums of money wired to the Phillipines in the last few months? Because the timing of this whole thing has us wondering whether Bill's talk of a viral armageddon is a prediction-- or a threat. How many virus writers do you suppose you could keep on retainer for fifty billion dollars?