Oh, the moral dilemma! Thanks to this news lull, the Apple world remains about as boring as your average Saturday morning farm report to a kid waiting for the cartoons to start. So, given the dearth of entertaining and dramatic plot twists that typically issue forth from Cupertino, are we, your friendly neighborhood AtAT staff, shameless enough to stoop so low as to boost our sagging ratings with cheap, off-topic jokes about Bill Gates and Viagra? Let us ponder that one good and hard for about three seconds... and answer with a resounding "you're darn skippy we are!" Hey, we gotta eat, right?

See, faithful viewer Victor Forberger passed along an Associated Press article about how Pfizer, the anti-impotence drug's manufacturer, recently lost a case in the U.K. when a British court ruled that one of the company's patents on Viagra is "invalid." (Insert lame joke about the courts being rather hard on Pfizer.) That fact in and of itself isn't particularly enthralling unless you have a vested interest in competing firms in Britain being able to make and sell alternatives to Pfizer's "Little Blue Pill That Makes Things Bigger™." What is rather interesting is that one of those competing firms is Lilly Icos, who in fact filed the suit challenging Pfizer's patent, claiming that "Pfizer's monopoly right was stifling the development of competitive products." Guess who's a big investor in Lilly Icos? Yup, none other than Big Rich Guy Bill Gates. Bill is indeed investing in the development of Viagra alternatives. (Insert lame joke about "Microsoft" here-- and throw in a crude one about a frustrated Melinda while you're at it.)

Now, all sniggering about Bill's, er, "condition" aside, even those of you too mature to enjoy the Viagra humor inherent in the situation must surely appreciate the irony of a Gates-sponsored lawsuit targeting another company for "stifling the development of competitive products," right? Evidently the suppression of competition in the computer software industry is good, clean, all-American fun, but forward progress in the pharmaceutical war against erectile dysfunction must be preserved at all costs. Whatever. In any case, we applaud Mr. Gates for investing in the future (self-serving though his motives may be), and wonder whether Steve Jobs is doing his part to break Pfizer's chokehold on what is surely a real growth market.