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.