You know, at one point we concluded that Bill Gates had to have been stoned to the gills when he declared publicly that spam would be eliminated by January 24th of 2006, but having now heard how much unsolicited commercial email he receives himself, were not sure whether we're more convinced that he was on drugs, or less. Faithful viewer Iain was the first to send us a link to an article in The Guardian which reports that Steve "Fire BAAAAAD!" Ballmer told an audience in Singapore that "Bill receives 4 million pieces of email per day, most of it spam." Ow. Here we thought our couple-hundred-a-day spam intake was bad, but 4 million? That's almost enough to make us feel sorry for the guy-- until we remember that it's Bill Gates we're talking about, here, at which point we wish for 12 million instead.

So here's the thing about the "solving spam by January 2006" prediction: on the one hand, Bill comes off as even more mentally deficient than ever when you learn that he thinks the problem is that easily solved despite being the daily recipient of 4 million messages offering him Cialis at ridiculously low prices. (Ah, spam with a double side order of irony: Gates was a huge investor in Lilly ICOS, the company that got the patent on Viagra overturned in order to make Cialis in the first place; and he's a founder of-- ahem-- "Microsoft.")

Then again, maybe it's not so hard to understand his optimism, since, of those 4 million spam messages, he probably only sees one or two; the rest are filtered out by software and his employees. Yes, employees, and not just a personal secretary: according to Ballmer (as quoted by BBC News), "literally there's a whole department almost that takes care of it." Wow. How hard up for a job do you need to be to work full-time as one of Bill Gates's many spam-sifters?

Now, if Bill never sees all this junk because it never makes it past his crack team of spam-sniffing flunkies, that might explain his obscenely optimistic prediction for spam's expiration date. But at the same time, we can't believe that he isn't at least aware of it on some level. So doesn't it occur to him that needing a department of people (not software filters, mind you, but actual people) to pick out the good bits doesn't bode well for the prospect of quickly finding a feasible large-scale solution to the problem?

On the other hand, assuming he does know about the 4 million messages a day, he's got at least a vague incentive to fix the problem. (He could put his entire anti-spam department to work aerating his topsoil, for example.) And the man does have more money than God, so if anyone's got command of the sheer financial resources to tackle such an intractable problem, we suppose he's the fella. In any case, though, back in January he also said that he'd make "a lot of progress this year" on fighting the problem, and if he's still getting 4 million spam messages a day, we're not sure exactly what sort of progress he could possibly have made-- and it's late November. By our count he's got roughly 431 days to go before he misses his spam-killing deadline altogether. Shall we brew him some nice, strong coffee?