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TIMES POSTCARD
The long drawn solution courtesy Bill Gates
By Rajpal Abeynayake
Bill Gates came on television to say that his 'Longhorn' Microsoft Windows programme will be launched and that computer users will sleep easy. I don't know about that -- Gates looks like he doesn't sleep at all. He has huge pouches below his eyes, and looks as if he is trying to look like Albert Einstein but is ending up looking like Frankenstein instead.

Gates says that spam is getting under control now.
Tell me about it Bill!
I am being spammed left, right and centre like a tsunami here everyday in remote Sri Lanka -- and he says spam is getting under control. Maybe what he means is that he is a philanthropist, and he has started a spam-aid fund - - like a tsunami aid fund - - with his wonderful wife Melinda who is always heard but never seen, like the promises we hear on spam control.

Longhorn is going to combat not just spam but pop-ups. For the uninitiated, pop ups are things that appear on a computer screen just when you are about to send off that vital e- mail on which your life depends. The pop pup will come and say things like, "why don't you improve your sex life?''

Bill Gates became the richest man in the world peddling things that tolerate that.
Cool.
Now he will start a spam and pop-up fund, because people feel beleaguered by this spam and pop-up business the way they feel poorly due to the tsunami or AIDS in Africa.

For a man who has become the richest in the world peddling inferior goods, its good to compensate. The disasters he causes in my computer are always put right by his philanthropic projects -- Bill Gates and Melinda against SPAM.

I think it's a long haul to make Longhorn make my computer work without spy ware, pop ups, and spam. But Bill Gates is nonchalant -- he is the richest man in the world, and by virtue of that we have to believe that what he gives us works.

He says he has SPAM under control. If it means that there are two less messages out of a hundred that say things like, "Get yourself a longer penis", then I think he has got spam under control. Give his philanthropies a little more leeway, and in his inimitable style, Gates will get all the world's woes under control including Global Warming, Chicken flu, and AIDS. Not to mention tsunami.

Now Bill Gates is getting into mobile phones. He told an interviewer that he hopes to facilitate music on the phone etc., Yeah right. If he gives me a better e mail program, and a better disc operating system - I just might have time to listen to music on my mobile phone. Bill Gates is a gatekeeper to the world's woes. If people in aid agencies have more time and less spam, we would have eradicated AIDS, and the refugee problem by now. But I suspect then Bill Gates will not have philanthropy. He who controls the world's spam -- or he who doesn't control it to be precise -- rules the world.

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