Bill Gates, though I hate to admit it, is slowly moving towards a place in my personal pantheon of heroes

Long have I hated Microsoft. Back when I was but a larval software engineer, they were the Great Satan of the tech world, universally feared and reviled. It wasn’t just that they were the world-eating Galactus of the industry; it was that their own products were so relentlessly mediocre. If there’s one thing hackers love above all else, it’s elegance. Apple is elegant. Firefox is elegant. Linux is elegant. Microsoft products are about as elegant as an arthritic three-legged elephant trying to ice dance.

Worse yet, their evil empire was built on intellectual theft. Windows? A ripoff of Apple’s user interface. Internet Explorer? Copied first from Netscape Navigator and then from Firefox. Word and Excel? Built on the ashes of WordPerfect and Lotus. Even Microsoft’s first big break – the MS-DOS operating system they provided for the IBM PC in 1980 – was built on somebody else’s product (QDOS) which in turn was a clone of somebody else’s (CP/M). Sure, the courts have decreed that legally speaking none of these were theft…but us techies knew better. All Microsoft did was market crappy copies of other people’s ideas with the serial numbers filed off. How we hated and feared them, and how we despised Bill Gates.

And how times change. Nowadays the industry’s fear of Microsoft has been replaced by a general uneasiness about Google, and Bill Gates, though I hate to admit it, is slowly moving towards a place in my personal pantheon of heroes. The first step on that journey of a thousand miles came in June 2006, when Gates announced that he would be weaning himself from his work at Microsoft in order to concentrate on spending his billions on philanthropic projects: in particular, improving basic healthcare around the world, with a focus on vaccinations, HIV research, and eradicating malaria.

Malaria is said to kill more than a million people a year. I’m skeptical of that number, but there’s no doubt that it takes an enormous toll in both lives and productivity. The great majority of cases are nonlethal, meaning that for every victim who dies, a hundred more spend a week in helpless misery.

Eradication isn’t an unreasonable goal. The disease was once endemic throughout North America; in fact, Staten Island, now a borough of New York City, went uninhabited for many years after the colonization of Manhattan mostly because it was malaria-infested. But the developing world is a far more challenging battleground. The stagnant pools where mosquitoes breed are everywhere, especially in the vast shantytowns that surround most Third World cities, and you can’t rely on any public-health infrastructure. Most antimalarial initiatives have focused on giving away mosquito nets. They’re much better than nothing, but they only alleviate the problem.

Enter a breathtaking solution straight out of a science-fiction novel, one funded by Gates and fellow Microsoft exec Nathan Myhrvold. Dr. Evil would approve wholeheartedly of this latest fruit of Microsoft’s evil empire: the “photonic fence”, aka fighting malaria by killing mosquitoes – with frikkin’ lasers!

In brief, the idea is to use relatively simple hardware – “no more complex than a household DVD burner,” according to 3ric Johanson, the primary developer for the project’s tracking and integration systems – to zap and kill every mosquito in sight. Johanson suggests that they could be used to build “mosquito firewalls” between where the bugs breed and where they feed. Myhrvold speculates about eventually having drone-mounted lasers flying through the African sky, killing billions of mosquitoes every night.

None of this may ever happen. I for one will remain skeptical until such systems are deployed and tested in real-world conditions. And as Johanson says, “malaria is complex to solve; this system may play a role in it, but it’s not a silver bullet.” But even if this particular approach ultimately doesn’t work, you have to admire the way in which they’re thinking both big and way outside the box in their quest to eradicate one of the world’s deadliest killers. Why, it’s almost enough to make me forgive the Blue Screen of Death.