So take this story about a new worm hitting MS-based PCs, combine it with this story about Arlington, VA county schools moving to MS-based PCs and you’d think that somebody was about to lose his job.

However, if you combine it with this story about the U.S. losing scientific dominance, you’ll deduce that, given the current state of public education, the man in Arlington will likely be rewarded with larger budgets to manage the mess he’s created.

As an aside, my personal solution, were anybody ever stupid enough to elect me to a position of power, would be to allow Microsoft to continue publishing their software, but force any user who allowed a virus or worm onto their system to use a typewriter exclusively for six months following the infraction.

But seriously, were I an ISP, I’d be offering discounts to people who attached any other operating system besides Microsoft’s to my network. To keep support costs reasonable, I’d only offer hardware and network-level support to these customers (further increasing the profit margin) and test their computers regularly for MS OSes. I’d probably offer support for one well-understood configuration (probably Macs, because they’re easier than Linux to administer for non-technical users) with the discount intact.

Hear that, Comcast? I’m saving you upstream bandwidth…