So the Daily Show got an interview with Bill Gates. You can watch Billy Boy’s sit-down on YouTube, or you can just load nine minutes of static onto your iPod and listen to it while you read the steaming pile of press release. The end effect is the same: random noise interspersed with sound bites about how amazing Vista will be. I’m very disappointed. Here is a sampling of what John threw at him over the course of almost ten minutes of interview.

• What does the F12 button do? (Nothing, you n00b.)
• What is a “beta version”? Will that make me sterile? (No.)
• What if I don’t know how to use Vista? (Call Bill, apparently.)
• What’s your password? (Is it “Gates”?)
• Do you hire people that can outsmart hackers? (Yes.)
• When are we going to get jetpacks? (Don’t know.)

Jon Stewart is an intelligent guy, I’ve been a fan of The Daily Show for years, and I’ve seen him do plenty of great interviews. But with ten minutes to interview the richest man on the planet, and one of the most influential philanthropists we’ve known, Jon turns into a clown. There are so many things Bill Gates could comment on that would’ve been even slightly interesting:

• What does he think of the One Laptop Per Child project?
• What are some longer-term goals on the table for the Gates Foundation, now that they’ve got billions of Warren Buffet’s money to spend?
• Does Bill Gates think that mobile technology will ever totally antiquate the desktop PC?
• Where does Gates see the biggest opportunities for Microsoft to compete with Google, since they’re clearly being trounced on “search”?
• What does Bill think about the problems in the Middle East? Bill’s PR reps would probably hate to see him start talking politics on the eve of a huge launch, but I’m sure Jon Stewart could get something out of him.
• Engadget had a great suggestion that should’ve come naturally to The Daily Show: team up Bill Gates with John Hodgman. It writes itself!

Maybe Bill’s people told Jon’s people that he needed to stay away from anything serious. Bill was in a rush to leave once the interview was up (he walked completely off-stage before the fade to commercial). Was he hurrying to the London launch, or was he just sour at having such a crap interview?

But not all of tonight’s YouTubing has been a waste. I didn’t get to watch the Colbert v. O’Reilly interviews when they aired, so I just caught up with them tonight. Steven Colbert definitely owned O’Reilly, twice – once on the Factor, and again on the Report. I can’t get enough of O’Reilly screaming about whether the “T” in “Colbert” is silent.

This week, I’d say Colbert’s “perched dragon” style interview-fu has proven far superior to Stewart’s “drunken hamster” style.

…and all I can really remember are the games (World in Conflict looks incredible) and the fact that MacWorld stole the show on Tuesday (by earning itself a lawsuit).

Well, that’s not entirely true. I remember the MoGo Mouse, which fits into your PCMCIA slot for recharging. I sat next to one of their sales reps on the red-eye back to Boston. It’s a neat gimmick, but nothing can ever really replace the $15 Logitech classic rat.

I also recall being completely underwhelmed by all the huge LCD monitors on display. Am I the only geek in America who’s still perfectly happy with my 30″ CRT television? Do we all really need a movie theater in our own living room? Sometimes I don’t want my media to overwhelm me.

I think Chris Kohler (who, I’m proud to say, once edited for The Primary Source) got it right when he wrote that content, not hardware, drives consumer technology. Most of the devices I saw at CES were incremental improvements on hardware that we’re already used to. The cool stuff was, by and large, software. Chris also rightfully mocks the “cartoonish lack of perspective” involved in praising every last little feature of Windows Vista as a watershed moment in computing evolution. $200 for an OS upgrade so that I can use a video for a desktop background?

Well, at least he got to see the keynote. There was no way I was making it all the way to The Venetian that early in the morning; not on my vacation. CES is kinda fun, but so is the rest of Las Vegas — and the MGM Grand Buffet is worth missing a Bill Gates speech. (For an extra $2.50, you get endless champagne, too. Rock on.)

I was briefly excited by the Windows Home Server, which is supposed to make it simple for mom and dad to set up a file server for backups. But it sounds like it’s not RAID; it’s an NTFS thing. If you just say “back this file up”, the file gets copied to one drive. If you say “back this file up redundantly”, the file gets copied onto two drives. That’s it. I suppose it’s good to let end-users decide which files deserve redundancy, and I might recommend this for my parents, but it feels a little too Fisher-Price for my own tastes. Instead of forking over money for My First Backup Server, I think I’ll stick with RAID-5 over a tower of SATA drives. (When can I buy that in a prepackaged box?)

And who can forget the iPhone? No, wait, not that one — this one!

I understand that Steve Jobs has a need for attention-grabbing publicity stunts, and hosting MacWorld at the same time as CES was pretty funny. It’s all people were talking about on Tuesday. But deliberately and publicly encouraging a lawsuit is reckless. I’m sure Jobs thinks he can get back to the negotiating table, but if someone at Cisco has a bruised ego and wants to pick a fight, it could get ugly.

Wall Street doesn’t seem to mind that the iPhone lacks Exchange integration, Office document support, and a replaceable battery. They still gave RIM and Palm a serious thumping, as if this device can somehow unseat those two from their thrones. I’m irked about that last shortcoming; smartphones die too quickly already. It’s ridiculous not to be able to replace the battery after it’s overripe. If Steve Jobs is serious about reinventing the phone, he can start by signing up for those miniature Direct Methanol Fuel Cells that we’re supposed to be getting in our gadgets soon.

Cringely has some good ideas on where the “Apple Phone” is going. I personally don’t think it will be a Blackberry killer; it’s clearly aimed at everyday consumers, not the “business professional” crowd. That it costs $600 and forces a contract with Cingular tells me that Apple wants early adopters to test out the first generation — not mom and dad, who will be busy figuring out how to use Windows Home Server. The first generation will probably suck as much as the first generation of iPod. From there, we’ll see how it goes; I hear the iPod isn’t doing too badly now.

Oh well. After the amount of money I spent just being in Vegas for a week, neither big-screen TVs nor touch-screen phones are in my near-term future.