MOSCOW -- It started with a rectangular jellyfish floating toward the lower right-hand corner of my computer screen. The jellyfish carried a logo, Kodak Easy Share, and was of a nauseating white-yellow-red design. The jellyfish had been there for quite a while, distracting me from students' papers and my own precariously delayed book manuscript, yet I could live with it. It was not particularly obtrusive and, having bobbed for a minute or so, disappeared in a hole it had dug for itself in the bowels of the screen.

The fact that a creature, totally alien to me and conceived by the mean wizards of the greedy corporation that had sold me a digital camera, dwelt unsolicited in my computer's basement did bother me, but I tended to accept it as a fact of life, like the jellyfish one comes across on a beach. It looked like a misguided drifter -- a nuisance for sure, but definitely not a threat.

It was not a Portuguese man-of-war with its famously deadly stings, but rather a stupid harmless invention, a shadow of the real killer. I did nothing to exterminate it, and the jellyfish and I lived in sort of an accord for several weeks.