Microsoft wants to copyright 1 and 0
This is from http://www.theonion.com:
REDMOND, WA-In what CEO Bill Gates called "an unfortunate but necessary step to protect our intellectual property from theft and exploitation by competitors," the Microsoft Corporation patented the numbers one and zero Monday.
Above: At a press conference beamed live to Microsoft shareholders around the globe, Bill Gates announces the company's patenting of the binary system.
With the patent, Microsoft's rivals are prohibited from manufacturing or selling products containing zeroes and ones-the mathematical building blocks of all computer languages and programs-unless a royalty fee of 10 cents per digit used is paid to the software giant.
"Microsoft has been using the binary system of ones and zeroes ever since its inception in 1975," Gates told reporters. "For years, in the interest of the overall health of the computer industry, we permitted the free and unfettered use of our proprietary numeric systems. However, changing marketplace conditions and the increasingly predatory practices of certain competitors now leave us with no choice but to seek compensation for the use of our numerals."
A number of major Silicon Valley players, including Apple Computer, Netscape and Sun Microsystems, said they will challenge the Microsoft patent as monopolistic and anti-competitive, claiming that the 10-cent-per-digit licensing fee would bankrupt them instantly.
"While, technically, Java is a complex system of algorithms used to create a platform-independent programming environment, it is, at its core, just a string of trillions of ones and zeroes," said Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy, whose company created the Java programming environment used in many Internet applications. "The licensing fees we'd have to pay Microsoft every day would be approximately 327,000 times the total net worth of this company."
Stupidest damn thing I've ever read
Now this has to take the cake. Hopefully M$ will convince everyone who runs the school system to stop all Mathematics classes as well or they won't make anymore ****ing money to add to the damn vault full they already have. It's pretty damn low when a company thinks that it can copyright the very foundation of computers throughout history. They might as well want to know that 1's and 0's are part of machine language, so every hardware manufacturer is gonna have to pay big bucks except for the M$ hardware. This is so sad, think about it, the very basics into which all computer data is read and transferred is going to be copyrighted because someone isn't rich enough.