Say it IS NOT so!

So here I am reading through an excellent article in The Register describing Microsoft's strategy to make Open Source software illegal and I come across this... Microsoft has applied for a patent on the IS NOT operator! Quoting from the patent application:

The invention relates to programming languages and in particular to an operator within a language that evaluates to "True" when two operands point to different locations in memory.

Hello?

It seems that the patent lawyer who built IBM's patent portfolio into a billion dollar business now works at Microsoft and is attempting to repeat his success there. Unfortunately for Microsoft, there's a big difference between IBM's intellectual property stash and their own. For one thing IBM's patents are mostly hardware oriented and for another they are the result of years of investment in real research not just clever word games.