Humor: Bush Claims Arithmetic Error in Microsoft Break-Up

[Warren Togami]

http://segfault.org/story.phtml?mode=2&id=3b97bde6-01e9b780

U.S. President George W. Bush has asked the DOJ not to divide the Microsoft
monopoly into baby-Microsofts. After a long meeting with a board of K12 math
teachers, he found out that there was a huge arithmetic error in the
break-up.
"You see", said Bush this morning, "we were about to DIVIDE Microsoft in 2,
but as any 10-year-old knows, division is the arithmetic operation where the
result is LESS than the original value. We were about to create 2 monopolies
out of one just for this stupid math blunder. We were dividing no bubba baga
there."

The DOJ has considered reducing Microsoft to a fraction of its current
1.0000 monopoly count, but it turnsout that Microsoft has a prime number of
employees and share holders, "making it impossible to cut part of it without
cutting men in half, and we've been told the Constitution won't let us cut
people in half (or whatever other fraction), even if the man in question is
the IIS Quality Assurance manager."

Bush added: "billions and billions of dollars in research and these lab rats
still can't divide prime numbers, are these mathematicians dumb or what?
I'll tell you something, lay off these geeks and nerds and let true brave
American soldiers do the work when we need it. Give me a squad of Marines
and I'll show you some primes being divided on schedule.".

"We can't pulverize it to a sound zero, we can't reduce, enlarging them
won't serve any purpose. My advisors say I should just overtax Microsoft so
that we can send a man to Mars in 2003 with the tax revenue from Windows
XP."

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was not available for comment.

Posted on Thu 06 Sep 11:19:47 2001 PDT
Written by Felipe Bergo <bergo at seul.org>