Programmer Humor @lemmy.ml sebastiancarlos @lemmy.sdf.org 10 hr. ago

Microsoft to Copyright Pi, Found to Contain Entire Arial Font

sebastiancarlos.com Microsoft to Copyright Pi, Found to Contain Entire Arial Font

In a revelation that has sent shockwaves through the tech and math communities, Microsoft has announced plans to copyright the constant pi…

32 comments

Microsoft sues the Library of Babel
Including relevant XKCD as demanded by internet law: https://xkcd.com/10/
- Oooh, a rare two-digit.
If pi is truly infinite, then it contains all the works of Shakespeare, every version of Windows, and this comment I'm typing right now.
- This person doesn't understand infinity. Don't feel bad, no one really does, it sort of breaks our brains.
- That's not how it's works. Being "infinite" is not enough, the number 1.110100100010000... is "infinite", without repeating patterns and dosen't have other digits that 1 or 0.
  
  to be fair, though, 1 and 0 are just binary representations of values, same as decimal and hexadecimal. within your example, we'd absolutely find the entire works of shakespeare encoded in ascii, unicode, and lcd pixel format with each letter arranged in 3x5 grids.
  
  Yes that's why they specified pi.
  
  If it's infinite without repeating patterns then it just contain all patterns, no? Eh i guess that's not how that works, is it? Half of all patterns is still infinity.
  
  In some encoding scheme, those digits can represent something other than binary digits. If we consider your string of digits to truly be infinite, some substring somewhere will be meaningful.
I ate The Onion
- Tbf I've heard crazier things which have ended up being true in the past week alone...
This just in: Measurements are now limited to ~3M decimals.

Science is ruined!
There's no way the copyright office is actually going to approve this right?
- I think this is satire. Poe's law is stronger than ever
  
  Yeah it set off my bullshit detector, just never seen anything posted from that site before.
  
  Are they known for posting satire?
- According to Dr. Calibri, there's a 99.9999% chance they will approve it :)

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