Isn't life wonderful. Here we have a problem identified by IBM back in the 70s, and solved by them back in the 70s, back in the days when the US sopreme Court was still sufficiently sane to assert that software patents were illegal. Then MS gets a patent on solving it in 2000, with a patent that has no non-obvious invention in it (at least nothing non-obvious to anyone familiar with the state of the art in, I think, the late 70s) after the law has been changed (by magic, or perhaps by the appointment of supreme court judges favoured by presidents whose campaign funds came from industrialists who wanted software patents).

We all knew the US patent system had become insane some time ago. What none of us outside the US know is why you pretend that your plutocracy is a democracy, claiming that the people rule when in fact only the money rules, as clearly evidenced by the changes in the last few decades to your copyright system and your patent system (amongst many other indicators).