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Microsoft Invents $1.15/Hour Homework Fee For Kids
theodp writes "Microsoft's vision of your computing future is on display in its just-published patent application for the Metered Pay-As-You-Go Computing Experience. The plan, as Microsoft explains it, involves charging students $1.15 an hour to do their homework, making an Office bundle available for $1/hour, and billing gamers $1.25 for each hour of fun. In addition to your PC, Microsoft also discloses plans to bring the chargeback scheme to your cellphone and automobile — GPS, satellite radio, backseat video entertainment system. 'Both users and suppliers benefit from this new business model,' concludes Microsoft, while conceding that 'the supplier can develop a revenue stream business that may actually have higher value than the one-time purchase model currently practiced.' But don't worry kids, that's only if you do more than 52 hours of homework a year!"
MS has announced they will not enter the online porn industry until they can determine a way to charge by the erection - film at eleven.
Said S.Balmer "Things are lookin' up!"
Am I the only one who finds it pretty funny that Microsoft's response to piracy of Office (which, I would guess, is most popular among students) markets their $60 version, repeatedly, as a "steal?"
The user jacks his credit card into our system.
We store user input.
We process user input.
We output processed data back to the user.
We suck money out of the user's credit card account.
Behold the cloud!
I always thought it was a totem-pole-of-ducks emoticon...
Well, at least it's a nice hotel.
I did far far less than 52 hours of homework a year.
Thinking about it, there may be a reason I failed high school..
Any time I did the homework, it wasn't checked. And any time it was checked, I never had it done. To this day, I'm very bitter about it. It seemed to me like psychological torture. I knew if I completed the work, the teacher wouldn't bother asking for it. And if I didn't complete it, I had to steel myself for the punishment, which was usually more homework, and so the cycle would repeat.
Don't ask me to pay for doing homework. I've paid already. I've got the scars to show for it.
It was outsourced overseas
I sat down to write a new sig tonight and all I did was make the chair warm.
Um, we're talking about Microsoft here. It might be an *expensive* hotel, but I'm not sure I'd call it a *nice* hotel...
The ringing of the division bell has begun... -PF
Wait, I get it! It's just like those crappy upgrades and services the mechanic sells you which don't do anything, or which would be trivially user-serviceable if the mechanic were generous enough to just tell you so!
Man, I just wasn't getting it, but once you make the connection to cars it's all so intuitive!
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
This whole summary is a troll. Technology businesses file many patents every year that they'll never implement. Patents are like munitions. You stockpile them in case you need to go to war, and to prevent others from attacking you. Balmer's saber rattling about Linux infringing on multiple Microsoft patents is the perfect example of this. (Though it's an example of the more sinister uses of patents).
Exactly! Balmer filed for three chair throwing patents this year alone, my personal favorite being the side arm method although it lacks accuracy of the over hand method.
You'll note Sony Home doesn't cost a penny.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
It would create an infinate loop, and you would have to reboot the computer to recover from it.
Three years ago whilst I was doing my ph.d. I was stupid enough to enter a command of this ilk 'to see what it did'. After having to walk two miles to reboot my servers I decided I'd learned my lesson...
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
Ah come on,.. They're trying to put the 'fun' back in malfunctioning.
May I please have my frontal lobotomy if I bring back the ashtrays?
Well, at least it's a nice hotel.
... with broken windows.
Say what you will but Bill Gates' vision was revolutionary for the time. He brought shrink wrapped software to the masses. No one had done it successfully before him.
Revisionist history. When shrinkwrap software was an emerging market, Microsoft was but one software house among many that were producing good product on 5.25" floppies. There were also Borland, WordPerfect, Broderbund, Lotus Development Corp, and dozens of other companies. Microsoft was no leader of the pack back in the day.
Microsoft did prove to be most successfully ruthless dog in the pack, though. It's "embrace and extend (and extinguish)" market strategy is arguably a true innovation, and its use of vaporware to limit the encroachment of better technologies on its market share demonstrated a superb mastery of advertising and marketing skills. It has also demonstrated a truly incredible disdain for the fetters of morality, ethics, and law. Microsoft has never been particularly strong in technical skills, but from the first it has been fantastically good at marketing, including pimping its image.
Basically Microsoft has gotten to the top by being the most successful slut on the street corner, knowing when to give the chauffeurs driving the rich guy's limousines a free ride, and knowing how to sidle up close enough to the competition to take a razor blade to her pretty face.