"You could easily plot these adventurous innovators on a graph, with the X axis showing their skill and the Y axis their financial means."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't you "easily plot" any 2D set of related numbers on an XY graph?

Do you really think that this is what its about? MS isn't stupid. They are out to make money and they aren't looking to heap shame on their users. They will probably end up marketing it as "your xbox the accountability partner" which will create rewards for meeting exercise goals. It seems a mountain is being made out of this molehill.

Is that cmdrTaco?

I think it seems much more likely that what they want to do is market a device that rewards you for getting in shape, not secretly find your medical records and not let you pay.

Probably something like,

"Hey parents, tired of your kids playing too many video games and getting fat? Well now you can buy this bracelet that they will have to wear or else their xbox won't work and the bracelet will only allow them to play when they are healthy."

Seriously, though. Business is about money. MS isn't going to secretly tap into your medical records to keep you from playing their games. Whatever the reason is for their doing this, you can be sure it is profit motivated, and more than likely something along the lines of what I suggested, and nothing sinister at all.

This is just a side note, and I'm not arguing about wether or not global warming is happening here, I just don't like the methods of the poster:

The point that October was the hottest month on record for Australia is a red herring. October was also the third coldest month on record for the US. A single month tells us nothing about global climate change even when it falls on an extreme. The slashdot mods should have removed this extraneous comment before posting.

"Sending free stuff to the press isn't purely a thing of gadget and software markets, it's been around for quite a long time before that."

True, I was just giving an example.

I'm going to ask you the same as the parent, what does OS have anything to do with this discussion? MS could very well be patenting some software to market to places like facebook. It might not be interested in using such a structure for marketing the OS at all. This is a very general idea that applies across anything that can be marketed. If you can use social network data to determine who the buying influencers are in a population for a given product (like milk, forget an OS) you can potentially maximize profit by sending them free stuff. That is what this is about. If this works and you could sell your technique to other companies looking to do the same thing (because you have a patent) it could be worth a fortune.

Yes, when the iPhone came out it wasn't just geeks buying it. You are missing the point. The point is, if a company can reliably identify the people who have the most influence on buying decisions of other people and send them free stuff, then they are likely to maximize profits. I was trying to give a simplified example for explanation.

My question is, why are simple linux users at the bottom of the social ladder? Are you saying there is absolutely no chance that movie stars are using linux? I don't see the correlation between social status and linux use. This isn't about who uses what operating system, its about influence in buying decisions over friends, which has absolutely nothing to do with what OS is on your computer. This patent would govern, for instance, looking at which soccer moms are most likely to convince other soccer moms to buy a particular SUV. That is what I'm asking you, where are you getting this claim that linux = bottom of social ladder.

"This will hurt no one and this was just an "article" to have an excuse to bash Microsoft about something. *yawn*"

I mildly agree; forgetting the fact that it is MS however, it might be legitimate to ask how this can be patented when it is already the system that has been in place since the dawn of marketing. (Send free stuff to people who influence buying decisions; product giveaways; etc)

We already have this sort of thing on a macro scale. Gadget magazines are sent free gadgets and many of us make buying decisions based on those gadget magazines. This is just a finer grained version of the same old system.

What scares me about this is that it would create the same kind of frenzied I-want-to-get-as-many-facebook-friends-as-possible-no-matter-if-I-know-them-or-not mentality except with profit motive behind it. The more friends you have, the more MS thinks you are an influential person, the cheaper products are for you. I think that this sort of thing would probably be quickly gamed by many people to the point of being worthless to the marketer.

This is not a challenge, just a clarification question: how exactly do linux users factor into this discussion? It seems to be about using information gleaned from social networks to adjust prices in order to maximize product adoption. Also, I wouldn't be so certain this wouldn't be popular. If everyone in your social group wants to be like person X and MS can determine this and give something to person X for free that will cost you and the rest of the group $10, I'm not sure so many people would abstain as a protest. Or at least not more than the gain in revenue seen by the scheme. I think of it like this: when the iPhone came out all the geeks bought them, and then convinced everyone else to buy them. Because of the cult of Apple it wasn't too hard to get tons of geeks to get them and show everyone else how cool it is. On the other hand not as many people were buying Zunes and convincing their non-geeky friends to buy them. What if MS was able to determine the people who had the most influence on their social group's technology buying habits and sent them all free Zunes? It seems like if this could be done accurately it would be an incredibly effective marketing ploy (of course, that is a big IF).

Actually, I found Objective-C to be incredibly enjoyable to code in. Once I became proficient in Cocoa it became much nicer to code in than C++ or Java or other mainstream programming languages.

It is true that Apple lets us know what the problem is. I have had cases (see somewhere above) where the rules have been provably arbitrarily applied (the same piece of code in two separate apps: one app is approved, in the other the code--that is also in the approved app--is the reason Apple won't approve the app).

For me the biggest problem is the arbitrariness of the rules as they are applied. For instance, Hewitt (mentioned in the article) has a great library called Three20 for doing a lot of common tasks. I use it in my apps for the photo browser module, since Apple seems to have forgotten to add one to the SDK.

Many of my apps use Three20 as do many in the app store, but ONE of my apps got denied because there is a function in the Three20 library that is never even called by my app or by any other method in the Three20 library that calls some unpublished APIs. Note here the problem: many apps have been approved with the same code that Apple objected to. Because the "laws" aren't applied universally the whole process is made exponentially more frustrating. (Of course I hacked out the problem function from my local version of the Three20 library and successfully resubmitted, but it is stuff like this that drives a developer nuts.)