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Amazon Patents Deducing Religion From Gift Wrap
theodp writes "If you're the giver or recipient of presents gift-wrapped by Amazon, you may want to take a gander at U.S. Patent No. 8,060,463, granted to Amazon last month for Mining of User Event Data to Identify Users with Common Interests. Among other things, Amazon explains the invention can be used to identify recipients of gifts as Christian or Jewish based on wrapping paper. From the patent: 'The gift wrap used by such other users when purchasing gifts for this user, such as when the gift wrap evidences the user's religion (in the case of Christmas or Hanukkah gift wrap, for example.)'"
... because no Jew would ever buy presents for their Christian friends, or vice-versa...
Shouldn't that be the religion of the receiver ?
(Unless it is really unimaginable for Amazon that people give presents across religious and ethnical boundaries.)
Where does Thomas the Tank Engine fit in?
What if I'm a satanist who just likes to use Jewish and Christian wrapping paper for kicks?
Atheists, Agnostics, and members of other religions don't give Christmas presents ?
BTW I am not a Christian
And who wants to pay more for gift wrsp than for shipping?
Patents are supposed to be granted only for non-obvious solutions. How is this not obvious to someone trained in the art?
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
I will admit, the Pony Girl gift wrap is NOT what I expected. Thankfully... If it was, that's a powerful level of niche marketing potential.
I can't be the only one who finds the idea of patents for " Mining of User... Data to Identify User[s]" a bit unnerving....
Of course, I'm one of the apparent minority who tend to adhere to the concept that privacy is still a right.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
... you can really patent something that basically reads, "Using a feature to help in set classification"?
About ready to say scrap the entire patent system - at least when it comes to software. It's not like it protects the actual inventors any more at all.
Check your premises.
How many religious symbols can you really find on gift-wrapping anyway? Remember that Christmas trees are not particularly Christian; they're a pagan survival, and here in predominantly Muslim Turkey you can see loads of them put up for New Year celebrations. Angels? Found in several religions. Yule logs? Decidedly pagan. Holly? Super-pagan. Snowmen? Just plain weird.
Because that's what my wife selected last year when she bought me a gift from Amazon one year.
I really can't see any religion being tied to that
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
. . . "Based on the Sending of Kinky Sexual Gifts to Non-spousal Persons."
" . . . hmmm . . . let's see what the mayor is sending to other females besides his wife . . . "
There's plenty more gold to be monetized in that Amazon mine.
Ordered copies of "Armed Insurrections for Dummies" . . . ? "Cooking Crack in Your Bathtub for Fun and Profit" . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
What gift wrap do pastafarians use?
We are but a pixel in the JPEG of life.
Determining religion by presence or absence of circumcision.
Determining gender by presence or lack of a penis.
Determining age by birth date.
Determining quantity by how many of an item is present.
and my favorite...
Determining the failure of the US patent system by filing stupid patents.
to throw it all off I'm going to use Jewish wrapping paper to wrap pressed ham in a can, or Christian wrapping paper to wrap books about evolution or by Christopher Hitchens.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
I wonder if that includes figuring out whether or not it was purchased from the bargain bin at Target... ??
This is why I had the goat leggings I purchased wrapped in Hanukkah gift paper and topped with a big red and green bow.
Its not the years, its the mileage
I am going to patent the heuristic thinking processes of a high value sales person 'on a smart phone' because that is totally different from on a computer because it has the words 'smart phone' in the patent.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
After reading yet another silly patent abstract, I cannot find anything worth patenting in it...
Well, there's your problem. Abstracts are not the claims, and do not need to be novel or non-obvious by themselves. That is the job of the claims.
From US Patent 8060463
The first claim:
If Amazon are actually making use of this patent it's a very interesting choice of approach.
I always thought the received wisdom about companies like Amazon and Google that maximise their revenues with very specific targeting was that their algorithms processed the statistics of people's behaviour and presented the suggestion/ad with the highest expected value without consideration of any qualitative explanation for why a certain thing is suggested.
This patent suggests categories are assigned to products to add artificial dimensions to the data. It's a little surprising, at least to me, if putting a label on, say, Jewish wrapping paper results in any more insightful profiling than noting that buyers of Menorah Pattern #1 wrapped gifts buy 4.6% more Kletzmer music than the average customer.
This will be a great way to attract law suits claiming discrimination based on Religion. All they have to do is offer something to people of one religion and not offer it to everyone else.
Mod previous down, as Libelous. *I* got a present from a Satanist last year, and it was NOT a letter bomb. It was a copy of the Satanobible! It was lovely, had gold-leaf edged pages, a genuine goat-skin leather cover, was beautifully tooled, embossed front and back with a gorgeous five-sided inverted star in a circle on the front. They somehow managed (it must have been a hologram) to make it look like the writing on the cover was continuously wet with blood.
Just like the Christianbible, though, the story inside was complete, unbelievable rubbish. Gorgeous covers though, looks great on my coffee table, and really compliments the severed goat's head with the baby's arm in its mouth I got from her last year.
Long story short... Best. Present. Ever.
So that's what that Marilyn Chambers movie was about.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
This is obviously just a distraction to throw off other (r)e-tailers towards the much more useful (but too obvious to be patented) kungfu of forcing people to choose between a handful of options (two in this case) and then categorizing them based on that!
Next up, using pizza chains to do marketing demographic research: Would you like a free Coke or Pepsi with your delivery?
My gender can't be determined by presence of a penis you insensitive clod.
Order a copy of the Koran with Hannukah gift wrapping!
They get creepier and creepier day by day.
"Amazon patents inferring religion from gift wrap" would be more correct.
So what about the ubiquitous 'snowflake' wraps out there? Or the colored plaid ones? Or the ones with candles on them?
Does blue and white mean Jewish, even if it's a Swedish flag? Does green and red mean Christmas even if it's on a chili pepper? Candles must mean a menorah right?
If I want them to wrap it in plain brown paper, are they going to assume I'm a Buddhist?
What complete and utter nonsense and tripe.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
When I've been to the Arab market in Jerusalem, the shop owners guessed the country I came from (in South America), my religion and the fact I'm a musican, as well as how much I was willing to pay for each item. Guess a simple algorithm is nothing compared to thousands of years of tradition as shopkeepers..
Or perhaps "appreciate" would be a better word.
That's a challenge - I'd have to find suitable stock paper, and steal one of the big printers at work ... or would I? An A3 sheet should do the job (sorry) OK.
That is a challenge to work towards.
I'll ask Amazon.
Google doesn't admit to it's existence. Yet.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
I would've thought using datamining to determine who is Jewish should be compared to the Nazis.
What the fuck has the USPTO become?
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Or Something.
Their they're doing there hair.
These patents are beyond ridiculous, they represent a mafioso style shakedown racket of the right to program a computer and a company-size-based monopoly on all progress and economic participation.
You'd assume that a system that destructive would eventually have to cause such economic damage to even the people who fund and benefit from it that it would just have to be changed, but that assumption wouldn't be taking into account U.S. Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions.
After being informed that the loaded gun of software patents was now pointed at the industry that finances and supports the manufacture of that gun, the banking industry, Sessions promptly sponsored and shepherded through Congress a bill that exempted the banking industry from software patents emanating from the likes of
(above excerpted from WSJ and http://www.leftinalabama.com/diary/566/ More from same sources:
So we can't even count on the the disease to finally kill the host because the host is to be artificially kept alive by bitchboys like Sessions.
So let's grasp the full scope of what's going on here.
The Big Players like Amazon, Microsoft IBM etc aided and abetted at every turn by the banks are creating and financing a system which is so fundamentally toxic to economic participation, even they can't survive it. The only way they continue to exist is through special legislative action tailored to nothing but their exemption from the consequences of the system they create.
Meanwhile, Sessions et. al. are busy legislating a system into existence which is so toxic that even the banking industry can't survive it, and it therefore needs to go to Sessions- cash in hand- in order to obtain a special dispensation from The King.
from: http://www.techlawforum.net/post.cfm/senator-takes-an-interest-in-patent-law-or-money>
So who's extorting whom? Are the trolls extorting the banks or are the banks and Amazon extorting would be competitors, or is Sessions extorting the banks?
It reads like some sort graduate student's thesis of self-stabilizing self-extortion rings where the simulation iterates until it finds its most stable, lowest energy state that nothing but pitchforks and torches can get it out of.
We are Rome.
Every small business man and store owners who know clients use their knowledge to choose the wrapping paper, and usually choose the wrapping paper based on a) the family name,
b) the knowledge gleaned from when the purchase is made
c) By asking
d) By the merchandise given as a gift.
Do they deserve a patent?
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
"Is it possible for a company to blame a computer based system for making stereotypical choices"?
Sure. It's possible for a company (or individual humans) to blame a computer for anything, even something that no computer can do. People blame computers for their own mistakes (and intentional actions) all the time.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Has anyone read this? Because I have. This is an algorithm only- a step by step procedure for solving a problem. The fact that's it's computer implemented is irrelevant. It's just an algorithm.
Correction - "the fact that it's computer implemented is irrelevant to you."
It's legally relevant, according to the Supreme Court. One might even say "crucial". See, e.g. Bilski v. Kappos.
They have such a backlog of patents that the USPO basically has decided that it is up to the courts to decide if a patent is valid or not. I cannot find the exact article that states this, but I did find this one in a past /. article.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100819/12015210689.shtml
Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon what's the difference? All steal money from devs and control with walled gardens.
No, I didn't know that, and I find that to be disappointing. A Satanless Satanism has no charm at all. If I were a Satanist, I would schism the religion immediately and declare the Satan-deniers to be infidels. You gotta have the horned 'n' hoofed guy, for the artwork alone! I used to think Satanism was a reaction to lame religions, but it sounds like they managed to out-lame their parents.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.