Well, I think you should have performed better research.
Nobody seems to remember Ringo. That was a working system that basically did the same you say that nobody had the talent and knowledge to do.
I can imagine very well how do the internals of Amazon.com recommender system work, and I admit that you and your fellow co-workers deserve the kudos for taking a very simple idea - that of building contingency tables and computing MAP probabilities for predicting interest in items in a catalogue - to work on top of a large relational database system, with reasonable response times.
That's an improvement, indeed, but it is not original, my friend! You cannot appropiate the authorship and 'prior art' rights, that's stealing from the public domain! We are all standing over the shoulders of other people. You should not forget that.
Egotism, and hubris have lead to the current patent madness:(
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for noticing that shameful grammar error.
But if you wanted to make a joke by reminding me on who was the author of that aphorism, you should check better also your sources ;)
[...]I had always thought that the phrase was Newton's: "If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants," but Merton, characteristically, traces it back at least to the 12th-century philosopher Bernard of Chartres: "We are like dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants and so are able to see more and see farther than the ancients" [p. 231][...]
Well, I think you should have performed better research.
Nobody seems to remember Ringo. That was a working system that basically did the same you say that nobody had the talent and knowledge to do.
I can imagine very well how do the internals of Amazon.com recommender system work, and I admit that you and your fellow co-workers deserve the kudos for taking a very simple idea - that of building contingency tables and computing MAP probabilities for predicting interest in items in a catalogue - to work on top of a large relational database system, with reasonable response times.
That's an improvement, indeed, but it is not original, my friend! You cannot appropiate the authorship and 'prior art' rights, that's stealing from the public domain! We are all standing over the shoulders of other people. You should not forget that.
Egotism, and hubris have lead to the current patent madness :(