Re: I may be crazy

On Wed, 08 Jun 2011 13:08:28 -0500, Julian Macassey wrote:
Now the membership cards, oh what fun they can be. The
first jape is to come up with a creative name for the card. For
example, I have a supermarket card as Karen Carpenter (She could
do with a square meal), Some as Sarah Palin, a Petco card as the
Dutchess of Devonshire, my Ace Hardware card is in the name of
Joe the Plumber (Joseph Wurzelbacher) and so on.

That one doesn't bother the process. The loyalty cards track
individually, but not personally. That is, they don't care what Julian
buys, only what customer 074338519 buys. And how often. And in
association with what. And at what stores within the chain. Knowing that
large buys happen at one store, largely on weekends, and a second store
buys prepared and packaged food, on weekdays, between 4 and 6 PM,
though, that's marketing projection gold.

The next jape is if you meet up with another card holder
and swap cards, just to mess with their database more. You go
from buying TV dinners and beer to tampons and diet soda.

That one's inconvenient, but detectable. Mostly by time and date
shopping patterns. Software finds when the change happens and resets the
instantiation date, effectively closing the old account and opening a
new one. Takes about 8-10 trips to get a good confidence margin that
the card's in someone else's hands, but it happens.

--
Cunningham's First Law:
Any sufficiently complex deterministic system will exhibit
non-deterministic behaviour.
.

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