Apple patents the CosaNostra pizza box
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009You be the judge.
From Apple’s patent:
A package is moved from location to location through delivery services like Federal Express or UPS; however what occurred during transportation, and what transpired to the package, is anyone’s guess. Occasionally, an object within the package is broken, indicating that the package experienced excessive abuse; but whose fault it is, or how or when it happened, are not known. What environments the package experienced is also not readily known.
[...]
Preferably, the MMD [movement monitor device] includes a real time clock so that the MMD tags “events” (as hereinafter defined) with time and/or date information.
— Personal items network, and associated methods, United States Patent 7,552,031, June 23, 2009
And a description of the CosaNostra pizza box:
The pizza box is a plastic carapace now, corrugated for stiffness, a little LED readout glowing on the side, telling the Deliverator how many trade imbalance-producing minutes have ticked away since the fateful phone call. There are chips and stuff in there. The pizzas rest, a short stack of them, in slots behind the Deliverator’s head. Each pizza glides into a slot like a circuit board into a computer, clicks into place as the smart box interfaces with the onboard system of the Deliverator’s car. The address of the caller has already been inferred from his phone number and poured into the smart box’s builtin RAM. From there it is communicated to the car, which computes and projects the optimal route on a heads-up display, a glowing colored map traced out against the windshield so that the Deliverator does not even have to glance down.
— Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson, 2000