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A Number For Everything
jtcampbell writes: "Whilst reading the Times today I found this article about a U.S. government idea to give everyone a unique 'ENUM,' that serves as a universal phone number, email address, and fax number. Quite a cool idea, but will everyone adopt the standard? besides, i thought we left numeric email addresses with compuserve a few years back. And remembering these 11 digit numbers could be fun ..."
Its much bigger than just the US govt, they have a very minor role here. This is an IETF/ITU thing
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This way, when you give someone your phone number you are giving them your social security noumber, tax number, medical identity, etc.
The problem with that is that it opens you up to two things: abuse and honest mistakes. Both for obvious reasons would be real problems.
Example. The credit agency in Canada seems to think I owe BMW money for a car. That is long gone (when the lease ended, I sold that car and bought a different make). Still, it's well neigh impossible to get that off the record. Now imagine everyone had that info!
And another example. I recently changed medical insuramce companies at work, and that needed an AIDS test. Negative, I am happy to say. But if it had not been: if all these systems had been tied together (as they will be soon, with one number) that information would quite easily have got back to the bank, or the employer, etc.
I think we need to be very careful indeed with systems that make it easier for people bad or good to track us and what we do.
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BDOS ERR ON A:>
No need for four of them. A good Chinese dictionary (I mean the biiig ones) has 60,000 characters.
60,000^3 = 216 Trillion combinations.
Chinese people typically have 3-character names. A one-character family name and a two-character first name.
So all we really need to do is give everyone on Earth a unique Chinese name! And since the characters might be hard to remember, you can tattoo it on their foreheads so the won't forget it.
I know Southern Baptists especially will just love this idea!
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
That's funny. I had this argument with my Systems Design prof that went something like this:
Prof: So, of these fields for the employee database, which would you use as the primary key: SSN, LAST_NAME, FIRST_NAME, or STREET_ADDRESS?
Me: None of the above.
Prof: Oh? The main requirements for a primary key is that the field be unique, and that the field not change. The SSN seems to fit that bill doesn't it?
Me: No, not everyone has a SSN.
Prof: This is an *employee* database. Of course they're all going to have SSNs.
Me: But these are not in anywway guarnteed to be unique or not change.
Prof: Oh, you're just talking silly things. Of course they're not going to change or be unique.
Me: Do YOU trust the government that much?
Prof: Stop being ridiculous.
So, you see... I *was* right!!! Heh.
My journal has hot
True story:
When I worked at Packard Bell tech support, my friend got a call from a woman who was distraught that her AUTOEXEC.BAT file was exactly 666 kilobytes. My friend had her edit the file and add
REM SATAN I CAST THEE OUT
to the end of the file. Did a DIR and checked the filesize -- 682k (or something like that.) Problem solved. The woman said "thank you" and hung up.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao