When I roll my chair wheels over that bubble packing material and pop the plastic bubbles, lots of neutrons come flying up from the floor. Has anyone else noticed this?
Will the photon front be in front of or behind the Earth when astronomers lose federal funding for looking in the direction of that star? (Don't forget about the 5 light year spread!)
Almost. The pretense is still there that it is a drug-free game.
I think you'd see much more steroid use if that pretense were dropped. Currently our athletes are forced to choose steroids based on their serum trace and the chance of being caught, instead of just choosing the best steroid for the job which should be their ONLY consideration. If everyone is on steroids anyway then as a fan I want my team to be on the best steroids.
The sport *I* would like to see would be a normal sport, like football, soccer, or hockey, where the "no drugs" pretense has been dropped, no testing is perormed, and players are encouraged to enhance their performance by any means possible wink wink. A game where all the players are on uppers and going through 'roid rage would make me more interested in the sport.
To me a more logical explanation of the filler DNA is to act as a buffer against flaws.
Nothing in biology has a "purpose". It isn't like a car where every part serves a well thought out function. You can find some organs with single well-defined functions, like the heart, but most serve a range of ill-defined roles. Bones, for example, are making white blood cells. The liver does all sorts of stuff. Everything happens because it happened before in a way that it can happen again. Everything is needlessly complex, full of awful unstable hacks. Absolutely no consideration was made during the process to make anything easy to understand.
In fact, evolution bears a large resemblance to dysfunctional software development by a team of beginner developers who don't talk to each other and who like to create code with legacy issues. One guy will code something because he doesn't know some other guy already wrote something to handle it- creating redundant systems that compete with each other. The body is full of stuff like that. An example would be the anterolateral system (evolved earlier) and the posterior dorsal column system (evolved later), two competing systems in your spinal cord. You need two, because just one would make medical school too easy I guess. There is a lot of cut and paste coding going on (introns are full of commented out goodies). And just like bad software that "evolves", there are buried broken features in you that don't work anymore- but even evolution can't "refactor" them out of your body. Hiccups, for example, served a function in the gills of the Devonian fish we evolved from, but they just annoy us. There is zero selective pressure for us to retain hiccups- in fact there is negative pressure, since a tiger might hear you hiccup and eat you before you reproduce. And yet hiccups haven't gone away after hundreds of millions of years.
As for garbage DNA- while there are advantages conferred by noncoding DNA (in high radiation environments, exposure to mutagens, viruses, transposons, and other genetic parasites, etc.) strictly speaking the DNA has no purpose since it is part of an evolved system, not an engineered one. Introns are a side effect of most evolutionary algorithms that rely on crossover and exchange of homologous sequences. In the field of genetic programming, they are a nuisance- the profusion of introns quickly becomes a problem as they consume computational resources- but you can't just get rid of them, because they contain most of your genetic diversity and some of them have really good ideas in them.
Junk DNA contains many versions of (parts of) genes that are disabled; you can think of some of them as commented out code that gets cut and pasted around occasionally. There are "sunken ships", recognizable genes in noncoding regions that have been accumulating mutations for thousands of years. We use them to measure mutation rates. The most common gene in the genome is reverse transcriptase- a gene used only by viruses- there are several hundred "sunken ship" versions of reverse transcriptase in your genome that probably wouldn't work anymore if a virus tried to use them. Within introns, there are also "if statements", where the/* and */ "comment delimiters" are subject to conditionals, so that splicing is not performed at those points and the intron actually makes it into the finished protein. A number of regulatory mechanisms work this way- the intron changes the function of the protein product to either make it functional or non-functional or different somehow. The finished protein might suppress a "conditional" elsewhere or land on a promoter region to encourage expression of the next gene in some cascade. (Biology is full of needlessly complicated "cascades" with useless steps that can't be gotten rid of for legacy reasons.) It's as if "run time" and "compile time" are both all the time with an infinite number of threads running on code that constantly rewrites itself and controls its own compilation and execution.
What is more evil to me is a law mandating that either side do something. Why do we need a law to handle an idea this stupid? If Verizon tries to collect money from Google, what will make Google pay?
What will make Google pay will be the fact that Verizon can now block Google until Verizon extracts as much money from them as they think they deserve. Do you think Google searches will be free if that happens?
A short while ago Verizon wouldn't have been able to block Google without the FCC stepping in. But the FCC issued a ruling recently that the phone companies can block whoever they want for any reason and net neutrality will no longer be enforced. This was done without a law being passed. (Which does NOT make it OK.)
It would be nice if the Bush FCC changed its mind and reversed itself. Until then, we need the law, and despite what you've heard on the teevee, all laws are not evil.
Excel (I forget which version) got some autoformatting features a while back that are incredibly annoying if they're inappropriate for what you're doing. Most users didn't know to turn them off before editing data files that they would later import into our application. So people bitched at us: "Your software keeps turning my identifiers into dates!!!"
Look at non-lethal policing weapons. They haven't replaced lethal force, they've just allowed the police to weaponize conflicts they previously wouldn't have had weapons for: they can shoot first against a civilian demonstration if they aren't using bullets.
Which is completely unfair if the civilians aren't going to be armed with the same range of devices that are available to police. So the public needs to start arming itself with these weapons immediately. This means all of you- open another tab right now and start buying some non-lethal weaponry for the next time you run into the police in a crowded public setting. Tasers are sold to nervous women all over the Internet, and you can buy "X-Ring" rubber bullets in a variety of calibers up to.45. But the police have way more nonlethal toys than that, and if you've decided that these standard options are just not for you, you'll still be able to find something that fits your style- perhaps tear gas grenades, or pepper spray, or even something as simple as the lowly police baton.
The non-lethal weapon I want is the capture net that is fired from a 37 mm launcher, with weights at the corners that spiral around the guy. I'd use that one at meetings for when someone comes up with a really bad idea- the kind of bad idea that needs to be stopped now before too many PHB-types hear it. I'd stand up, say "stop right there" and fire the net around the person, immobilizing him before his bad idea got any traction. I really think that would help me make my point.
If everyone in the meeting were afraid that anyone there might be armed with one of these things, it could really cut down on bad ideas.
I wouldn't trust it. The people who write bad code will write bad debug detection code... especially if they are coders who have been outsourced and do not care if it works or not.
The code in javac is more than three times the size of my HelloWorld program, so I'm not sure it's compiling it correctly. Especially if Sun farmed out javac to some outfit in Bangalore. They won't care if it works. I'm scared to run my program now. What if it doesn't say "Hello World"? It might say "Goodbye world" and then delete my hard drive since the javac guys just don't care.
I'm just going to have to hand-assemble the bytecodes myself. I don't trust anybody!
Yeah, this is the person you'd want to have design your network, the guy behind the proposed Bridge to Nowhere. A $223 million, mile-long bridge to connect Ketchikan, Alaska (pop 8000) to Gravina Island (pop 50). The intent of the bridge, it seems, is to put the local ferry boat operator out of business.
Just our luck: humans are one of the few (or maybe only) species that don't actually have a penis bone.
Can you imagine breaking a penis bone? Ow ow ow. You'd have to wear a cast for weeks while under strict doctor's orders to avoid women and pornography.
And obviously the people answering phones and sorting mail there deserve to be punished, because they're contribuing to a business they A) have no control over B) likely do not even understand the business model of and C) probably honestly believe does useful work (possible as a result of B). Good for you. It would be weak to take factors like intent into account when dishing out punishment.
So the company gets off the hook by having employees and hiding the truth from them. You have a strange sense of morality.
I'll be sure to keep that in mind when it's exposed that your company has been buying overseas slave labor or funding execuitive's trips to Tailand for sex with 11-year-old boys or poluting the local water source or whatnot.
From this I can only assume that if you found out your employer was funding executive sex tour packages you'd be OK with it and would continue to work there. No wonder you posted AC.
No, it means you have to publish your public key and make it available to the game you shoot. Just print it out base-64 encoded and nail it to trees in the area so that the deer can be sure that it's you shooting them and not someone else.
Good lord. I wonder what would happen to society if we punished mistakes with such extremity.
You're missing the point. This isn't about "punishing" a single incident. It's about Choicepoint's whole business model, which would be illegal in a sane world.
Until they radically restructure themselves to make their money in some other way, they shouldn't be in business.
Maybe Intelligent Design can get some respect if other hard-to-test and long-shot hypotheses are allowed to be called "science".
Doubt it. Both string theory and Intelligent Design may be unfalsifiable, but then they are also unfalsifiable for different reasons. A major goal of string theory was to make the theory falsifiable, by looking for low energy phenomena that could be predicted by it. The string theorists failed, because their theory takes place in what turns out to be an unobservable realm with no observable predictions, but at least they were trying. Intelligent Design's unfalsifiablity was built into it by design.
String theory could still surprise you. They might make unexpected progress and come up with some string-theory derived explanation for some low energy phenomenon, like the mass of the proton. But Intelligent design will never successfully predict a thing since by nature it is not a predictive theory.
The NSF was founded because the easy research like buoyancy, boats, and candles were all pretty well covered. But this isn't the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries anymore, and scientific advances now require lots of time, money, and resources since we had pretty well covered the easy stuff like candles already. That is why we set up a federal support structure for scientific research that only a few short years ago was the envy of the world. The earlier paradigm does not work. You cannot cut all scientific funding and expect some lone genius working in his basement to discover new things about DNA for you on the cheap in time for your cancer treatment. As we advance further, scientific and technical advances tend to cost more in time and treasure, and in general they will not happen unless they are profitable. That's just common sense, which seems to be in short supply.
Oh wait, the president only said that federal funding wouldn't be available, he didn't actually ban anything (except human cloning), now did he? In fact, there aren't really a 'raft of restrictions' at all, just a short list of stem cell lines for which federal funding is available, and not for any others.
Oh wait, you have no idea how science gets funded in this country, and are parroting a talking point that someone prepared for your consumption. Most scientific research depends on federal funding. The stem cell lines on the "short list" are useless because there are so few of them and they are now contaminated with the cells from other animals that are used to keep the stem cells alive. The Bush ban isn't a matter of the government paying for all your lab costs except for particular stem cell lines which get crossed off as a line item. If any lab in any scientific research organization touches a non-Bush-approved stem cell line, it "poisons" the entire organization "GPL-style" and all federal funding gets cut off for all research that the organization might be doing whether it is related to stem cells at all or not. That will effectively shut it down.
If this is the universal panacea that it's being touted to be, then there should be no difficulty finding state, local, or private funding sources. You just can't feed out of the FEDERAL money-trough on this one.
The voters of the state of California approved Prop 71 which set up a bond for a stem-cell research in the state as a result of the federal funding restriction. The state would be getting a new non-federal research facility that would not be tainted by a single dollar of federal funding for equipment or office supplies or anything. Unfortunately, construction on the facility has now been held up for years now because of lawsuits from litigious wingnuts.
4 bytes (SSN) + 14 bytes (avg) for a name + null byte = 19 bytes each. 262 million US citizens * 19 bytes is 4.64GiB. If you keep the optimal binary format, and want to add DOB, add another 4 bytes per record for a total of 5.6GiB.
Oh come on- this is so fluffy. You could encode the information far more efficiently than this.
First of all these numbers are handed out by SSN offices which determine the first 5 digits of the number. (I think the state determines the first 3, and the second 2 are a code for the office.) I bet the distribution is very lumpy- each office assigns a range of numbers, and has a range free (and they don't want to waste them). So you can store them in order of increasing SSN. Have a fixed record for the office and its code, then a list of names starting with 0000, 0001, 0002 with a code for run length encoded NULLs. Then the names can be tokenized. You should have a global list of common tokens at the top of the file (Smith, Jones, Mitchell, as well as firsts like John, George, Jennifer) and a smaller localized token dictionary of LAST names included with each office header to nail those towns where a hundred people show up at the SSN office with a last name like "Hamalainensen".
Of course, then the car thief needs specialized software to decode the file, and it won't compress as well. But the compression algorithm shouldn't get to have all the fun.
One of these days some government employee is going to run an errand with a laptop in his car and a lucky car thief will drive off with every single name and Social Security number in the country. You could fit them all on a USB thumb drive. And they could be all over the Internet within hours. It would be game over for Social Security numbers and the rickety infrastructure that has been built on top of them. It's only a matter of time before this happens. It might not be in a single theft as I described, but smaller thefts will eventually add up to the point where everyone's SSN has been compromised, and someone is going to compile them and make them widely available.
That would be the most bitchin' thumb drive, wouldn't it? You could show it to all your friends and taunt them. I'd better not lose my keys or you're all screwed!
Why does every tech article, without fail, have more political jibes in it than tech comments? I just started reading the comments under this story, and this is only the first one I saw. I'm sure it won't be the last. Slashdot should just save itself the trouble and redirect all of its traffic to MoveOn.org or DNC.org.
I don't understand. You opened an article about the fundamental rules of the Internet being rewritten by a bunch of technically illiterate politicians, and you're surprised to find people are discussing politics?
WTF do you expect people to be talking about?
I share your nostalgia for the days when politics wasn't a major topic here. Now please wake the fuck up.
Slashdot Mirror
When I roll my chair wheels over that bubble packing material and pop the plastic bubbles, lots of neutrons come flying up from the floor. Has anyone else noticed this?
Not to rain on anybodies parade, but if that supernova sends a gamma ray burst in our direction. We can kiss our asses goodby....
It won't make gasoline more expensive, will it?
Although I'm sure technology will have advanced by then to let me use gamma rays to run my Hummer.
Will the photon front be in front of or behind the Earth when astronomers lose federal funding for looking in the direction of that star?
(Don't forget about the 5 light year spread!)
Almost. The pretense is still there that it is a drug-free game.
I think you'd see much more steroid use if that pretense were dropped. Currently our athletes are forced to choose steroids based on their serum trace and the chance of being caught, instead of just choosing the best steroid for the job which should be their ONLY consideration. If everyone is on steroids anyway then as a fan I want my team to be on the best steroids.
Screw multi-ton space vessels.
The sport *I* would like to see would be a normal sport, like football, soccer, or hockey, where the "no drugs" pretense has been dropped, no testing is perormed, and players are encouraged to enhance their performance by any means possible wink wink. A game where all the players are on uppers and going through 'roid rage would make me more interested in the sport.
To me a more logical explanation of the filler DNA is to act as a buffer against flaws.
/* and */ "comment delimiters" are subject to conditionals, so that splicing is not performed at those points and the intron actually makes it into the finished protein. A number of regulatory mechanisms work this way- the intron changes the function of the protein product to either make it functional or non-functional or different somehow. The finished protein might suppress a "conditional" elsewhere or land on a promoter region to encourage expression of the next gene in some cascade. (Biology is full of needlessly complicated "cascades" with useless steps that can't be gotten rid of for legacy reasons.) It's as if "run time" and "compile time" are both all the time with an infinite number of threads running on code that constantly rewrites itself and controls its own compilation and execution.
Nothing in biology has a "purpose". It isn't like a car where every part serves a well thought out function. You can find some organs with single well-defined functions, like the heart, but most serve a range of ill-defined roles. Bones, for example, are making white blood cells. The liver does all sorts of stuff. Everything happens because it happened before in a way that it can happen again. Everything is needlessly complex, full of awful unstable hacks. Absolutely no consideration was made during the process to make anything easy to understand.
In fact, evolution bears a large resemblance to dysfunctional software development by a team of beginner developers who don't talk to each other and who like to create code with legacy issues. One guy will code something because he doesn't know some other guy already wrote something to handle it- creating redundant systems that compete with each other. The body is full of stuff like that. An example would be the anterolateral system (evolved earlier) and the posterior dorsal column system (evolved later), two competing systems in your spinal cord. You need two, because just one would make medical school too easy I guess. There is a lot of cut and paste coding going on (introns are full of commented out goodies). And just like bad software that "evolves", there are buried broken features in you that don't work anymore- but even evolution can't "refactor" them out of your body. Hiccups, for example, served a function in the gills of the Devonian fish we evolved from, but they just annoy us. There is zero selective pressure for us to retain hiccups- in fact there is negative pressure, since a tiger might hear you hiccup and eat you before you reproduce. And yet hiccups haven't gone away after hundreds of millions of years.
As for garbage DNA- while there are advantages conferred by noncoding DNA (in high radiation environments, exposure to mutagens, viruses, transposons, and other genetic parasites, etc.) strictly speaking the DNA has no purpose since it is part of an evolved system, not an engineered one. Introns are a side effect of most evolutionary algorithms that rely on crossover and exchange of homologous sequences. In the field of genetic programming, they are a nuisance- the profusion of introns quickly becomes a problem as they consume computational resources- but you can't just get rid of them, because they contain most of your genetic diversity and some of them have really good ideas in them.
Junk DNA contains many versions of (parts of) genes that are disabled; you can think of some of them as commented out code that gets cut and pasted around occasionally. There are "sunken ships", recognizable genes in noncoding regions that have been accumulating mutations for thousands of years. We use them to measure mutation rates. The most common gene in the genome is reverse transcriptase- a gene used only by viruses- there are several hundred "sunken ship" versions of reverse transcriptase in your genome that probably wouldn't work anymore if a virus tried to use them. Within introns, there are also "if statements", where the
What is more evil to me is a law mandating that either side do something. Why do we need a law to handle an idea this stupid? If Verizon tries to collect money from Google, what will make Google pay?
What will make Google pay will be the fact that Verizon can now block Google until Verizon extracts as much money from them as they think they deserve. Do you think Google searches will be free if that happens?
A short while ago Verizon wouldn't have been able to block Google without the FCC stepping in. But the FCC issued a ruling recently that the phone companies can block whoever they want for any reason and net neutrality will no longer be enforced. This was done without a law being passed. (Which does NOT make it OK.)
It would be nice if the Bush FCC changed its mind and reversed itself. Until then, we need the law, and despite what you've heard on the teevee, all laws are not evil.
Excel (I forget which version) got some autoformatting features a while back that are incredibly annoying if they're inappropriate for what you're doing. Most users didn't know to turn them off before editing data files that they would later import into our application. So people bitched at us: "Your software keeps turning my identifiers into dates!!!"
Plus there'd be people saying how those in those stories "created a hostile work environment for woman".
Well in the U.S. they certainly would. American ladies are just daintier and more virtuous than British women.
(ducks)
Well doesn't the laptop have a voltage regulator on the board? You'd think it would be a safe assumption for the average user... :)
Look at non-lethal policing weapons. They haven't replaced lethal force, they've just allowed the police to weaponize conflicts they previously wouldn't have had weapons for: they can shoot first against a civilian demonstration if they aren't using bullets.
.45. But the police have way more nonlethal toys than that, and if you've decided that these standard options are just not for you, you'll still be able to find something that fits your style- perhaps tear gas grenades, or pepper spray, or even something as simple as the lowly police baton.
Which is completely unfair if the civilians aren't going to be armed with the same range of devices that are available to police. So the public needs to start arming itself with these weapons immediately. This means all of you- open another tab right now and start buying some non-lethal weaponry for the next time you run into the police in a crowded public setting. Tasers are sold to nervous women all over the Internet, and you can buy "X-Ring" rubber bullets in a variety of calibers up to
The non-lethal weapon I want is the capture net that is fired from a 37 mm launcher, with weights at the corners that spiral around the guy. I'd use that one at meetings for when someone comes up with a really bad idea- the kind of bad idea that needs to be stopped now before too many PHB-types hear it. I'd stand up, say "stop right there" and fire the net around the person, immobilizing him before his bad idea got any traction. I really think that would help me make my point.
If everyone in the meeting were afraid that anyone there might be armed with one of these things, it could really cut down on bad ideas.
I wouldn't trust it. The people who write bad code will write bad debug detection code... especially if they are coders who have been outsourced and do not care if it works or not.
The code in javac is more than three times the size of my HelloWorld program, so I'm not sure it's compiling it correctly. Especially if Sun farmed out javac to some outfit in Bangalore. They won't care if it works. I'm scared to run my program now. What if it doesn't say "Hello World"? It might say "Goodbye world" and then delete my hard drive since the javac guys just don't care.
I'm just going to have to hand-assemble the bytecodes myself. I don't trust anybody!
We need less cheering and more critical thinking here on Slashdot.
Then go away. We don't need your jeering either.
Yeah, this is the person you'd want to have design your network, the guy behind the proposed Bridge to Nowhere. A $223 million, mile-long bridge to connect Ketchikan, Alaska (pop 8000) to Gravina Island (pop 50). The intent of the bridge, it seems, is to put the local ferry boat operator out of business.
Just our luck: humans are one of the few (or maybe only) species that don't actually have a penis bone.
Can you imagine breaking a penis bone? Ow ow ow. You'd have to wear a cast for weeks while under strict doctor's orders to avoid women and pornography.
And obviously the people answering phones and sorting mail there deserve to be punished, because they're contribuing to a business they A) have no control over B) likely do not even understand the business model of and C) probably honestly believe does useful work (possible as a result of B). Good for you. It would be weak to take factors like intent into account when dishing out punishment.
So the company gets off the hook by having employees and hiding the truth from them. You have a strange sense of morality.
I'll be sure to keep that in mind when it's exposed that your company has been buying overseas slave labor or funding execuitive's trips to Tailand for sex with 11-year-old boys or poluting the local water source or whatnot.
From this I can only assume that if you found out your employer was funding executive sex tour packages you'd be OK with it and would continue to work there. No wonder you posted AC.
No, it means you have to publish your public key and make it available to the game you shoot.
Just print it out base-64 encoded and nail it to trees in the area so that the deer can be sure that it's you shooting them and not someone else.
Good lord. I wonder what would happen to society if we punished mistakes with such extremity.
You're missing the point. This isn't about "punishing" a single incident. It's about Choicepoint's whole business model, which would be illegal in a sane world.
Until they radically restructure themselves to make their money in some other way, they shouldn't be in business.
The best thing about the gummy bear attack is that you can eat the incriminating evidence once you've used it.
(eeeeeeeeeeeeewwwwwwww)
Maybe Intelligent Design can get some respect if other hard-to-test and long-shot hypotheses are allowed to be called "science".
Doubt it. Both string theory and Intelligent Design may be unfalsifiable, but then they are also unfalsifiable for different reasons. A major goal of string theory was to make the theory falsifiable, by looking for low energy phenomena that could be predicted by it. The string theorists failed, because their theory takes place in what turns out to be an unobservable realm with no observable predictions, but at least they were trying. Intelligent Design's unfalsifiablity was built into it by design.
String theory could still surprise you. They might make unexpected progress and come up with some string-theory derived explanation for some low energy phenomenon, like the mass of the proton. But Intelligent design will never successfully predict a thing since by nature it is not a predictive theory.
The NSF was founded because the easy research like buoyancy, boats, and candles were all pretty well covered. But this isn't the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries anymore, and scientific advances now require lots of time, money, and resources since we had pretty well covered the easy stuff like candles already. That is why we set up a federal support structure for scientific research that only a few short years ago was the envy of the world. The earlier paradigm does not work. You cannot cut all scientific funding and expect some lone genius working in his basement to discover new things about DNA for you on the cheap in time for your cancer treatment. As we advance further, scientific and technical advances tend to cost more in time and treasure, and in general they will not happen unless they are profitable. That's just common sense, which seems to be in short supply.
Oh wait, the president only said that federal funding wouldn't be available, he didn't actually ban anything (except human cloning), now did he? In fact, there aren't really a 'raft of restrictions' at all, just a short list of stem cell lines for which federal funding is available, and not for any others.
Oh wait, you have no idea how science gets funded in this country, and are parroting a talking point that someone prepared for your consumption. Most scientific research depends on federal funding. The stem cell lines on the "short list" are useless because there are so few of them and they are now contaminated with the cells from other animals that are used to keep the stem cells alive. The Bush ban isn't a matter of the government paying for all your lab costs except for particular stem cell lines which get crossed off as a line item. If any lab in any scientific research organization touches a non-Bush-approved stem cell line, it "poisons" the entire organization "GPL-style" and all federal funding gets cut off for all research that the organization might be doing whether it is related to stem cells at all or not. That will effectively shut it down.
If this is the universal panacea that it's being touted to be, then there should be no difficulty finding state, local, or private funding sources. You just can't feed out of the FEDERAL money-trough on this one.
The voters of the state of California approved Prop 71 which set up a bond for a stem-cell research in the state as a result of the federal funding restriction. The state would be getting a new non-federal research facility that would not be tainted by a single dollar of federal funding for equipment or office supplies or anything. Unfortunately, construction on the facility has now been held up for years now because of lawsuits from litigious wingnuts.
4 bytes (SSN) + 14 bytes (avg) for a name + null byte = 19 bytes each. 262 million US citizens * 19 bytes is 4.64GiB. If you keep the optimal binary format, and want to add DOB, add another 4 bytes per record for a total of 5.6GiB.
Oh come on- this is so fluffy. You could encode the information far more efficiently than this.
First of all these numbers are handed out by SSN offices which determine the first 5 digits of the number. (I think the state determines the first 3, and the second 2 are a code for the office.) I bet the distribution is very lumpy- each office assigns a range of numbers, and has a range free (and they don't want to waste them). So you can store them in order of increasing SSN. Have a fixed record for the office and its code, then a list of names starting with 0000, 0001, 0002 with a code for run length encoded NULLs. Then the names can be tokenized. You should have a global list of common tokens at the top of the file (Smith, Jones, Mitchell, as well as firsts like John, George, Jennifer) and a smaller localized token dictionary of LAST names included with each office header to nail those towns where a hundred people show up at the SSN office with a last name like "Hamalainensen".
Of course, then the car thief needs specialized software to decode the file, and it won't compress as well. But the compression algorithm shouldn't get to have all the fun.
One of these days some government employee is going to run an errand with a laptop in his car and a lucky car thief will drive off with every single name and Social Security number in the country. You could fit them all on a USB thumb drive. And they could be all over the Internet within hours. It would be game over for Social Security numbers and the rickety infrastructure that has been built on top of them. It's only a matter of time before this happens. It might not be in a single theft as I described, but smaller thefts will eventually add up to the point where everyone's SSN has been compromised, and someone is going to compile them and make them widely available.
That would be the most bitchin' thumb drive, wouldn't it? You could show it to all your friends and taunt them. I'd better not lose my keys or you're all screwed!
Why does every tech article, without fail, have more political jibes in it than tech comments? I just started reading the comments under this story, and this is only the first one I saw. I'm sure it won't be the last. Slashdot should just save itself the trouble and redirect all of its traffic to MoveOn.org or DNC.org.
I don't understand. You opened an article about the fundamental rules of the Internet being rewritten by a bunch of technically illiterate politicians, and you're surprised to find people are discussing politics?
WTF do you expect people to be talking about?
I share your nostalgia for the days when politics wasn't a major topic here. Now please wake the fuck up.