Read my post again. I said the problem is that other organizations, not the state of South Carolina, are using SSNs as *secrets*, like a PIN. That means that when this state DB gets hacked, people are agitated because these supposed "secrets" are exposed.
There's not much problem with having a unique ID. It should just always be considered to be public knowledge, and handled accordingly.
Actually that's 100% FUD. You and the IRS are pretty much the only people that need your SSN. Down-mod parent into oblivion, and up-mod me as +5 Informative.
So everyone as a (mostly) unique ID handed out by the government. That can be used to try to uniquely identify individuals. Great.
But that in no way implies that the ID can be or should be sensitive information. In fact, any such use should be outlawed, IMHO. SSNs should NEVER be part of an algorithm used to validate one's identity for registration or sign-in (unless and until the government starts issuing tamper-resistant smart cards to enable two-factor authentication).
The whole problem is that right now it's trivially easy to provide someone else's SSN to lenders, etc., who incorrectly treat them as secrets. Thus it's trivial to fraudulently establish accounts under the wrong identity, which is the exact thing you said they need to avoid.
Who's to blame? In good part it's every single company and organization in this country that tries to use people's SSNs as some kind of secret PIN or ID. It's not.
It's a non-changing lifetime number that you have to hand over to just about every doctor's office receptionist, insurance agent, and offshored credit card phone lackey that you deal with. *Nothing* of value should depend on SSNs being kept private in any way, shape or form. You reveal this number to thousands of people over your lifetime, few of which you have any reason to trust.
Lately, companies seem to try to address this issue by truncating the SSN to its last 4 digits, then treating that portion as both the secret PIN and the part that can be publicly shown. Sheer idiocy.
That's right if someone spends weeks updating a piece of software then they shouldn't be able to expect to get compensated in the future. After all the work has already been done why should they get paid for it?
Damned straight! It's a huge injustice!
Look at my example: I just spent the last few weeks creating a stylish new mustache for Mickey Mouse. Now the Disney corporation is on my ass and won't let me sell my improved Mickey and collect my deserved compensation! This is a bunch crap. We've got to stop these communists from taking our wealth.
NASA is about science, but it's also there to put people on other worlds and to bring them back again.
Says who?
For all you people who want to spend 10X the money on space exploration to get fewer scientific results because you insist on including a dog-and-pony show, I think NASA should sell pay-per-view tickets. If they get enough money to fund your stunt that way, then great. But don't make the taxpayers fund this Hollywood-style entertainment.
If the end goal is to drive rovers around on Mars and never actually, you know, go there, then they can feel free to shut down the Mars program, because I honestly don't give a shit if there is life elsewhere in the universe if I am never going to meet it.
I've got a clue for you: With 99.999999% probability, you aren't ever going to another planet, whether NASA pays for a manned program or not.
The inevitable cost overruns of any human mission to Mars would pare down its science objectives to those now found on the ISS: attempt to do little more than keep the people on the mission alive. The main things such a mission would achieve would be to plant a flag, take postcard-worthy snapshots, and impede future science by contaminating Mars with a fecal microbes.
Most likely the other main benefit would be the gripping drama of the astronauts trying to avert disaster caused by one or more technical failures. It would be a government stimulus: Hollywood could make millions on an Apollo 13 sequel.
Automatic self-driving vehicle technology is currently advancing at an impressive rate. I'd bet a good amount of money that it we could have a robot on mars that drives as fast as the lunar rovers sooner and cheaper than a successful manned mission.
Re:Did Zuckerberg ever have to get past HR?
on
Just Say No To College
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Most people aren't born with adequate amounts of (1) or (2). That's why they go to college: To get those things.
This whole "skip college, be your own tech mogul" theory sounds like the thousands of inner-city kids who all think that their ticket out of the ghetto is to become an NBA star. Sure, it works for a couple of dozen of lucky people per year, but for the rest, it's an abysmal failure.
I don't see why you feel the local telco operators should be forced to structure their revenue in any particular way.
A company choosing not to deal with you because you're overpriced is not forcing.
The bigger carriers are just being dishonest by dropping the calls.
Look again at the fine print in your service agreement; I just did. They clearly state that they don't guarantee that any service they provide will actually work at all, and you have no recourse if it doesn't.
They're obviously taking full advantage of that part of the agreement in this case. That may be slimy, but it's not legally dishonest. They told you what might happen, and if you don't like it, you don't need to sign up with them.
Like I said, if the overpriced rural telcos don't want to get their calls dropped, they need to figure out how to operate while charging NATIONAL market rates to connect. The only logical way to do that is charge the people who choose to make themselves hard to get to for the extra costs.
Of course in the real world, this won't happen. The rural telcos will cry to Uncle Sam that they're being abused. Then they'll probably convince the congress that's been gerrymandered to over-represent rural districts to impose government-decreed social engineering on this market, yet again force the urban population to subsidize the lifestyle of rural phone users.
Because those *particular* loop customers, who are way out there in the boondocks, cost more to connect to. The people out there enjoying all that open space and fresh air should pay the higher cost of their lifestyle choices themselves.
AT&T and Verizon don't need to buy anything from anyone if they don't want to.
3. Rural customers' bills are increased to the point where they cover the extra costs for small-scale operations and more miles of wire per house. This may mean charging the rural customers per-minute for incoming long distance calls.
Telcos from the boonies then have the funds so they can afford to charge their peers reasonable market rates for routing calls. Calls don't get dropped anymore.
What I want to know is why the US has quarters instead of 20c coins.
I'll bet it's because the US dollar was modeled after the Spanish dollar, which was in turn worth 8 "reals" (aka "bits"), and was introduced centuries before decimalization came into vogue. That's why a quarter is still sometimes called "two bits".
Hi. I'm right here in the good old USA, and I can confirm for everybody that is in fact 100% an irrational attachment.
It's a relatively recent development, too. I was around in the 1970s, and I don't recall anybody back then insisting that the government introduce 1/4-cent pieces and paper 25-cent bills to address the value points filled by the current dollars and pennies.
It is truly an irrational pursuit that only sees these materials as weapons. It is our most valuable resource. Actually that would be U-235. We could be using it a lot more efficiently in a new generation of molten salt type reactors.
When will all the pro-nuke dorks on this site get it through their heads that the problem with fission power is NOT TECHNICAL. And that therefore, no newfangled fission technology will accomplish anything.
The problem with fission power is human nature. If this species were competent enough to obtain the majority of its power from nuclear fission, we wouldn't be drawing up war plans right now over Iran's nuclear "power" program.
Of course it would be some time in the future, because both solid fueled missiles and a manned moon presence were in the future. That reinforces my point that the stunt of slamming something into the moon (that happens to be a bomb) would prove nothing w.r.t. basing viable missiles on the moon. As it happens, the Soviets soundly beat us in the race to slam objects into the moon, and they probably knew they were ahead of us at that point. Duct taping a bomb onto the payload would also have been a trivial and equally pointless exercise for them at the time.
because it would be proof positive to the Soviets that you had actually gotten working nukes onto the moon
Detonating a nuke right before it impacts the moon would be orders of magnitude easier than landing them there, sheltering them from the elements and maintaining them there for years in operational condition. (All long range missiles were liquid fueled back then, and with the primitive computers and robotics of the time, it probably would have required a full-time manned presence on the moon, just like we had in earthbound missile silos.)
Moreover, with the technology of the era, it seems like it would be pretty hard to aim the lunar-based missiles accurately at any kind of target on the earth. There wouldn't be a frame of reference for inertial guidance that earth-based ICBMs would have. As a comparison, all the early manned missions only had to aim at a large patch of ocean for reentry, and they used human intervention to help do it.
Congratulations! You've cast meager doubt on two items of your own choosing out of hundreds of possible countermeasures. This conclusively proves that a system that rarely worked even in rigged stunts would have been an impenetrable bastion of defense in the real world.
It was certainly intended to work, up until failures progressed to the point that even the Neocons pushing it had to admit that it can't work. (Especially against any enemy smart enough to employ simple countermeasures.)
After that point, they switched to plan B and changed SDI into an elaborate Potemkin village, similar to the expensive and unworkable bomber defense systems that preceded it.
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Read my post again. I said the problem is that other organizations, not the state of South Carolina, are using SSNs as *secrets*, like a PIN. That means that when this state DB gets hacked, people are agitated because these supposed "secrets" are exposed.
There's not much problem with having a unique ID. It should just always be considered to be public knowledge, and handled accordingly.
Actually that's 100% FUD. You and the IRS are pretty much the only people that need your SSN. Down-mod parent into oblivion, and up-mod me as +5 Informative.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_number#Use_required_for_federal_tax_purposes
SSN is not an identification card, and up until '72 that used to actually be printed on them explicitly.
The utter unworkability of your suggestion in the actual world reminds me of the old Yogi Berra quote:
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.
So everyone as a (mostly) unique ID handed out by the government. That can be used to try to uniquely identify individuals. Great.
But that in no way implies that the ID can be or should be sensitive information. In fact, any such use should be outlawed, IMHO. SSNs should NEVER be part of an algorithm used to validate one's identity for registration or sign-in (unless and until the government starts issuing tamper-resistant smart cards to enable two-factor authentication).
The whole problem is that right now it's trivially easy to provide someone else's SSN to lenders, etc., who incorrectly treat them as secrets. Thus it's trivial to fraudulently establish accounts under the wrong identity, which is the exact thing you said they need to avoid.
Who's to blame? In good part it's every single company and organization in this country that tries to use people's SSNs as some kind of secret PIN or ID. It's not.
It's a non-changing lifetime number that you have to hand over to just about every doctor's office receptionist, insurance agent, and offshored credit card phone lackey that you deal with. *Nothing* of value should depend on SSNs being kept private in any way, shape or form. You reveal this number to thousands of people over your lifetime, few of which you have any reason to trust.
Lately, companies seem to try to address this issue by truncating the SSN to its last 4 digits, then treating that portion as both the secret PIN and the part that can be publicly shown. Sheer idiocy.
That's right if someone spends weeks updating a piece of software then they shouldn't be able to expect to get compensated in the future. After all the work has already been done why should they get paid for it?
Damned straight! It's a huge injustice!
Look at my example: I just spent the last few weeks creating a stylish new mustache for Mickey Mouse. Now the Disney corporation is on my ass and won't let me sell my improved Mickey and collect my deserved compensation! This is a bunch crap. We've got to stop these communists from taking our wealth.
Yoda agrees: "Do or do not. There is no try."
Sending people to stand next to flags on other planets is not a "worth goal". Sorry.
NASA is about science, but it's also there to put people on other worlds and to bring them back again.
Says who?
For all you people who want to spend 10X the money on space exploration to get fewer scientific results because you insist on including a dog-and-pony show, I think NASA should sell pay-per-view tickets. If they get enough money to fund your stunt that way, then great. But don't make the taxpayers fund this Hollywood-style entertainment.
If the end goal is to drive rovers around on Mars and never actually, you know, go there, then they can feel free to shut down the Mars program, because I honestly don't give a shit if there is life elsewhere in the universe if I am never going to meet it.
I've got a clue for you: With 99.999999% probability, you aren't ever going to another planet, whether NASA pays for a manned program or not.
The inevitable cost overruns of any human mission to Mars would pare down its science objectives to those now found on the ISS: attempt to do little more than keep the people on the mission alive. The main things such a mission would achieve would be to plant a flag, take postcard-worthy snapshots, and impede future science by contaminating Mars with a fecal microbes.
Most likely the other main benefit would be the gripping drama of the astronauts trying to avert disaster caused by one or more technical failures. It would be a government stimulus: Hollywood could make millions on an Apollo 13 sequel.
Automatic self-driving vehicle technology is currently advancing at an impressive rate. I'd bet a good amount of money that it we could have a robot on mars that drives as fast as the lunar rovers sooner and cheaper than a successful manned mission.
Most people aren't born with adequate amounts of (1) or (2). That's why they go to college: To get those things.
This whole "skip college, be your own tech mogul" theory sounds like the thousands of inner-city kids who all think that their ticket out of the ghetto is to become an NBA star. Sure, it works for a couple of dozen of lucky people per year, but for the rest, it's an abysmal failure.
So what if they're snooping on entire nations.
After all, if nobody in a nation is doing anything wrong, then that nation has got nothing to worry about.
I don't see why you feel the local telco operators should be forced to structure their revenue in any particular way.
A company choosing not to deal with you because you're overpriced is not forcing.
The bigger carriers are just being dishonest by dropping the calls.
Look again at the fine print in your service agreement; I just did. They clearly state that they don't guarantee that any service they provide will actually work at all, and you have no recourse if it doesn't.
They're obviously taking full advantage of that part of the agreement in this case. That may be slimy, but it's not legally dishonest. They told you what might happen, and if you don't like it, you don't need to sign up with them.
Like I said, if the overpriced rural telcos don't want to get their calls dropped, they need to figure out how to operate while charging NATIONAL market rates to connect. The only logical way to do that is charge the people who choose to make themselves hard to get to for the extra costs.
Of course in the real world, this won't happen. The rural telcos will cry to Uncle Sam that they're being abused. Then they'll probably convince the congress that's been gerrymandered to over-represent rural districts to impose government-decreed social engineering on this market, yet again force the urban population to subsidize the lifestyle of rural phone users.
Because those *particular* loop customers, who are way out there in the boondocks, cost more to connect to. The people out there enjoying all that open space and fresh air should pay the higher cost of their lifestyle choices themselves.
AT&T and Verizon don't need to buy anything from anyone if they don't want to.
No, the actual fair and correct solution is:
3. Rural customers' bills are increased to the point where they cover the extra costs for small-scale operations and more miles of wire per house. This may mean charging the rural customers per-minute for incoming long distance calls.
Telcos from the boonies then have the funds so they can afford to charge their peers reasonable market rates for routing calls. Calls don't get dropped anymore.
What I want to know is why the US has quarters instead of 20c coins.
I'll bet it's because the US dollar was modeled after the Spanish dollar, which was in turn worth 8 "reals" (aka "bits"), and was introduced centuries before decimalization came into vogue. That's why a quarter is still sometimes called "two bits".
Hi. I'm right here in the good old USA, and I can confirm for everybody that is in fact 100% an irrational attachment.
It's a relatively recent development, too. I was around in the 1970s, and I don't recall anybody back then insisting that the government introduce 1/4-cent pieces and paper 25-cent bills to address the value points filled by the current dollars and pennies.
It is truly an irrational pursuit that only sees these materials as weapons. It is our most valuable resource. Actually that would be U-235. We could be using it a lot more efficiently in a new generation of molten salt type reactors.
When will all the pro-nuke dorks on this site get it through their heads that the problem with fission power is NOT TECHNICAL. And that therefore, no newfangled fission technology will accomplish anything.
The problem with fission power is human nature. If this species were competent enough to obtain the majority of its power from nuclear fission, we wouldn't be drawing up war plans right now over Iran's nuclear "power" program.
Of course it would be some time in the future, because both solid fueled missiles and a manned moon presence were in the future. That reinforces my point that the stunt of slamming something into the moon (that happens to be a bomb) would prove nothing w.r.t. basing viable missiles on the moon. As it happens, the Soviets soundly beat us in the race to slam objects into the moon, and they probably knew they were ahead of us at that point. Duct taping a bomb onto the payload would also have been a trivial and equally pointless exercise for them at the time.
because it would be proof positive to the Soviets that you had actually gotten working nukes onto the moon
Detonating a nuke right before it impacts the moon would be orders of magnitude easier than landing them there, sheltering them from the elements and maintaining them there for years in operational condition. (All long range missiles were liquid fueled back then, and with the primitive computers and robotics of the time, it probably would have required a full-time manned presence on the moon, just like we had in earthbound missile silos.)
Moreover, with the technology of the era, it seems like it would be pretty hard to aim the lunar-based missiles accurately at any kind of target on the earth. There wouldn't be a frame of reference for inertial guidance that earth-based ICBMs would have. As a comparison, all the early manned missions only had to aim at a large patch of ocean for reentry, and they used human intervention to help do it.
Congratulations! You've cast meager doubt on two items of your own choosing out of hundreds of possible countermeasures. This conclusively proves that a system that rarely worked even in rigged stunts would have been an impenetrable bastion of defense in the real world.
It was certainly intended to work, up until failures progressed to the point that even the Neocons pushing it had to admit that it can't work. (Especially against any enemy smart enough to employ simple countermeasures.)
After that point, they switched to plan B and changed SDI into an elaborate Potemkin village, similar to the expensive and unworkable bomber defense systems that preceded it.
Her and her family are unusually obnoxious, but not unusually fat.
Don't blame management for something they didn't cause.
If a company can't make it selling Twinkies in Honey Boo Boo's country of origin, then it most certainly is the management's fault.
Now, how exactly does this company going out business benefit anyone
It will help every American by putting a tiny dent in our spiraling healthcare costs.