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Admin
I shouldn't feed an obvious troll, but here:
http://2010.census.gov/2010census/how/interactive-form.php
That should answers your questions, but I suspect that you don't care what the answers are because that might conflict with your tin-foil hat world view.
Admin
Obviously it's a government plot. All those people who can't do this simple math will be rounded up and shot.
Admin
Um, you're completely missing the point. Just because they say they want it doesn't make it any more constitutional.
Admin
[quote user="Hatterson] The relationship between SSNs and people is supposed to be 1:1 although in practice (do to change someone's number for various reasons) it ends up being many:1
The one thing it is not is 1:many
Simply because I use (illegally I might add) someone else's SSN doesn't mean it still isn't an identifier unique to them.[/quote]
Are you sure about that? Let's see, SSNs are of the form ###-##-####, which means 1,000,000,000 unique numbers. If SSN's are never recycled, how many years do you think they last from inception to exaustion?
Admin
Admin
Great! Jane Smith has my SSN too. Looks like I have health insurance after all!
Admin
Admin
Alex is trolling to make Mark feel better.
Admin
[quote user="justsomedude"][quote user="Hatterson] The relationship between SSNs and people is supposed to be 1:1 although in practice (do to change someone's number for various reasons) it ends up being many:1
The one thing it is not is 1:many
Simply because I use (illegally I might add) someone else's SSN doesn't mean it still isn't an identifier unique to them.[/quote]
Are you sure about that? Let's see, SSNs are of the form ###-##-####, which means 1,000,000,000 unique numbers. If SSN's are never recycled, how many years do you think they last from inception to exhaustion? [/quote]
SSNs may not fill the whole number space. I believe that the first 3 digits describe US states. So, they are limited to less than the 1,000 possibilities. Also, I've never seen a zero in an SSN.
Admin
Backup the database, restore the table with a different name, make the change, drop or rename the table, and make the atomic rename change on the restore; scan for and import the change differences from the 10 minutes the previous op took.
And stop crying, you fucking hardware monkey.
Admin
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Or you just made the whole thing up.
Admin
Stop helping. You're not.
Admin
Really? Do you actually deal with SSN's? I deal with them all the time and see plenty of zeros. In fact, my SSN has a zero in it.
Admin
You do realize without hardware monkeys you wouldn't have a paycheck, right?
Disclaimer: I am a software monkey.
Admin
Very true, I was trying to error on the large side since it makes the point even stronger. On a side note, I believe the first three digits are not specific to US states, they identify the SS office that issued the number.
Admin
Way to approach evolution from a results perspective, you... educated designist thinker, you.
Disclaimer: This software monkey is usually called upon to solve hardware problems once the hardware monkeys have fucked it all up. And blamed it on the software, because that's all they know. Blame.
Admin
Aha! We just narrowed it down by 38%! A few more uninformed statements and we'll have you!
Admin
sleep
Admin
I think the real WTF is the data layer clearly supports parameters, but the submitted query has hard-coded times. The poor database doesn't even get the chance to reuse a previous query plan!
Admin
My brother and I applied for our SSNs at roughly the same time (i.e. within minutes of each other) and at the same place, and they differ in the first three digits. (This was, obviously, back in the days before the tax law required all dependents to have SSNs, and our social security cards were carved into bear skins with stone chisels.)
Admin
Disclaimer: I have no problem with anyone who does their job correctly, from bagging groceries and mowing lawns, to writing application software or administering server farms. The issue here is the dumbass that thinks IN ALL SITUATIONS, ADDING A COLUMN TO A PKEY IS A MISTAKE. At least the original DBA whiner was mostly honking about having to do anything at all(outside of his normal job description of nothing, nothing, nothing, mine-sweeper, nothing, solitaire, nothing, nothing, halo and nothing), and took the time and professional courtesy to couch that complaint by claiming the app developers were insisting he deploy untested code to production.
Admin
or perhaps Time for a Date with same Irish Girl
(Happy St Paddy's day too!!)
Admin
And who's going to know if you are answering them truthfully?
If you don't think they should be asking the question, either don't answer it or LIE!!
Admin
An insurance company in the US has absolutely no need for a social security number whatsoever, nor must you have one in order to buy insurance. If the insurance company asks me for my social security number and I refuse to give it to them, they'll end up putting garbage in the field (it's required because an ignoramus assumed it must be unique and made it the key).
It is not illegal to provide someone else's social security number unless you are attempting to represent yourself as that individual. (i.e. If I give them 123-45-6789 to protect my privacy and all my other information is true and correct, then I haven't committed a crime whether or not it happens to be the real SSN of someone unknown to me.)
Admin
FFS: OP#1 said 'Why do they need to know...' OP#2 said 'Here is there explanation'
Where has he missed the point? He wasn't justifying it, merely pointing out that there is an explanation. Didn't actually see him say that it meant it wasn't unconstitutional!
Admin
Get used to disappointment.
Admin
Wait! Crap! You almost had me! Nice try.
Admin
An SSN is made up of an Area Number (first 3), Group Number (next 2) and Serial Number (last 4). Any of the three parts can have a zero, but any part must have at least one non-zero number.
Admin
Title 13 of US Code (authorized by an act of Congress)
Sec. 221. Refusal or neglect to answer questions; false answers
(a) Whoever, being over eighteen years of age refuses or willfully neglects, when requested by the Secretary, or by any other authorized officer or employee of the Department of Commerce or bureau or agency thereof acting under the instructions of the Secretary or authorized officer, to answer, to the best of his knowledge, any of the questions on any schedule submitted to him in connection with any census or survey provided for by subchapters I, II, IV, and V of chapter 5 of this title, applying to himself or to the family to which he belongs or is related, or to the farm or farms of which he or his family is the occupant, shall be fined not more than $100.
(b) Whoever, when answering questions described in subsection (a) of this section, and under the conditions or circumstances described in such subsection, willfully gives any answer that is false, shall be fined not more than $500. (c) Notwithstanding any other provision of this title, no person shall be compelled to disclose information relative to his religious beliefs or to membership in a religious body.
Admin
The page linked to may answer the question "why do they need to know these things?", but it does not appear to answer the question "how is knowing these things necessary to coming up with a head count for the House of Representatives?".
There may in fact be a legitimate answer to that question; even if not, there may be other constitutional justification for asking these questions in the census, beyond simply allocating House seats. I don't see any such answer or justification on that page, however.
CAPTCHA: nimis. Hey! I don't think I've seen that one before!
Admin
The Constitution trumps any act of Congress, since the Constitution created and empowers Congress.
Constitution of the United States, Section 1, Article 2: Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.
Enumeration means counting, not a detailed survey. You don't even have to give your name. Just the number of people where you live.
Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
If the Constitution does not explicitly give Congress the power to do something, they can't (legally) do it.
Of course, the Constitution is just a flimsy joke since the last 50 to 100 years, but anyway, that's what it says.
Admin
What does that mean? It means that it will cost you 'not more than' $600 to avoid answering those questions.
How strongly do you feel about it? - if it really bothers you, $600 (in fact, less than $600) is a small price to pay....if it doesn't bother you so much, grin and bear it!!
I know someone who always tried to write in ineligible scrawl on census papers, although that's not so easy for Check Box questions....
While were on information they don't need:
In fact (as with almost any form you fill in these days) it seems like they ask for way too much unnecessary information.
I think questions on race are potentially important to assess demographics. However, the question could be better written (anything question that needs an 'other' option shouldn't be a check box to begin with). I think Question 8 is wrong too (you could get the same information asking a question that doesn't appear to target a particular group).
Of course, I'm not a yank - I assume Census' (Censii?) in the US are used to establish demographics. I also think the Census is a crock for the most part, but I hate statistics in general....
Admin
Sadly, I've seen a variation on this before. My particular favourite was the guy who was a friend of the boss who often asked us for programming advice (he was a C programmer). He had a currency string and wanted to strip all the non-integer symbols out of it (e.g. wanted $3.00 to become 300). Before we could respond with an answer, we got another email saying he'd solved the problem. His answer? To pass it to the SQL engine, not once, but twice. The first time to strip the '$' out, the second time to take care of the '.'. (He didn't specify exactly how he got SQL to do that, and that probably would've opened up a whole new can of WTFs unto itself)
The most worrying thing about it was that he actually had clients who paid to use his software. Scary stuff.
Admin
From http://www.prisonplanet.com/census-data-not-so-confidential-after-all.html
Unfortunately, choosing privacy now costs more: legislation recently passed raises the fine for “anyone over 18 years old who refuses or willfully neglects to complete the questionnaire or answer questions posed by census takers” from a limit of $100 to $5,000—a fact not advertised even in the small print.
It's worth reading the whole article.
Admin
This actually happened in one production DB I had the good fortune to work with. Luckily, the records also had a UNIQUEID field which was auto-allocated by the DB on an INSERT.
Admin
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And of course, if you're using MS SQL Server, there's the ever-popular option of a column of type GUID.
Admin
also can't start with 666 or have all 0's in any of the 3 sections, and other restricted ranges of numbers set aside for special uses.
Admin
SELECT GETDATE()
There is zero benefit to wrapping this in a stored procedure. It won't be faster. You can't manage security with the stored procedure because there is no possible way to deny a user the right to execute this statement directly. I can't think of any reason to add complexity to this process other than "Do it, monkey, because I said so". Did somebody think that the implementation of retrieving the current date and time would change some time in the future?
Admin
Sorry dudes, but the code makes perfect sense to me. Date calculations are notoriously dangerous if you want any kind of accuracy, particularly if you deal with multiple time zones, and especially if there's variation in Daylight Saving Time periods, or if you care about second accuracy (Leap seconds can be a bitch), or if you have no control over the clock configuration on the client app.
Ideally all dates should be stored in GMT which solves most of these conundrums, but when you have tons of legacy code, ideal is rarely practical.
Admin
TRWTF is they ask you how many people are in your household on April 1 . . . In March.
Admin
That is the plan for implementation, by the way, what you suggested. And despite all the TRWTF'ers, there is in fact a reasonable explanation for wanting to expand the compound PK on this table from two columns to three. Of sorts. As the person who owns the ETL process that loads data to this table every night and will therefore hear about any data issues, I'm very happy that they've agreed to develop new reports against a test table.
(That's TRWTF in my story. I work for a Fortune 100 company, and I *design tables, *design ETL process to load them, *administer the ETL processes, and *administer the database in question. And it's taken all of my work-shirking expertise to not get saddled with any of the front-end application development, which I undoubtedly would have ruined by writing functions that determined the current date & time with database calls.)
(And TRTRWTF: I've recently been promoted to supervisor. So in theory, I guess I should be telling someone else to do all those things. I'm still working on that part.)
Admin
There were a bunch of links to related articles on the Old New Thing recently: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2010/03/12/9977245.aspx Enjoy.
Admin
Admin
+1
Admin
What I've always wondered about SSNs is that there are 9 digits, which means there are 1,000,000,000 possible SSNs. Now the number is further reduced because they are dispersed regionally and by birth year, with the first three and next two digits representing those values. Further remove the numbers that are PROBABLY not used, 000-00-0000, etc, and you have fewer than 1 billion SSNs available. Now, the federal government says that dead peoples' numbers are not and will not be reused, so have there seriously not been 1 billion people in history that have been issued a Social Security Number?
Admin
[quote user="Massive Debt"][quote user="justsomedude"][quote user="Hatterson] The relationship between SSNs and people is supposed to be 1:1 although in practice (do to change someone's number for various reasons) it ends up being many:1
The one thing it is not is 1:many
Simply because I use (illegally I might add) someone else's SSN doesn't mean it still isn't an identifier unique to them.[/quote]
Are you sure about that? Let's see, SSNs are of the form ###-##-####, which means 1,000,000,000 unique numbers. If SSN's are never recycled, how many years do you think they last from inception to exhaustion? [/quote]
SSNs may not fill the whole number space. I believe that the first 3 digits describe US states. So, they are limited to less than the 1,000 possibilities. Also, I've never seen a zero in an SSN.[/quote]
I have a 0 in my frist three digits. Kentucky, issued 1974.