Just because he was corrupt doesn't mean he wasn't set up on that occasion.

And in this case, the automatic response of many corporations will be to set up a new job position in charge of creating ids for all such voting, and learning how to maximize the corporation's contribution to the voting process.

I expect that this has already happened in many corporations ...

There have been numerous reports from many countries about duplicate government ID numbers due to schemes like this. There was a recent story about a similar case in Canada, with two people born the same day in the same hospital that were given identical names.

Yes, the probabilities are low, but they aren't zero. If the money has any legal or financial impact, duplicates inevitably lead to lawsuits, lost time, etc, etc.

If the ID number is important, you need to guarantee that two people don't get assigned the same number. If you let this happen, you might be surprised at how quickly it happens -- and it's your fault.

I wonder if it'd be useful to collect a list of as many such ID collisions as we can find. It could serve as a warning to anyone thinking of making the same mistake in yet another "unique ID" scheme. I did a bit of googling, but didn't find any such list anywhere.

Bugger, forgot to snip the rest of the quote.

So would a temporary session cookie, often set without the programmers knowledge, be ok?

How about a cookie which is used to remember you've done an action, but not track you. E.G. "color=red" and "color=blue".

The problem with this legislation isn't the intent, it's the complete lack of clarity coming from the ICO who are responsible for its adminstration and enforcement. The law essentially boils down to "do not track your users without their consent", which the ICO has then muddied the waters over by making some vague remarks about implied consent being OK without explaining exactly what they mean. There is a great deal of confusion over whether the request to opt-in/out needs to be overt (i.e. a click-through or banner), whether or not you can set a "do not track" cookie (you can), and so on.

It's not being helped by some totally lame implementations of the consent request, most probably due to lack of clarity from the ICO about what can and can't be done, in the cases of users with cookies and/or JavaScript disabled for a site. A frequent occurance in this case seems to be that such users either have to go through the consent request every visit or have a consent banner permanantly displayed on the screen. Both these problems could (and I'll emphasis that "could") go away quite simply if the ICO were to state that:

1. If using a script to prompt for consent and if that script is blocked then default to "do not track"
2. It's OK to try and set a cookie, read it back and if that fails assume cookies are blocked by the user and implied consent = "do not track", otherwise prompt the user for consent and act accordingly.

But all that assumes that the websites are going to act in the best interests of their users over the best interests of their bottom line; in many cases sites will be dependant on the revenue they can raise from their users, and a tracked user is going to be better targetted with ads, and thus more likely to click through, than one that is not. The more inconvenient it is for users to opt out of tracking, the more likely we are going to see those sites taking that track. Kudos on that front to the BBC who have a well thought out and graded set of cookie policies you can opt into ranging from "necessary", through "functionality" and "performance", to "behavioural advertising".

Indeed. A few years ago, I ran across a US Census Bureau web page that gave the number of people with specific first or last names, and an estimate (likely from multiplying the fractions) of the number of people in the US with a given first+last name. It said that there are about 1800 people in the US with the same name as me, and my family name isn't even Smith or Jones or any of the other top 100.

Through the years, I've seen a number of bibliographies that list things that I've written, intermixed with things written by various of those others with my name. So far, I haven't complained, since this makes us all look better than we really are. ;-)

Still, it could be useful if we had a reasonable way to separate out such things and give individuals the proper acknowledgement for their contributions to our knowledge. But I'd be surprised if we could actually do this job right, within the lifetimes of people now living.

Among those of us familiar with the old music of the British Isles, one ongoing frustration is the misattribution of music written by Niel Gow or Neil Gow. One of those was the grandfather of the other; do you know which was which? The intermediate in the male line was Nathaniel Gow, who also wrote a lot of good tunes, and collectors also confuse him with his father and his son despite the different name. Somehow, I suspect that this Unique ID system won't be extended to them, any more than I expect it to be implemented accurately for living authors.

(And none of this will stop current publishers from claiming copyright for their works. ;-)

Why is Nixon a dirty word today, and G. Gordon Liddy a political pundit?

Because Bruce Perens makes his living by talking about and participating in copyright shakedowns?

I just bought a stand alone automotive GPS. none of our three vehicles have one built in. The old ones we have are lame Magellans; I bought a Garmin with lifetime traffic and maps. It's a refurb so it costs just a little over a hundred bucks.

I live in the boonies where it's not always possible to get a signal at all. Google map caching cannot be controlled and it expires every 30 days, so you have to manually uncache and recache oh and by the way, you don't get the places for that region, just the maps. Garmin has a standalone app with downloaded maps, but they don't even offer lifetime maps for it, you have to buy them two years at a time. And since I don't have an Android phone, I'd have to buy a tablet to run it on. Getting the same kind of daylight viewability as a typical dedicated GPS device in a tablet requires spending a significant piece of money, and I'll have to pay for maps every two years. I've had the same GPS for four years (and I bought it used) so that's a valid concern.

  A Garmin device with lifetime quarterly map updates can be had for less than a hundred bucks. You can use it at the same time you use your phone. It works where/when there's no phone signal. The majority of cars sold don't have navigation; mostly built-in navigation is awful. A phone with a navigation app is just not a good substitute for a real GPS device. It is an adequate one for most purposes, but that's it. There's no sign that dedicated GPS devices will go away any time soon.

The two events are highly temporally related, so it's essentially impossible not to see a connection there...

Pretty sad when Flash is better than what you're using