Wish mine were prime. However, for the first time I noticed that listed as an "achievement" on my /. user page it says:
Member of the 10010 Digit (binary) UID Club , which is almost as good.
I really don't know how one would reasonably call this an "achievement" though.

A simple solution for now would be just to add 4 or 5 digits to the new SSNs that are issued. That would break so many systems that others would have to address the real problem.

Or simply change it to a HEX value. Instantly you get an expansion of possible 'numbers'. Personally, I'd like to see them go to a 10-digit hex number with a checksum as the last char. The main reason I'd not go beyond 10 digits is because the larger the number, the more difficult it is to remember.

Unfortunately, changing that particular field is a non-trivial exercise given how widely it is used.

There are also numerous other issues with them using the SSN as an authentication token as well. Much of this was discussed further upthread. It simply is not the authentication token that people think it is and misuse it as.

There is a reason we call it "Government Level Stupidity".

It depends largely upon where you live. Went to transunion earlier today and they wanted to charge me $10.50 for a credit freeze. They didn't even state how long it was good for. I'd guess a year. So, if I want to freeze my credit report at all 3 agencies, it would likely cost me more than $30/year.

Maybe now I won't have to deal with emails at work that have a huge screen print of text that would have been much more appropriate to copy/paste. This is especially bad with command line output. Users will send you a screenshot of the cmd.exe window rather than just copying/pasting the contents. This means I can't copy/paste the parts of the content for my own use, and instead have to type crap out myself, which will inevitably lead to typos and such.

Many moons ago I was working in a datacenter and we had a crew in the hallway hanging wallpaper. In order to do so, they had to remove the box that normally covered the Emergency Power Cutoff switch (which was actually a Big Red Button) that would instantly drop power to the whole room. I'm sure you can guess where this is going...

One of the paper hangers bumped into the BRB, and *poof*, there went the power to the room. In the data center, we were in the middle of a shift change. My coworkers and I were standing around discussing handoff, and whatnot. Suddently, we heard a huge Boom as a crapload of switches tripped all around us. Then we heard the drives and fans spinning down.

As I said, this was a ways back. In the data center we had 12 HP-3000/70 minicomputers, a couple of VAX 11/780s, and a water-cooled IBM 3090 mainframe that were our main systems in the room. The disk drives on the HPs were disk packs of 16" platters sitting in drives the size of a small washtub. They produced a lot of noise. Each HP3K had about 8 or 9 of these things daisy-chained behind the system itself.

The room was loud. All the time. Well, when the power dropped, all those drives started to spin down. We were all just kind of standing around looking at each other, not knowing what had happened. You could hear the pitch of all those drives winding down, becoming a lower and lower note, until finally - silence.

Simon and Garfunkle had a song called "The Sound of Silence" many year even further back into the dim reaches of time from when all this was taking place. This was the first instance in my life when I really understood what silence actually sounded like. It was eerie. You never heard silence in the computer room. You have UPS, generators and all kind of other things to make sure you never actually heard silence.

So, there we were, standing around with our mouths hanging open, and listening to the eerie silence. The moment broke, and we quickly determined what had happened. Rather than just cut the power back on, we went through and powered off all the drives and such so we could slowly bring everything back up in an orderly fashion.

One thing that I learned that day was that HP-3000 minicomputers contain a battery designed to allow the things to ride through such catastrophes. Out of the twelve HPs, once we had powered back on all of the drives, nine of them just started executing their next instruction and continued on as if nothing whatsoever had happened. Three needed to be coldstarted, which wasn't a really big deal. Within 30 minutes or so of power being brutally disconnected we had all of them running smoothly, or at least on the way up.

The two DECs weren't quite so resiliant, but after checking their dirty disks, they came back up as well.

An IBM 3090 does not like to have it's power just cut off. It really doesn't. We ended up having issues and it took about 24 hours to return to normal operational status.

The entire event was kind of cool to run through. Gave me a new respect for HP engineering. For many of our users, all they experienced was that their terminal froze for about 20 minutes, then continued on where it had stopped.

I don't know if the paper hanger lost his job, but we lost several thousand user hours of time while they were sitting staring at their frozen terminals.

It was certainly an interesting experience, and I'll never forget the Sound of Silence in the Computer Room.

Agreed with your comment. Thunderbird is a mature product that really doesn't need much additional work other than bug and security fixes. From Thunderbird, I can send and receive email with multiple services, including local mail.

For those who want calendaring, the Lightning plugin works reasonably well. Enigmail similarly works for those who would like to actually have the ability to send send encrypted messages. For myself, I don't need much else. There is no reason to bloat on features just to have "development" occurring.

Do not fix what isn't broken. Yeah, maintenance isn't sexy, but it's really all that is needed.

Wish I had mod points. Liberal "compassion" is just a nicer way of looking down their noses.

So, not evil, just lazy and incompetent.

Typical Microsoft then. Why do it right when you don't have to?

As someone who handles a lot of resumes I plainly see that many foreign applicants are infact more qualified in some cases. So I don't think they should end the H1B program. They just need to end the abuse of it.

In my experience, those "qualifications" on the resumes are not worth the time it takes to even read them. They are a fantasy at best.

I suggest micro-engraving data on gold leaf with QR-codes. It's fairly compact, has built-in error checking, and is a well-documented format. You can fit 1,264 bits of data in a single QR code.

I wonder how much data you could fit on a 4"x4" bit of gold leaf using micro-engraving. It would be an interesting experiment.

Not really sure why this was modded down. Skype for business compatibility would definitely be a major plus. I just downloaded the Linux Skype client, and it won't let me log in using my S4B creds.

Good advise, not getting involved in anything not "core" to the business.

The problem is, sometimes that still doesn't help. I was employed by a company that was based almost purely on analytics. They hoovered information about their targeted area (yeah, I'm being intentionally vague), repackaged it and had their in-house 'analytic engines' massage the stuff before reselling it.

They were/are big sellers to government, business, and the press. Then some PHB got the smart idea of outsourcing their IT stuff to another company (who shall also remain nameless). Now, the only actual product of this company was the data itself. They had no manufacturing or similar operations. I would have thought that the IT stuff was in fact their 'core business', and to this day would argue the same.

Anyway, rather than saving anything at all, they merely instituted yet another layer of unaccountability. I most specifically do not call it any form of actual "accountability", as all it has done is elevated finger pointing and buck passing to an art form. Even though many of the former IT workers for the company were essentially 'sold' to the outsourced company, there was still a huge drain of institutional knowledge in all IT areas. My particular support group essentially evaporated within about 3 months of my leaving.

The people who took over our former responsibilities were almost entirely 'offshore assets', who had zero knowledge of the how/why of the environments. To the best of my knowledge, no actual money has been 'saved' by this outsourcing decision, and all it has essentially done is make the company that much slower to do anything because instead of having one level of bureaucracy to deal with, you now have two, and each of those two levels have conflicting missions. The vendor just wants to keep costs as low as possible, while the business just wants to get things done. Add to that, the fact that prior to this massive divestiture, you had groups with quite a bit of institutional knowledge in its area of responsibility, and these groups and the individuals within them took ownership of the areas they supported. Now, there is no institutional knowledge, and no ownership. People work on everything up to the various bright lines that demarcate what is "theirs" and what is "ours", and doesn't take initiative to actually try to figure out what is "best".

Over all, I'd say it's been a complete waste of time, money and effort. The company is still hobbling along on pre-existing momentum, but there is a big vacuum out there that someone else will eventually fill.

while I'm here ranting, I'd like to ask if anyone has ever actually seen one of these big IT deals like this that actually worked and made sense? I've seen a lot of weird goings on, over the past 40 years in different companies, and I can honestly say that sometimes I'm absolutely astounded that most of them have managed to stay in business. (The only one with a real clue didn't, because it was so well run that it was bought out by a criminal enterprise that was willing to leverage itself into oblivion to keep it's pozi scheme running.)

You have a good point. Also, in addition to having multiple passwords for multiple sites, with various password requirements, you also might have multiple devices that need to be kept in sync from a password perspective. For instance, when I change my personal email password, I have to change it in my desktop email client, my android device, and my phone. It's a pain, and causes me to not do it as often as I otherwise would.

One thing that has really come to be a lifesaver for me is a password manager (keepassX) in my case. It helps a lot in password generation, and I also keep a history of the changes there.

Idiots hurt themselves with illegal drugs every day; until you're ready to operate a large scale gulag system your laws can't prevent that.

Not even that would help. A prison is a practical example of the perfect police state, yet it doesn't keep out drugs.