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Re:87% of the U.S. Population are uniquely identified by {DO... by jeffreymcmanus on Tuesday August 30, 2011 @05:49PM (#2943422)
True unique identifiers are immutable. At least two of those three things can be changed.
Re:87% of the U.S. Population are uniquely identified by {DO... by steve-howard on Tuesday August 30, 2011 @06:57PM (#2943579)
Gender is a bit of a stretch, if technically changeable. I don't know much on the subject but I would wager that the proportion of people who have changed gender is not statistically significant enough to change the 87% figure.
Re:87% of the U.S. Population are uniquely identified by {DO... by jeffreymcmanus on Tuesday August 30, 2011 @08:35PM (#2943772)
Identifiers are either immutable or they're not. They can't be sorta-kinda immutable.
Re:87% of the U.S. Population are uniquely identified by {DO... by geboyr on Tuesday August 30, 2011 @11:15PM (#2944110)
Do we know if she took into account population migration / movement? Looking at the description it doesn't look like it, but I'd be really curious to see how that affects the stat. Or how the stat changes if the zip code is tied to the person's DOB. In that scenario it probably drops a lot, because (I'm assuming) most people are born in a hospital, and there isn't a hospital in every zip code. So to my first comment on population movement, maybe that's actually a representation of the effect of population migration / movement. Cool.
Re:87% of the U.S. Population are uniquely identified by {DO... by Peaker on Wednesday August 31, 2011 @11:52AM (#2946079)
"True unique identifiers"? Is it anything like a true Scotsman? :-)

Something can be a unique identifier of someone in a given time point, and later become non-unique, or stop identifying that person.

Re:87% of the U.S. Population are uniquely identified by {DO... by huherto on Wednesday August 31, 2011 @12:26PM (#2946254)
It is hard to find good natural keys (that are immutable and unique). That is why many people recommend using artificial keys.