US Monitoring Database Reaches Limit, Quits Tracking Felons and Parolees 270
An anonymous reader writes "Thousands of US sex offenders, prisoners on parole and other convicts were left unmonitored after an electronic tagging system shut down because of data overload. BI Incorporated, which runs the system, reached its data threshold — more than two billion records — on Tuesday. This left authorities across 49 states unaware of offenders' movement for about 12 hours."
As the astonished submitter asks, "2 billion records?"
Now.. (Score:4, Insightful)
They just need to upgrade it so they can track the other 4 billion properly.
Damn sick criminals! ALL OF THEM.
Re:Now.. (Score:4, Insightful)
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The joy of using centralised versus distributed systems. We live in the age of the network. Load balancing data sets across multiple databases, machines and systems and merging them whenever they are needed is trivial. Designing for such load balancing is trivial as well.
Anyone designing a system that piles up everything on a single box gets whatever christmas they deserve. By the way, considering the name of the company I am not surprised. It says everything that there is to be said about their design meth
Re:Now.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I really doubt space was the actual problem because TFA says "BI Incorporated, which runs the system, reached its data threshold - more than two billion records - on Tuesday. " The max value of a signed 32 bit int is 2 147 483 647. It is much more likely that someone set an index value on the database to int years ago and then forgot about it.
Re:Now.. (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, we've all seen that happen before [slashdot.org].
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And could any of us have really blamed them?
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HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Sat, 09 Oct 2010 10:31:23 GMT Server: Apache/1.3.41 (Unix) mod_perl/1.31-rc4 Connection: close Transfer-Encoding: chunked Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
OK
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, admin@fbi.gov and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
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Are people really this dumb?
A record does not equate to a single individual. They are tracking movements so in the movement table, I am sure they have a lot of records for each person they are tracking, not to mention the other tables that contain multiple entries for people
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Each movement should be a row in a child table.
You're not designing for availability. Each movement should get it's own child table. Each hosted on a separate machine. Geographically distributed, ideally each on different continents.
Granted you might run out of continents, but if you can't just buy more then you probably can't afford my consulting fees, either. Next!
Re:Now.. (Score:4, Informative)
Posting anonymously for obvious reasons.
I was on electronic monitoring for the US BOP (bureau of prisons) through BI incorporated for about 3 years. I had to pay my own monthly bill for monitoring services, which went to BI incorporated in Colorado somewhere.
How the system works is like this: Your federal probation officer comes to your house and installs a box that looks kind of like a cable TV box. It connects to your telephone line (you must have a land line phone to be on electronic monitoring) on one end and also plugs into power. The box is pretty heavy because it has some rechargeable batteries in it so it can operate for some time if the power goes out.
You get an ankle bracelet installed that is pretty permanent - rubber band with a steel core around your ankle, and a pager-like device attached to it. Now, the device is pretty simple. Whenever you go out of range (about 100-200 ft.) of the box, it dials one of BI's modems and reports that you left. Whenever you come back in range of the box, it dials out and reports that you arrived home. If you disconnect it from power, or the power goes out, it also dials in and reports the power outage (you are never supposed to unplug it, but sometimes power outages happen). When the power comes back on, it dials in and reports the power is back online. Even if you never leave your house at all that day, it still dials in once a day to report it's status.
The purpose of this EM (electronic monitoring) system is to allow people to be on home confinement and still leave the house to go to work, get groceries, etc, but not be out at all hours of the night committing crimes.
I can easily see how 2 billion records are in the database. There are not 2 billion criminals. These are just 2 billion date/timestamp entries saying prisoner #X left their house, prisoner #X returned, etc.
I found the entire 36 month or so experience pretty surreal. The most difficult thing was wearing baggy pants to hide the ankle bracelet at work. For obvious reasons I didn't want to advertise to the world that I was a federal prisoner. It also says a lot about a society and judicial system where there are so many prisoners that they need to outsource the imprisonment of non-violent offenders to a corporation. But who am I to complain? I'm just a felon who committed a victim-less drug crime.
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It will be no time before the fear mongers on the evening news are bandying about the new statistic,
600% of the population of the US are sex offenders.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Well no wonder (Score:5, Funny)
MS Access can't possibly handle 2 billion records, no matter how much hardware you throw at it.
Re:Well no wonder (Score:4, Funny)
65536 Excel rows should be enough for anyone
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Wasn't present in 2007, either. But have you ever tried loading a spreadsheet with more than 30,000 records, let alone one with more than 100,000 records?
Hope you have enough RAM, and that nothing else is open on your system....
Oh dear oh dear oh dear (Score:2, Informative)
Also, chances are, if you think any typical business data set is best represented by a spreadsheet, you
Re:Oh dear oh dear oh dear (Score:5, Insightful)
And you are clearly completely unaware of the accounting world.
I have yet to meet an accountant that knows much of anything about access or any other database system. On the other hand the majority of them have complained about the 65000 line limit in excel.
They ALL do this. You're telling thousands of accountants to change how they do things, and honestly, not for the better. They know how to use excel and know how to make things balance with excel.
A large portion of them took accounting because it was supposed to make them a lot of money, these people don't even use 1/10th of the functionality provided in excel, lets not try to make them learn another entirely different software skill set, ok?
Even if you're currently working in IT and are like "Oh, no, our accountants have access to all this stuff in our system and they would never do that". Trust me, they do. It all ends up in an excel sheet somewhere eventually.
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And you are clearly completely unaware of the contracting world.
I have yet to meet a contractor that knows much of anything about screwdrivers or any other tool than a hammer. On the other hand the majority of them have complained about how hard it is to drive screws with the hammer.
They ALL do this. You're telling thousands of contractors to change how they do things, and honestly, not for the better. They know how to use a hammer and know how to drive nails.
A large portion of them took contracting because
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Also, the quick fix for the 2 billion records is "delete * from sex_offenders where known_alias ='cowboyneal'";
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The problem is the times change a lot faster than the people do, and accounting requires a different head than programming does. Sure some people can manage both, but most can't. A lot of accountants I know are still more comfortable with a pen and paper than anything else really.
For proof: See all of the millions upon millions of tonnes of paper thrown into filing cabinets every year just because accounting wants "a paper copy"
Also, to be honest, they have to know so much already and keep up with so many c
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That's true in a lot of jobs, and certainly won't get any sympathy from me - the IT field changes a lot more in one year than accounting does in a decade.
When it was first created, SQL was considered a sort of a "databases for dummies." It let non-programmers use databases. "Real programme
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I had an application where I needed to manipulate a few million records to analyze data in excel. When you start using pivot tables, auto-filters, and the like, it isn't that hard to get into these absurd numbers.
For myself, I ended up just using perl and a few shell scripts to get data into manageable worksets, but to claim a database is the answer to everything ignores many different things that can effectively be analyzed in the more free-form world of spreadsheets.
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Nor should it, if you've got 2 billion records use something designed for that kind of load.
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Yes, that was the joke. See, GP poster is implying that even though the system should have been using something designed for the load, since it is a government contract, they used Access.
Quickbase would be my guess (Score:4, Interesting)
It seems to be the crap database of choice these days, especially for consulting companies. Friend of mine got a job not long ago as a consultant for a consultant. Yes really, he consults for a consulting firm. Not like he is someone they hire out, he is a consultant they hire to work on jobs they've been hired to work on. The thing that got him the job was his Quickbase experience. This company loves them some Quickbase for some reason. However they are always bashing in to limits it has. Had they used MSSQL or Oracle they'd be fine, but they didn't. So a major thing he does is work around those limits in various creative ways. Retarded, but that's what they want and they'll pay for it.
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If you haven't, rent a copy of the documentary "Hacking Democracy".
Diebold chose to use MS Access as the backend for voting machines
Thereby solving the problem... (Score:5, Funny)
BI increased its data storage capacity to avoid a repeat of the problem.
ONCE AND FOR ALL.
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Yes, I heard that after a long and challenging, but well-planned and spotlessly executed migration, the system now works on a future-proof fully 32-bit operating system, capable of accessing more than 640k of RAM.
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I think more than 2147483648 records (Score:2, Insightful)
Seems like it took them a few hours to change the key column from unsigned +/- 2^31 to signed 0-2^32-1
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2 billion... (Score:5, Interesting)
Assuming that's a normal "US" billion, and assuming it's a journal of historical data going back a few years, I don't think it's unreasonable to think there could be information in there on a couple of hundred thousand people each of whom has been track for an average of at least 6 months. So, approximately and with some guesses, that's around 55 [wolframalpha.com] records per prisoner per day. 1 update every 30 minutes? That sounds about right, maybe a little on the low side if anything.
What is surprising is that they were running some sort of database process that maxxed out at 2 billion records, and that it just stopped once it hit that limit rather than failing over to a backup process. But then, this is a government IT contract, so maybe it's not too surprising.
Re:2 billion... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Whereas you'd have plenty of room to store the data if the person has their own DB for the location. You'd have something like 68 years to work with. That's fairly close to an enti
Re:2 billion... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:2 billion... (Score:5, Informative)
it just stopped once it hit that limit rather than failing over to a backup process.
"just over 2 billion" is almost certainly 2^31 (2 147 483 648), or the maximum number representable by a signed 32-bit integer. People usually think of "over 4 billion" (2^32) as the integer limit, but that's for unsigned integers only, which are rarely used, especially in databases. I'm willing to bet that they used an "int" as a primary key in one of their tables, and simply overflowed the maximum possible value.
This kind of bug has impacted lots of systems in the past. If it happens, there's no "fail over" that could possibly save the system. The replica would have the same data, and hence the same issue, and would have failed as well. The usual fix is to extend the key type to 64-bits or longer (e.g.: GUIDs), but for a 2 billion row table, that's going to take hours at best, probably days.
Most database systems do not provide a warning when the keys start to approach large values, so it's easy to miss.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
unsigned integers only, which are rarely used, especially in databases.
What? Intro DB courses all mention using unsigned columns for numeric/incremented indices. I use unsigned ints by habit for numbered indices. I'll grant you I've seen plenty of really terrible DB designs in the wild that happen to use signed ints, but "especially in databases" unsigned ints are more frequently used, at least by the competent pros I've met.
Also, if the system's already down, there's no load on it. The admin can mount the schemas (maybe rollback a bit), apply the changes, and go get some coff
Lemming database design (Score:3, Interesting)
There seems to have been a period, roughly when hard drive capacity was rising more rapidly t
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And maybe they don't need every GPS position in the database. It could be there just to cover for legal requirements in which case they could append it to a binary file and open a new file every day. Compress the old files with bz2 and archive all data more than a year old.
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Re:2 billion... (Score:4, Informative)
Posting anonymously for obvious reasons.
I was on electronic monitoring for the US BOP (bureau of prisons) through BI incorporated for about 3 years. I had to pay my own monthly bill for monitoring services, which went to BI incorporated in Colorado somewhere.
How the system works is like this: Your federal probation officer comes to your house and installs a box that looks kind of like a cable TV box. It connects to your telephone line (you must have a land line phone to be on electronic monitoring) on one end and also plugs into power. The box is pretty heavy because it has some rechargeable batteries in it so it can operate for some time if the power goes out.
You get an ankle bracelet installed that is pretty permanent - rubber band with a steel core around your ankle, and a pager-like device attached to it. Now, the device is pretty simple. Whenever you go out of range (about 100-200 ft.) of the box, it dials one of BI's modems and reports that you left. Whenever you come back in range of the box, it dials out and reports that you arrived home. If you disconnect it from power, or the power goes out, it also dials in and reports the power outage (you are never supposed to unplug it, but sometimes power outages happen). When the power comes back on, it dials in and reports the power is back online. Even if you never leave your house at all that day, it still dials in once a day to report it's status.
The purpose of this EM (electronic monitoring) system is to allow people to be on home confinement and still leave the house to go to work, get groceries, etc, but not be out at all hours of the night committing crimes.
I can easily see how 2 billion records are in the database. There are not 2 billion criminals. These are just 2 billion date/timestamp entries saying prisoner #X left their house, prisoner #X returned, etc.
I found the entire 36 month or so experience pretty surreal. The most difficult thing was wearing baggy pants to hide the ankle bracelet at work. For obvious reasons I didn't want to advertise to the world that I was a federal prisoner. It also says a lot about a society and judicial system where there are so many prisoners that they need to outsource the imprisonment of non-violent offenders to a corporation. But who am I to complain? I'm just a felon who committed a victim-less drug crime.
Another thing to mention is that what you see on TV or in the movies is pretty false. These are not GPS enabled tracking devices that can pinpoint your location on a map so they can hunt you down anywhere in the country. These are dumb radio devices that only have a 100-200 ft. range and the box uses dial-up modem technology from the 90s. I wouldn't be surprised if they ran the entire monitoring center on a few old PC servers.
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Seems more likely to me that the id of their tracking record table was a 32 bit signed integer which maxes out at 2,147,483,647 and when they say they "increased its data storage capacity" they just changed it to a larger data type.
Which just goes to show how well designed it was. Exactly how often do they need to track a negative number of people?
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Which just goes to show how well designed it was. Exactly how often do they need to track a negative number of people?
I know that in some programming languages, like java, you have to jump through hoops to get unsigned values. For all we know that database was fine, but the server frontend trunctuated values down to signed ints.
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Still, the complaint about how intelligently the software architecture was put together is seriously put into question as those who designed the system really didn't think through how long their software would last or what kinds of records were being put into the system. I understand how IPv4 had unanticipated problems with billions of computers on a network originally designed to handle merely hundreds and when v4 came out it was still in the mere thousands of computers being connected. In this design, i
maybe the update got delayed fly attendant system (Score:2)
maybe the update got delayed like that fly attendant system tracking / scheduling system that crashed when it hit to many changes for a month it has placed to be replaced / updated but due to budgets cuts that was pushed back.
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Absolutely correct. However, 16,000 offenders being tracked.. 2 billion records.. Approximately 125,000 records per offender? I suppose it depends on the sort of data they are recording, and over what duration it needs to remain in an active (and not archived) state, but that just seems like an awful lot.
I guess the upside to this is that we know the US government (and it's contractors) can't actually track all ~300 million citizens with any sort of accuracy or utility then. There simply isn't enough bra
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Afaict IDs in databases are typically not reused after records are deleted or even after records fail to insert so even if the old records are archived you will still run out of IDs eventually.
How long eventually is depends on the size of your field and the insert attempt rate into your DB.
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16,000. 300 was the number in the state of Wisconsin.
about 16000 (Score:5, Interesting)
Prisons and other corrections agencies were blocked from getting notifications on about 16,000 people, BI Incorporated spokesman Jock Waldo said on Wednesday.
- interesting number. Anyway, it's not about the number of people in the database, it's about some number of records associated with each person presenting their location, so probably GPS coordinates taken at some time intervals.
Also note that they are still logging the data, they just can't read it, so it's an application for displaying the coordinates that is failing. Quite possible that the actual problem is in filtering the data, maybe they are just trying to view data for an entire time period per person rather than looking at latest records, something like: 'last month only'. But this is, in the words of infamous W, 'speculaaation'.
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So on a wild guess there's a function "int recordId()" that'll return -1 on problems (network failure, database connection failure, whatever). Sounds like a completely reasonable design except it's time to move to int64, 2^63 records ought to be enough for everyone. Though with the US prison population, who knows...
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Anyway, it's not about the number of people in the database, it's about some number of records associated with each person presenting their location, so probably GPS coordinates taken at some time intervals.
Interestingly, if you assume they've averaged half the number of people currently being tracked (not an unreasonable assumption if the popularity of such tracking has been steadily increasing), and hourly logging, then you get 2^31 / 8000 / 24 / 365 = about 30 years, which is perhaps not coincidentally t
1 in 31 US Citizens in custody or parole (Score:5, Informative)
This doesn't make me feel safe.
Re:1 in 31 US Citizens in custody or parole (Score:5, Informative)
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Not that I'm disagreeing with your point, but I think you're misreading that page. That 25% figure is for people who were high at the time of the offense. (I assume you're looking at table 2).
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The entire reason the Federal penitentiary system was created and the first Federal penitentiary (in Atlanta) was built was to handle drug criminals. Before that, except for the military, there basically weren't any Federal prisoners.
Re:1 in 31 US Citizens in custody or parole (Score:5, Insightful)
Not before their incarceration, no. But after surviving lock-up in a Darwinian environment in which "fittest" equates to "most dangerous", then re-entering a society in which convicts are denied the right to a good job, there's a pretty good chance they will. We have a criminal justice system that develops criminals.
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I've never been into recreational pharmacology, never been a smoker of anything, think it's called dope for a reason, and even I am in favor of legalization.
The problem with your argument is two-fold:
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If the government bans violent video games, isn't the easy solution just not to play them? There are other games, and other ways to entertain yourself. If it bans demonstrations in front of the capital or city hall, there are hundreds – even thousands – of other streets where you can protest. And if it bans a certain religion, just find another one to follow; there are plenty of them.
Thankfully this kind of thinking is the exception.
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For the benefit of those who don't know how much/little this really is, a regular (80 mm) cigarette is about 1 gram, so 20 g equates to a pack of cigarettes.
Now, your typical U.S. reefer is fatter than a cigarette, but also mixed with tobacco, so a "typical" one usually contains slightly less than a gram of marijuana.
So 20 g roughly equates to 25 Mary Janes.
Hashish, on the other hand, is far heavier before being processed (heated and smoldered), and 20 g probably equates to a matchbook sized brick. And due
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CSV To The Rescue! (Score:5, Funny)
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32 bit signed integer strikes again (Score:5, Interesting)
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2 billion? That's awkwardly close to 2147483647... This is why your ID field should be BIGINT and not INT....
And I see no reason why someone would use a signed integer for an ID field. You're wasting half of the type's range (assuming negative ID's are not used).
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Seems like a complete waste to use BIGINT if your db is never going to approach a billion rows. Obviously they should have used BIGINT in THIS case, but in general? Or did you only mean this specific case?
Data loss is not guaranteed (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not sure any data has been lost. Say they have a table with the following columns:
id (auto increment) ...
felonid
gps
timestamp
If the 2 billion number is simply id that has run over, there's still enough data in the database to recreate the felons whereabouts using the gps and timestamp columns. Might be a problem in the system pulling data (based on id), but probably no data has been lost.
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Slashdot had this problem (Score:5, Informative)
Anyone remember when Slashdot hit 16,777,215 comments, and overflowed MEDIUMINT? The ALTER TABLE statement that fixed it took hours to run. I shudder to think how long it'll take to fix this, even with the problem diagnosed.
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What DB was slashdot running on .. oracle and sqlserver will both do this sort of upgrade in very little time.
Hmmmm (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe the answer isn't better software (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe the answer isn't better software, but fewer criminals to fill up the database with.
I keep seeing articles here and there how the U.S. has more people imprisoned than China. A large chunk of the prison population are inmates convicted of drug crimes and a large portion of that set of people were convicted on marijuana laws.
I don't smoke, but as a tax payer I would rather see the government make marijuana into a tax revenue generator instead of a huge expense to paid for with taxes.
Re:Maybe the answer isn't better software (Score:4, Insightful)
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In addition to having the largest number of prisoners by headcount, the US has a comfortable lead in the largest percentage of its population (715/100K) in prison. Russia and Belarus (core of the former Soviet Union) are the closest competitors (554-585/100K), followed by an assortment of various small "third world" countries, other former Soviet-bloc states, South Africa, and Singapore. Not great company. The first western-European country – the societies that the US is supposedly closest to in c
You have it backwards. (Score:4, Insightful)
There is no authorization in the constitution for laws that control what you do personally or consensually. The criminals, as Mark Twain told us, are in the legislature.
And as long as the government is out of compliance with the constitution, the government is a criminal organization. Law-breakers and oath-breakers, both.
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They're the criminals here -- they have a considerable stake in disagreeing with me. However, the constitution is entirely on my side.
These are the very people who think they can re-define "shall make no law" as "hey! Let's make a law!", and "shall not infringe" as "hey! Lets infringe!", and "interstate commerce" as "intrastate commerce", and "shall make no ex post facto laws" as "hey! let's make some ex post facto laws!", and so forth.
The US
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I don't see those people as criminals, at least not with a capital 'C'. I'm straightedge but I don't see smoking pot as being any worse than alcohol. I would rather have my crime fighting dollars go to jailing thieves, murderers, rapists, *narcotic* dealers, etc. Not someone doing something the equivalent of having or selling a drink.
Where's Waldo? (Score:2)
We don't know!
(check the name of the BI Inc spokesman)
Population of USA. (Score:2)
As far as I can tell the population of the USA (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+of+USA) is around 312 million.
Which is not even close to 2 billion....
So how can the US be monitoring over 6 times it population?
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Maybe they keep more than one record per offender in their movement monitoring database. Shocking, I know. Imagine the phone call: hello, there was an attack at XYZ Elementary School last week, we think it might have been wisnoskij, can you tell us where he was thursday at 2pm? No, you can only tell us where he is now? Your system only keeps one record per offender?
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OK i guess record probably just means piece of data, meaning every single person would have many.
2 billion records (Score:2)
One record per second for the year, tracking your location, 31 million records per day, per offender. A decade of records, a dozen offenders, 3 billion records. Oops ... they're not even tracking them that accurately. Maybe they're only tracking minute by minute, but for a couple of thousand offenders. I sure hope it's not hour by hour, it'd be too easy to get to a school, do something horrible, and get back before the system would notice.
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It's not Visual Basic's fault, they just had too much data. 640K ought to be enough for anyone.
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The fine print showed the need for much more cash as the system expanded onto more cores and the database grew.
MS does not just 'gift' that kind of power away to anyone without deep long term paid up rental deals.
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BTW if you ever need to load billions of records (restore or upgrade) into a DB be prepared to wait for hours. Hope the boss/customer doesn't expect it'll be done in just an hour or so ;).
This guy took 45 minutes to insert 40 million rows:
http://www.justincarmony.com/blog/2009/01/12/mysql-40-million-rows-myisam-innodb/ [justincarmony.com]
This guy probably did better:
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Mysql-and-a-billion-rows-using-innodb-87890 [dslreports.com]
At a prev work place they were using an older version of MySQL and the DB guy had to
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I'd guess the offender registry probably uses a commercial db (oracle/sqlserver). Those will handle billions of rows a bit faster than you're describing. We regularly generate performance testing databases and do a TB (~10B rows) insert in 4-5 hours.
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2 billion offenders tracked should be fine, as there are only about 300 million people in the US. But 2 billion locations? Someone needs a real database. Or a chron job to archive these puppies.
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2 billion entries does not mean they are all unique individuals.
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Of course not. Most of them are clones. That's why there are now "pedophiles" behind every bush and tree. Just ask any TV-news-watching or talk-radio-listening American.
Re:two billion locations perhaps? (Score:4, Funny)
2 billion offenders tracked should be fine, as there are only about 300 million people in the US. But 2 billion locations? Someone needs a real database. Or a chron job to archive these puppies.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that if you think it's spelled "chron", you probably shouldn't be making suggestions on this subject.
"Well proven" "better solution" - rubbish (Score:3)
Re:Cheaper solution to "2 billion" problem (Score:4, Informative)
You obviously don't know the meaning of physical castration, the effects of chemical castration, and the varieties of violent sex offences.
Physical castration is simple removal of the testicles. You can still gain and maintain an erection after such a procedure on a normal male. Rape is still possible, especially since it's less about sex, and more about power, thus a sex drive reduction is immaterial to the process.
Chemical castration prevents erections, as long as you're still taking the drugs. Miss a dose, and you're operational again fairly quickly. However, it doesn't stop sex drive at all, nor does it curb aggressive behaviour, so foreign object rape is still possible, which is usually much more damaging to the victim. Also, the chemicals required are *really* fucking expensive.
And your plan doesn't cover female sex offenders in any way, shape, or form. Please, before you spout off idiocy, make sure it's actually idiocy that stands some hope in hell of actually working, instead of just inflicting it on those of use who use our brains as more than a way to keep our ears separated.