It has! What I was actually thinking was along the lines of "UUIDs, man! Not names!"
And even today we still have this problem, and I don't just mean in badly-designed database schemas. When we worked with a lawyer to write our wills, we weren't asked for something like Social Security numbers for the people we named. For relatives maybe that's not needed ("my brother Bob" is pretty clear), but I named a few non-relatives in mine. I guess we rely on the executor to figure it out? ("Oh, the Mary she's assigning custody of her cats to is probably the Mary who takes care of them when she's away...") I don't think we were even asked for addresses, which would at least provide some clarity for one point in time ("in 1998 Joe lived at $address in $town").
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Date: 2017-07-14 01:09 pm (UTC)And even today we still have this problem, and I don't just mean in badly-designed database schemas. When we worked with a lawyer to write our wills, we weren't asked for something like Social Security numbers for the people we named. For relatives maybe that's not needed ("my brother Bob" is pretty clear), but I named a few non-relatives in mine. I guess we rely on the executor to figure it out? ("Oh, the Mary she's assigning custody of her cats to is probably the Mary who takes care of them when she's away...") I don't think we were even asked for addresses, which would at least provide some clarity for one point in time ("in 1998 Joe lived at $address in $town").