Fourth Of July: Things To Consider
1. It wouldn’t have lasted long as the growing population would have had too many recent memories of the futility of a monarchy. If anything the democracy would have forbade any type of hierarchical form of government.
2. If slaves had never been brought to America, the south would not have developed the intense trade it did, and our country would have taken years longer to reach the industrial age.
3. To improve the current government we have, we would have to get back to the original tenants of democracy - government for the people, by the people. Get rid of lobbyists and special interests. We may be able to vote for the best man to represent us, but we have little control over what happens to him when he gets into his seat of power. As well, it seems, he has little control over what happens to him despite his best intentions.
4. There should be limits on Senators and Supreme Court Justices. I don’t know about time limits so much as age limits. Once a person in a position of power in our government becomes so old they cannot distinguish their past from the present, it is time for them to go. But, considering the immense hassle and tremendous amount of money and fighting involved in replacing these positions, it might be worth it not to change much. Just filling the new seat for the Supreme Court is going to usurp all forward motion of our government for months. If we had to make changes because of tighter limits, our government would be in a constant chaotic state.
5. Gitmo and the Patriot Act are different from internment camps, rationing, and other inconveniences because Gitmo and the Patriot Act require zero sacrifice from us.
6. National I.D. card? Yes. Absolutely.
7. Would I accept $20,000 less than my property was worth? No. I’d fight so loudly they’d give me the $20,000 just to shut me up. A bypass road can bypass my house.
8. It does not say anywhere in the Constitution that the government has an obligation to take care of us in our old age. That came about with Social Security.
Posted by Phoenix
07/02/2005 at 12:59 PM
Here you go, I posted my own responses here.
Posted by CodeMonkeyMike
07/02/2005 at 01:07 PM
CodeMonkeyMike,
You give governors a lot of power - with the ‘trust’ that they, themselves, will not be corrupted. Yet you say digital processing of voting cannot be trusted. Can the people who handle it now be trusted as you would trust governors to be able to veto legislation?
As far as information on an I.D. card, any cop or law maker can find that information out without an I.D. card in a matter of moments. Your reaction to this seems quite paranoid to me. Why would the average American worry about an I.D. card. The average illegal or potential terrorist might, indeed, have something to worry about. A couple of clicks in any cop car and your whole life spills out. Personal information is hardly sacred. And so what if you have nothing to worry about.
It seems to me, based on your answers, that you have exponentially increased the hassles of an already big government making it even larger and infinitely more full of hassles. There is an odd dichotomy of your trust of man vs. your trust of technology.
Posted by Phoenix
07/02/2005 at 01:34 PM
1. The other founding fathers would’ve probably hung him if he took the role of King. Well, hopefully, I suppose.
2. Lincoln would be known today as a tyrant rather than a liberator, presuming that the Civil War still took place. It would have most likely happend later, however, and probably under a different president—who would be known as a tyrant if he did what Lincoln did.
3. Is this a trick question? We do NOT live in a Democracy, we live in a Constitutional Republic which places limits on what our government can do. The trick is keeping your government within its bounds, which is easier said than done. Reminder: Growing a plant in your backyard for personal consumption with State approval is [drumroll].. covered by the ‘interstate commerce’ clause!
4. No, and especially not for Justices, though I do see some point in putting an age limit on there for SC justices. You want a term limit on a Senator? Stop voting for the bastard!
5. This is different because we haven’t declared an actual war. With WWII we declared WAR on nations properly. I’m not sure we’ve done that since, but I’m not sure about Korea. We sure as hell didn’t with Vietnam, or the 1st Gulf conflict. I mean zero disrespect to any Veteran of said conflicts, however. They were in a war, but the nation wasn’t.
6. National ID card? You’ve gotta be kidding me. I am not a government controlled piece of propety - the government exists because We The People say it MAY exist. In light of question #8… where in the Constitution does it say the citizenry is to be tagged like cattle?
7. No on the 1st count, and a ‘maybe’ on the 2nd count if after reviewing the data I realized I had to give up my property for the benefit of the public. It just might not be worth squabbling over 10% which is why I respond ‘maybe’.
8. It doesn’t say that, but one could presume that the “general welfare” spoke of in the Constituion permitted retired folk from being taken care of in the Depression. However, it should have been done away with very quickly, if ever implemented at all. The existence of this program is destructive to our nation not only financially but morally. With a (fake) safety net to provide for retirement one more incentive to building a family of productive citizens is gone, and family values take a dump. Think I’m full of it? Look around you.
Posted by Justin Buist
07/02/2005 at 02:30 PM
Hmmmmm!
#1. Moot question. Even if Washington had wanted a crown, others (such as the framers of the Constitution) would have prevented it.
#2. You might conduct a seance, summon the ghosts of the Habsburgs, and ask them about the dynamics (and lessons) of polyglot populations.
#3. The governmental apparatus must be reduced to its actual and designated constitutional limits. The welfare state (meaning the vote-buying) apparatus is the first thing to be scrapped. But all of this will mean sweeping the socialists out of Washington first.
#4. They term-limited the Presidency on account of FDR. Any arguments made in favor of that can be made in favor of term-limiting the congress-critters or justices, for that matter. In my view, what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. All or none.
#5. I know of no Americans who are complaining about Gitmo and the Patriot Act. I don’t count Fifth Columnists, even unwitting ones who are so blinded by their intentions that they never comprehend the results of their actions.
#6. A national ID card? We already have one, known as a Social Security card. If we must have another, especially an omnibus card such as the one you propose, it had better be verifiable by every possible means (fingerprints, retinal scans, DNA profiles etc), or it will open up an entirely new branch of identity fraud.
#7. I do accept that anyone may arrogate unto himself the right to force me to sell my property to anyone, anywhere, at any time, for any reason. Q.E.D.
#8. Nowhere. The welfare state has been erected in the so-called “penumbra” of the Constitution by those whose sole purpose was to buy and sell votes like cattle, and their stated intentions be damned.
Happy 4th of July to one and all.
Justin,
Your qualifying nearly every question on this list distorts your answers. In particular, number five. Declaring war or not declaring war has nothing to do with anything. I’d like to re-qualify all of your answers, but I won’t so struck am I by your statement: “With a (fake) safety net to provide for retirement one more incentive to building a family of productive citizens is gone, and family values take a dump.” Where do you come up with this reasoning? The more productive one is during his career, the more retirement he gleans. How is it that Social Security is fake? Millions of senior citizens live on it. Without it, our poverty levels would be higher and our health costs would rise exponentially because poverty breeds ill health. As for ‘family values taking a dump’.... I look around and see a cultural phenomenon where the average family does not have a parent/grandparent living in the house. We are not like the Chinese who wish only to produce a male child so that child will take care of them in their dotage. We appreciate the fact that our parents wish to remain independent as long as they can, and to deny them that dignity is far from our values taking a dump. Social Security helps the elderly to live with dignity and the respect they deserve.
Posted by Phoenix
07/02/2005 at 06:39 PM
Sorry, I didn’t want to write an essay on each topic so I kept answers rather brief. I didn’t get the memo that I was supposed to send down a 10 page essay…
WIth regards to #5 I guess you’re right. It doesn’t really matter if the Federal goverment starts up the War Machine without an actual declaration of War. Why should we pester ourselves with the legislative body having to declare war? Let’s just live under War-like conditons all the time, and toss people into prison camps For Our Own Good all the time. Them dead white guys were full of it when they said Congress had the power to declare war, not the executive branch. Heck, we shoulda had Gitmo in the 80’s for anybody that raised a hand to the Feds.
I’m so damned silly for bringing that one up! Thanks!
It IS important because that decision hasn’t been put in front of the legisulate quite some time. The power has been handed to the executive branch and they have been permitted to run around with it for far too long now. This is not in accordance with the Constitution. I’m sorry if you don’t see that. I voted for Bush, but I want to see a FORMAL declaration of war if we’re going to act like we’re in a war.
Now, next one..
The numbers show that Social Security will start collapsing around 2041 or 2042… that’s why I call it fake. The metric buttload of money I’ve sent off into the system? Already spent. Fake security.
“Without it, our poverty levels would be higher and our health costs would rise exponentially because poverty breeds ill health.”—I don’t know about you, but I’ll be damned if my parents and grand parents get tossed out onto the street. You made my point perfectly, actually. As a whole this nation has lost sight of family values and becuase of that cutting Social Security out of the picture, right now, would mean the elderly would be screwed. The old folk didn’t starve in the 1800’s around here, but they would now. Why? The family doesn’t exist anymore. That’s my point. Toss it out, let us keep our 15% of income, and no elderly person will go hungry or be without a home in our family.“Social Security helps the elderly to live with dignity and the respect they deserve.”—‘cuz nothing says dignity like sending government goons to shake down somebody at gun point for money while your own family is willing to let you starve to death.
Please, do yourself a favor: Never, ever, use the phrase “repsect they deserve.” Respect is earned, never deserved.
Posted by Justin Buist
07/02/2005 at 07:59 PM
Thank you, Justin, for the time it took you to respond. You have the respect from me you deserve.
Posted by Phoenix
07/02/2005 at 08:31 PM
Regarding the ID card issue. Here in Britain the government is planning to introduce one. I am dead set against it. It is a pointless exercise and a colossal waste of money. Our government has never brought in a computer based project on or under budget. The predicted cost of the card is £90 (say $150 give or take). However independant assessments predict the actual cost will be nearer to £300 ($525) Since the carrying of the card will not be a legal requirement how will this help with illegal immigrants as the government claims? Do they really expect us to believe that when served with a notice to produce their id card at the police station the illegal/terrorist will turn up? I think not.
Furthermore since we have signed a treaty with our “friends” in the EU anyone with an EU passport or ID card can come and go as they please. I work in a job where we deal with identity cards and passports. The numbers of forged and counterfeits we encounter is shocking and they are often to a very high standard. The standards of the European id cards are often poor. The old French and Italian id was a scap of paper with a photo stapled in. Yet this is seen to be acceptable evidence of a persons identity.
Another argument the government puts forward is it would help stamp out abuse of the national health system. Well, in my view a better way to end the abuse is to kill off the NHS and make everyone take out insurance. Why should we allow people who have never contributed a penny to the system get medical treatment for free it’s insane.
As for the rest well you know you secretely hanker after a King! Hope you enjoy your Independence day! Here’s something a friend sent me which made me chuckle......
To aid in the transition to a British Crown Dependency, the following rules are introduced with immediate effect:
1. You should look up “revocation” in the Oxford English Dictionary. Then look up “aluminium” Check the pronunciation guide. You will be amazed at just how wrongly you have been pronouncing it. Generally, you should raise your vocabulary to acceptable levels. Look up “vocabulary” Using the same twenty-seven words interspersed with filler noises such as “like” and “you know” is unacceptable and inefficient form of communication. Look up interspersed.
2. There is no such thing as “US English” we will let Microsoft know on your behalf.
3. You should learn to distinguish between English and Australian accents. It really isn’t that hard.
4. Hollywood will be required occasionally to cast English actors as good guys.
5. You should relearn your original national anthem, “God Save The Queen”, but only after fully carrying out task 1. We would not want you to get confused and give up half way through.
6. You should stop playing American “football” There is only one kind football. What you refer to as American “football” is not a very good game. The 2.15% of you who are aware that there is a world outside your borders may have noticed that no one else plays “American” football. You will no longer be allowed to play it and should instead play proper football. Initially, it would be best if you played with the girls. It is a difficult game. Those of you brave enough will, in time, be allowed to play rugby (which is similar to American “football”, but does not involve stopping for a rest every twenty seconds or wearing full kevlar body armour like nancies). We are hoping to get together at least a US rugby sevens side by 2005.
7. You should declare war on Quebec and France, using nuclear weapons if they give you any merde. The 98.85% of you who were not aware there is a world outside your borders should count yourselves lucky. The Russians have never been the bad guys. “Merde” is French for shit.
8. July 4th is no longer a Public Holiday. November 8th will be a new national Holiday, but only in England. It will be called “Indecisive Day”.
9. American cars are hereby banned. They are crap and it is for your own good. When we show you German cars you will understand what we mean.
10. Please tell us who killed JFK. It’s been driving us crazy.
Bless you, LyndonB. I will concede to you all ten points. JFK was killed by American protestants, much in the tradition of Cromwell and Charles I. Catholic kings are easy targets.
I played in a local amateur rugby league ten years ago. I still have bruises from that experience.
I sincerely hope you folks don’t get sucked too far into the EU. England is our last bastion of sanity across the pond. Don’t fail us now.
We forgive you for 1812. Just don’t do it again.
Skipper, I think LyndonB needs an avatar. How about a White Ensign?
Lyndon, as a Yank living now in Kiwi land and well on my way to residency here, I agree with your friend’s observations about many of my fellow Americans needing to pay attention to things outside our borders, but he also needs to realize that the US is so large that we have become our own little world. Last I checked, I think California is larger than the UK and has the 5th largest economy in the world.
As for “proper” English, I, too, am highly embarrassed by Americans who use “like” and “you know” ad nauseum, but at least we don’t have street signs written in Farsi (as is the case in Birmingham)...yet.
As for American cars, yes, many of them ARE crap....at least you cited German cars and not anything you guys make. I haven’t been in a Jaguar that could go 500 miles without breaking...you would think that since they only make about 10 of them per year they could at least get it right.
As for rugby vs. “grid iron” I have an appreciation for both games (I’ve played both and am currently coaching my stepson’s rugby team which is undefeated), but I don’t need to denegrate one to elevate the other. However, soccer is a pure pussy sport and is about as useless as cricket or baseball...I’d rather watch grass grow or paint dry..it’s far more entertaining. I have found that most people who share your friend’s views about the pads worn by grid iron players are often misguided because they do not understand the game. Grid iron has very, very specialized positions. The down linemen on the offensive and defensive lines...their entire purpose in life is to destroy their opponent on the other side. Were these 150 kilo behemoths to unload with all their strength on one another every play, without the padding, there would be nobody left after 5 minutes. That said, I thoroughly enjoyed watching our NZ “All Blacks” kick the living dogshit out of your British and Irish Lions....twice; not to mention our provincial team, the NZ Maori, kicked their asses also. Please send my regards to DeLallio, O’Driscoll, and Wilkinson.
Phoenix,
The Real ID Act gives the DoHS the authority to add whatever information they want, whenever they want. They could easily require voting software providers to record who you vote for to keep track of voting fraud, and then put the information on your ID card. You get pulled over and a cop sees republican, constitution party or libertarian in San Francisco, you’re f$%^ed.
I don’t trust voting machines because I am a software developer and can think of a number of ways they could get away with bad things. Inserting malicious code is so easy to do that you’d never even notice it unless you were looking for it in many cases. That was one of my biggest objections to the system, and I guess you didn’t see that. Hell, just putting (0/0); in most C-derived languages will crash your software if the compiler doesn’t catch it. That one line of code could bring down an entire critical information system, so excuse me if I am a bit recalcitrant to get gungho about technology here as a “solution” to human problems. I’d rather have a few dead people vote in elections than have a voting machine which may randomly change peoples’ votes to different ones to help a particular party.
The bottom line is that you don’t know what’s going on that ID card if they store it on a flash memory chip and encrypt it. For all you know, it stores encrypted copies of all of your credit card and bank accounts so that a cop can know even where you bought your dinner that night. Who says it can’t happen, when the DoHS is going to be given the authority to put whatever information they want on the card and they have already tried tying together all of the major private sector databases to build profiles on the entire public?
Flash memory is so cheap these days that they could easily put 4-5MB of storage on a single card for a few of only a few dollars. A database dump of my blog which has almost 1,350 posts could fit on that ID card with room to spare. They could easily put every single group you’ve ever been affiliate with, every single economic account you have, all of your government information including school records, medical history and more on that card. Now maybe you’re comfortable with the idea of police being able to find out everything there is to know about you in realtime, but I’m not. I don’t care enough about terrorists to think that terrorism even remotely justifies this. Hell, our President won’t even secure the border nor begin expelling the illegals already here. They won’t enforce the law against them because they don’t care and thus I ain’t willing to give up even a modicum of my freedom for any of their stupid initiatives.
But hey, if you want to do the “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” thing, then I hope you’ve been totally clean because even a technical screwup can get you prison time in today’s legal system.
Posted by CodeMonkeyMike
07/04/2005 at 10:36 PM
Oldcatman,
Who’d have the time? The government could put whatever info they want on there, as little or as much as they want, and it’d be open to even your local PD. The point of my post was that they could put your credit card numbers on there, then the cop could be given permission through a successor to the Total Information Awareness project to your credit card accounts and lookup your expenditures that night. You say that you didn’t even go near a bar, but your credit card says you did, and guess what… the cop now sees that you did. If TIA ever gets back off the ground, and an alternative system is supposed to be in the design phase now, they’d also be able to find out what you bought at most stores so that gun you just bought? They know about it. So many more scenarios they would try as well.
What people like you assume is that even given sufficient information on the public, that the government can and will only abuse a handful each year. I’m warning that given sufficient information on the public, they can get away with abusing everyone because of all of the information they’d have from your voting record, to government records to the information on what you just bought 5 minutes before getting pulled over. You’re too trusting because you don’t want to see the big picture. They’ve already tried the TIA route before and haven’t given up.
Posted by CodeMonkeyMike
07/05/2005 at 08:43 AM
Oldcatman,
It’s not only not going to end voter fraud, but electronic voting could actually ACCELERATE voter fraud onto a Soviet level. The only way that a national ID card with strong security built in would prevent any voter fraud is if we still did manual counting of votes, and even then you have to deal with voter fraud. The feds and others want to go to electronic voting because it’s not accountable to the public at all. As I said before, I am a software developer, so I know how easily they could insert code that monitors how you vote and record it or change your vote. I haven’t checked this for complete validity, but a SQL statement like this could destroy your vote and change it to another candidate, and it’s just one line of code:
UPDATE dist4rockingham_county_va_results SET candidate = 1 WHERE (candidate = 0 AND voter_id_serial % 5 = 0)
That would be enough to change your vote from Republican to Democrat if your Real ID card number is evenly divisible by the number 5. And again, one of the “beauties” of the electronic voting system is that you have no way of knowing if the source code that gets audited by public organizations like the ACLU, EFF or Institute for Justice is the source code that got compiled and installed on that voting machine. The database schema could be totally different and thus enable a complete digital record of how you vote, and then years later your entire voting history is up for police scrutiny when you hand your ID card over to them.
Inserting crude, but highly malicious code is not hard at all. The reason that I don’t see any positives that outweigh the negatives is that I have four years of formal training in software development at a major university and a few years of actual professional experience doing it. I could easily myself write malicious code for the government to monitor your voting habits if they wanted to hire me to do it and I was actually willing (I’d rather punch them, than do that).
Posted by CodeMonkeyMike
07/05/2005 at 11:53 AM
Oldcatman,
If it’s just to get a ballot, then I agree that in that area it’s a good thing, but I am making a point of reminding myself here that there’s a bigger picture. Try seeing this whole thing from the perspective of the following tying in with it:
1) The Total Information Awareness project
2) Tax credits to companies that create standardized database schemas (a schema is the structure of the database table, like what fields are what)
3) The ability of the DoHS to put anything they want on your card without prior congressional approval
4) The probability that it will end up all encompassing because that’s a lazy cop’s dream come truePosted by CodeMonkeyMike
07/05/2005 at 02:51 PM
OCM, I have to agree 100% with CodeMonkeyMike. As you may be aware by now, I have been doing software and information systems for nearly 30 years and have a BS and MS in computer science. Everything CMM has said is true. Hacking the code is way too easy and practically undetectable. As an Oracle Certified Professional, I live and breathe databases daily. I constantly fight battles over security and no matter how tightly I wrap a database up, there’s always some lunatic who figures out a way in. Usually an inside employee.
Having done government contractig for the last fifteen years, I can tell you several hundred horror stories about database intrusions and code errors.
This is one idea, though hard to implement, that could be put into use. The schemas of all of the major databases out there on you such as credit reports, credit cards, banks, amazon, wal-mart, etc. all probably use very different schemas… but if they were harmonized it’d be possibly, though difficult, to implement a system able to tie all of them together into one super database with all of your financial information availible. Here’s how they could get you:
-They could simply store an upgrade social security number and biometric data on your card
-Then they’d use that ss number as the id number for all of the databases, commercial and governmental. All of a sudden, each every single item sold in Wal-Mart that goes on your bill now has your SS number appended to it in Wal-Mart’s database.
-They build a wireless system for law enforcement to put in the cruisers so that a cop can use long-range WiFi to query information. Put your card in a card reader, all of a sudden the TIA-harmonized databases are exposed to the cop in realtime. Your school records, criminal record, the purchase you made 5 minutes ago on your credit card, everything is now tied together and availible on demand. That gun that you just bought? It’s on there because in order to legally allow credit cards, a merchant must connect to the TIA system.
-Now for the final coup against the public: it’s a crime to accept cash without showing a national ID card and recording the data in a TIA-connected database.My guess is that they’d probably store just the minimum information. They’d probably store driver’s license information, maybe any serious crimes you committed, your SS number, some biometrics info and whether you have a concealed-carry license. The problem is that when coupled with a TIA-like initiative, that SSN could quickly become the identifying key for thousands of databases. With a simple user interface, the cop could do a lookup like “what has John Smith bought in the last 24 hours” and find out everything you bought from Wal-Mart, the grocery store, even where you went to dinner that night. With a corrupted voting system, they could also find out your voting history, registration, etc.
The worry that I and others have about this system is that it’ll be turned into a piece in a larger puzzle. That’s usually how it happens. Complex information systems are almost always built as components rather than as monolithic designs. Then the components are glued together. It really doesn’t matter what’s stored on your card per se, what really matters is what they can connect that card to and who can connect to it. There are so many potentials for abuse it’s really quite scary.
Posted by CodeMonkeyMike
07/05/2005 at 04:55 PM
CMM, you are more on the money than you think. The leading database providers, Oracle and IBM already provide “gateway” products to allow for information interchange between different databases and even schemas. Hell, they even provide interfaces to exchange information with mainframe flat files in old hierarchical databases. All that is missing is the connectivity between the various entities and whether you know it or not, several of these systems are already exchanging data (banks & credit card companies, for instance). It’s closer to the scenario you described above than you think. Be afraid.
It’d be hard to implement the TIA project because of the varying needs of the players involved. Amazon for example has much different needs than say Wal-Mart which in turn is very different from a local comic book store. Also, be aware that like the USA PATRIOT Act, this system WILL NOT be restricted to terrorists. The “PATRIOT” Act has already been used against common criminals for God’s sake! It was a power grab akin to the Reichstag bombing IMO, and I believe that the DOJ would have demanded it regardless of whether it was Bush or Gore because they were trying to get it under Clinton. (For the Bush supporters, note that I blame it ultimately on the DOJ as an institution and not the Bush administration)
Wal-Mart would be the hardest player to get to go with the TIA project. They store already something like seven or so terabytes of data a year. The largest hard drive I’ve seen is around 400GB and 400GB is 40% of 1 terabyte. I can’t remember though, if that’s how much they process in a year or have in total, but it’s just absolutely obscene how much information they store on purchases and product sales. I don’t know if they are supposed to be storing our individual purchases or just making trend data, but it’s obviously A LOT.
For Wal-Mart and other big corporations to switch would be very hard. They’d have to not only transition tons of information they already have, but find a way to painlessly transition their current systems over. For Wal-Mart, they’d have to shut down for 1-2 days to make sure the transition works because it’d be HORRIBLE to have the fix the level of information that Wal-Mart generates each day.
Posted by CodeMonkeyMike
07/05/2005 at 05:02 PM
The Skipper,
I’m not surprised. I have also been thinking about going for an OCP and the Microsoft equivalent when I get a chance, but I have to admit that when I tried out Oracle 9 it seemed… REALLY bloated. Of course I tried running it on my desktop machine, rather than a standalone box. I’m doing one of those free mac mini deals and I’m almost finished. If and when I get it, I plan to turn that little baby into a headless Java app server and Oracle DB :-D
Posted by CodeMonkeyMike
07/05/2005 at 05:05 PM
CMM, you have to see and manage Oracle10g running on a cluster of Sun E15k servers (32 CPU’s each) attached to a few hundred terabytes of NAS on the backend to appreciate databases. Then you have to keep separate the real-time transactional instances from the reporting instances and the OLAP instances (that last is where people digging for dirt go to find trends and possible problem data). All of these interact at blinding speed in a modern IT shop. With fiber connections to other databases a continent away, inter-connected in a grid all over the place you would be amazed what can be assembled out of all that data .... in a matter of seconds.
With the right handshaking going on between systems, that cop can pull up your concealed carry permit as well as the size of your underwear (that you just bought at Wal-Mart) in no time at all. It’s all there. All that’s lacking is somebody plugging it all together. And that’s easier said than done.
Yeah, I agree and that’s why I said it’s going to be VERY difficult, but it COULD be done if the feds really wanted it to. I think that most governments around the world wouldn’t care at all and might be interested in helping us out as a way to control their own populations. Russia would probably bend over backwards to help us out because it’d be their KGB thug-in-chief’s wet dream come true. Give some financial incentives to most of Western Europe and aim a missle at the Lourve and France would go along as well
A lot easier said than done, but the fact it could be done, even if imperfectly originally, is what really scares me personally. Btw, may I ask how you got involved with OCP work? I’m almost done with my internship of 2 years and will graduate in December and database development (not necessarily administration) has always interested me.
Posted by CodeMonkeyMike
07/05/2005 at 05:25 PM
CMM: the year was 1990 and I had just completed a course of training in ADA for the DoD. I was coding for a major USAF development project when Oracle came out with Oracle7 which included a new internal coding language, PL/SQL, which was designed after ADA. Somebody asked me if I would like to “transition” to a DBA job. The rest is history.
We migrated everything from a DEC VAX VMS environment on Oracle6 to the new Oracle7 environment on HP-UX systems. It hurt. A lot. Three years later I was working for Oracle as a Senior Consultant.
Passing the OCP test is easy with all the “prep” books out there. Earning your stripes the hard way (fighting the bugs) is much harder. I recommend you get the experience first, then pass the tests.
Learning Java wouldn’t hurt, either. It’s the future path.
The Skipper,
I actually know Java pretty well. My university makes us use it for a lot. Right now I am working on getting comfortable with C#/.NET as well and for the most part, I am comfortable with C as well. My only problem with C is actually lack of experience and good documentation (C.. good document… HAH what a joke, right?)
My favorite language to screw around with is actually Python. Here’s an example if you want one. It’s a simple XML-RPC client that only requires a few lines of code. You’d probably be amazed at how easy it is to write stuff in python if you haven’t done it before.
C was actually the first language I started with. I first started playing with it when I was 12, but wasn’t able to really grasp programming until I was 17. I went from coding like a newbie hobbyist to coding like a typical senior in our major between my freshman and sophomore years :-D I like C and I’ve had to write a simple file system in it before for an operating systems class. I with I had had more time to put it into and that’s a large part of the reason I’m retaking that class in the fall (my last semester). It’s a fun language, when people are taking the time to make sure that function and variable names are actually expressive of their purpose. Nothing worse than a C or C++ programmer who is compensating for a 1mm peter by writing the most “naturally obfuscated” code he possible can…
Posted by CodeMonkeyMike
07/05/2005 at 11:16 PM
07/03/2005 at 02:27 AM
07/03/2005 at 08:45 PM
