In my first year of high school I had Latin, which I hated with a passion. Before, I thought that it would boil down to learning some common words and sayings and proverbs, but no. It was learning latin as a foreign language. I don’t think I was taught anything remotely as useless as that. And I really don’t like the teacher and she didn’t like me and it was truly awful and I hated every second of it. It was so awful that I had nightmares about it, even years after high school.

A couple (two I think) of years after that latin studies I saw the Life of Brian for the first time. I didn’t know what I was going to see, so when the “romanus eunt domus” scene came. It wasn’t just hilariously funny it was also cathartic.

So I’d say that. I remember that sketch almost by heart since the first time I saw it.

I didn’t read it like that. What I take from it is that he’s implying that the government uses something much stupider than sql, like Lotus1-2-3 or plain txt files or excel. I really wouldn’t be surprised that there’s some government department that had their IT done during the first Bush administration and didn’t really upgrade from it since.

There are also probably some departments that don’t get much funding, so they organise part of their work into some shared excel files.l

Nothing really wrong with that. Unless he’s implying that the entire federal government works like that, which is preposterously stupid.

This is true, but there are many instances where denormalization makes sense and is frequently used.

A common example is a table that is frequently read. Instead of going to the “central” table the data is denormalized for faster access. This is completely standard practice for every large system.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with it, but it can be easily misused. With SSN, I’d think the most stupid thing to do is to use it as the primary key. The second one would be to ignore the security risks that are ingrained in an SSN. The federal government, being large as it is, I’m sure has instances of both, however since Musky is using his possy of young, arrogant brogrammers, I’m positively certain they’re completely ignoring the security aspect.