ID Cards, Immigration ... Reusable Code

They've bandied about the notion of a national ID card here ... but this country has a strong libertarian streak running through it, and the idea often doesn't get far. But if the objective is to track our movements, then I'm not sure a singular card is necessary. How far are we, really, from being able to cross-reference all the different means of identification we already have? I've got several different credit cards and I'm willing to wager there are programs at work at this very moment that matching up purchases made on one agains the other, looking for patterns or other things that might yield a buck in a clever marketing play.

My lovely bride and I both get scads of catalogs from companies we've never done business with. They've drawn a picture of us based on our other purchases. Apparently I'm into high-end outdoor activities. Ironic, given I'm essentially a lazy bum behind a keyboard.

Two quick points, then on to my other topics:

1. I rarely buy tobacco with a credit card -- I never want an insurance application rejected because of some purchase somewhere.
2. Victoria's Secret (the lingerie people) are relentless -- it's been 10 years since I've bought anything from them, yet I still get catalogs.

* * *
We're having quite a row here about immigration ... specifically, illegal immigration, but that's not what the press is calling it. Some estimates put the number of illegal immigrants at around 12 to 15 million. There is absolutely no rational discussion going on at all ... it's all senseless emotionalism. I think the world as a functioning societal organism has gone past some tipping point.

* * *
Has anyone, to the best of your knowledge, ever conducted a study to see if the promised riches of "reusable code" has been realized? I suspect it has not paid off ... I suspect we have no more productivity than we did before. I'm willing to bet Java programmers end up writing an awful lot of code over and over again.

I got to thinking about this when I was pondering the whole "SOA/ESB" thing. The dream is that there'll be this "any-to-any" bus on which a program can simply request a service and magically have that service performed. But what I suspect will end up happening is that people will have the ability to statically configure the service connection -- using whatever addressing the bus will use -- so that in the end we're no better off than what we are now. The ESB thing is MQ V1.0 with more bells and whistles nobody wants.

Boy, am I cynical.