:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::
"Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little pill of news every day - 23 minutes - and that's supposed to be enough." -Walter Cronkite, RE TV news. The Web has changed that for many, however, and here is an extra dose for your daily news cocktail. This prescription tends to include surveillance and now war-related links, along with the occasional pop culture junk and whatever else seizes my attention as I scan online news sites.:: 1.29.2005 ::
:: "Government computer blunders are common and expensive" ::
From Security Focus
By Ted Bridis, The Associated Press
The FBI's failure to roll out an expanded computer system that would help agents investigate criminals and terrorists is the latest in a series of costly technology blunders by government over more than a decade.
Experts blame poor planning, rapid industry advances and the massive scope of some complex projects whose price tags can run into billions of dollars at U.S. agencies with tens of thousands of employees.
"The government is just as inept in buying computers as it is in using them for accounting," declared a 1994 report, called "Computer Chaos," from a Senate Governmental Affairs subcommittee. "The system is indeed broken and it is time to fix it."
Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the senior Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, called the FBI's computer overhaul "a train wreck in slow motion." Critics said the FBI's case illustrated government's propensity to build its software from scratch, which can dramatically increase a project's complexity and cost.
"They do have a tendency to reinvent the wheel," said James X. Dempsey, an expert on national security for the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington-based civil liberties group.
Read the entire story here.
posted by me
:: 9:31:00 AM [+] ::
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