Voters News Service: What Went Wrong

ddtstudio writes "Baseline Magazine has a pretty good recounting of how even the national TV networks can have a computer network go wrong -- in this case the night of the last U.S. election. From the article: "VNS had been trying to rewrite and retool the system for years. This was just the most recent attempt and it failed miserably." Oracle, IBM, BEA Systems -- all crashed."

Comments

Re:VNS was *WRONG* in Florida

[HBI]

"Well-documented" by a link to Salon. There's no bias here, folks!

I would feel better with a link to an openly communist site.

Uh...Woops, Salon qualifies.

At least Salon has a soft porn section.

Re:Oh BooHoo

[Tailhook]

How libertarian-minded conservatives can tolerate Ashcroft is beyond my limited ability to comprehend human irrationality.

I'll explain it too you, then.

It's profoundly clear to this libertarian-minded conservative that the people responsible for our nations security were asleep at the switch and drooling into the control panel. This is not surprising. Bureaucracies get this way over time. The way to fix this is to put someone in charge that kicks proverbial (and real) ass and takes names. Will this ultimately lead to abuse? Yes, it will. Will we again self correct and deal with the abuse? Of course. The people in my nation have been doing this for nigh on 300 years.

It is also profoundly clear that some day one of these half smart psycho zealot religious kooks will get a hold of a warhead. It doesn't matter whether it's some cobbled together circa 1950's tech coming from Pakistan, or a nice shiny slightly used Soviet suitcase device. What does matter is that the day this happens some western nation will lose a coastal city. That nation highest on the target list is mine This will be biblical catastrophe the scale of which I can claim to only vaguely comprehend in my darkest moments.

If, in the meantime, Ashcroft happens to have a few of the kooks in lockdown, screwing up money transfers or buying time for investigators to cull the evidence, more power to him. The fact is that when some high population density area is vaporized we're going to blame Ashcroft for being negligent, regardless of whether he's among those caught in the blast. The folks that replace him will make Ashcroft look like a harmless teddy bear.