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Computers May Thwart 2010 Census
smooth wombat writes "With the Constitutionally mandated census of 2010 just around the corner, it appears the Commerce Department's attempt to use handheld computers to gather census information may not come to fruition. Originally, the contract was awarded at a cost of $596 million to Harris Corporation. However, the GAO has now estimated the revised contract, now costing $647 million, could grow to $2 billion and the equipment may still not work properly. There is consideration that the paper and pencil method might have to be employed to complete the census."
Recall that Herman Hollerith came up with punched cards for the 1890 census. He founded the company that became IBM. Here's some linky goodness.
...what accounts for the differences in the estimate and the cost? What cost(s) were underestimated?
The bloat is occurring because the project is not open-source, it could be done for pennies, but would take 20 years to complete.
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
of course do a more businesslike version with a larger keyboard... but the XO with custom census gathering application saving the data off onto flash drives would have been perfect... pity the timescale is a bit short now...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
How could we possibly do a census with paper and pencil? I mean, we've never done it that way before, right?
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
Originally, the contract was awarded at a cost of $596 million to Harris Corporation. However, the GAO has now estimated the revised contract, now costing $647 million, could grow to $2 billion and the equipment may still not work properly.
1.4 billion is one hell of an overrun...and after all that, the equipment may still not work properly?
Is the Harris Corporation currently hiring? I'd like to get me some of that boondoggle.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
At least this way, you can say the 2010 census used proven techniques.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Between driver's licenses, utilities, medicare, social security, public school enrollment, arrests, and other records, a good statistician should be able to get an answer that is close enough. To double check the results, canvass a few dozen randomly chosen counties, then adjust accordingly.
But there is no reason that counting people should cost over half a billion dollars.
We should be able to contract this out. Offer maybe a mere 50 million dollars to the entrant that can produce the best results. Anyone can enter. They do their counting by whatever legal method they choose. THEN the census dept does their random counties, and whoever is closest on those counties gets paid, and their results for the whole country are used.
BTW, I'm assuming here that a census should be just counting heads; that all of the other questions that the census people ask, such as level of education, are none of their business. The constitution requires that people be counted. The goal was to ensure proportional representation. It does not require all of the intrusive questions that they ask now.
Also, according to the image on page 4, in 2015, we STILL won't be using Vista.
:D
And that's good news!
Is there a law that requires census workers to knock on people's doors, can we not allow people to register for a census on the internet? Would that not be easier and less expensive?
The problem with the computers is two-fold. One is they aren't designed to work with large amounts of data. The other is user training. Having been in college for the 2000 census, I can tell you that the government will hire any douchebag to complete the census in time. Therefore the users will be stupid. This system better be designed with a 90 great grandma in mind or it won't get results. That means it HAS to be intuitive. Furthermore the Census will always be off. If people returned the mail in form then the computers wouldn't be needed. Some people will never submit their information while still others who know what the Census is used for (Government subsidies and aid is tied to it) will over report the number of people in their household.
Government Accountability Office, apparently.
I know computers are capable of doing the job, but what was wrong with paper? Paper doesn't crash, get deleted, or require technology training. Further, if someone loses a paper copy of the census, it doesn't cost that much to replace.
It doesn't even have to be nice paper, just as long as it can be written on.
Help I'm a rock.
How the hell can it be that hard to count people?
Lets hope not. The population of the West Coast and the North East combined would come out at zero!
Squirrel!
The problem is as it always is with the federal government. The Constitution only says one thing about the census:
"[An] Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct."
from Article 1 Section 2, but our government has increased what is actually collected from a simple head count to a great deal more (intrusive) information as defined by 13 USC 141.
If the census only covered what is mentioned in the Constitution, one of those simple hand counters (the click type) would suffice.
During the last census, one of the census workers came to my house with this big long form. I told him that there were 2 voting age adults and 3 underage children residing there. He started asking all sorts of other questions, how much do you make, what race is everyone, etc. When I refused to answer he became all indignant telling me I was required to answer because it was a Constitutional mandate. When I pointed out that I did answer based on the Constitution he became angry.
At that point I told him to have me arrested and I'd see him in court and closed the door.
The fact is, the government needs all that data to continue with their social engineering and that is something I won't support.
So yeah, the system has cost overruns, and could be handled with just a piece of paper and a pencil, if, the government would do only what they were supposed to do.
Are there seriously people out there who are NOT TRAINABLE to this extent? Or to ask it another way, did the census people hire people who are incredibly dense, averse to learning new things, and/or stubborn?
Or maybe I should ask it this way. Did the company who designed the software do such a poor job designing the interface that it's impossible to use?
just take an enumeration, which is all that the Constitution allows, anyway. ("The actual Enumeration shall be made ... within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct...counting the whole number of persons in each State...")
Without the need to gather all that other illegal crap ("How many toilets in your household?"), a census take needs little more than a cheap handheld clicker.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I think they should just use the post office to conduct the census. They already go to everyone's house. They could just hire some more people for the census and expand the job of the mailperson for a few months.
I don't see why a couple hundred servers at a few million along with a nicely designed site with php and mysql for a few hundred thousand wouldn't work. Internet surveys are extremely popular these days and the information wouldn't have to go through multiple hoops to be stored in the database format where it can be analyzed.
Are computers just not powerful enough for the task? Are the incapable of performing the required computations? If not, I don't see how this is the poor computers fault. On another note: I am guessing a slate of Tungten Es with custom software is out of the question.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
The whole census survey took about 15 minutes. They collected a lot of data - I'd say there were between 60 and 80 questions. Since I'm a geeky sort of person, I asked the kid how it worked and he showed me - the PDA (a Compac Pocket PC) just ran a macro in MS Office which dumped each survey as a file into a folder. That folder synced via wireless/mobile-phone link to where the main data center was.
The country has a population of about 4 million, and he said there were 200 people doing the survey for several months. Seemed pretty straightforward, and I can't imagine it cost that much - certainly labor and not the PDAs was the primary expense.
A-Bomb
I will be 60 this year and as far as I know may have never been counted, unless I was
counted somewhere around my 2nd birthday. Spent the first 34 years at the same address.
While there we received census forms in the mail twice, with instructions to wait for
a census worker to come pick them up. There was no address for mailing them back to
anywhere and nobody ever came to pick them up. After I left that address I, my wife
and son have never had any contact with anybody or anything regarding the U.S. Census.
I have lived in the same home for the last 13 years in a St. Louis county suburb in
Missouri that is less than 8 miles from our Lambert International Airport.
Paint me blue and call me stupid, but really, how hard is it to make a hand-held computer designed to take and store census data? It's not like these machines need to calculate pi. It's data entry and retention. Right? How could that possibly require $2 billion dollars to implement? What am I missing? (beyond the obvious corruption and inflation of budgets to line the pockets of fat cats)
Bet if you did a study, a serious one, you'd find there's an irrefutable inverse relationship between the amount of money bid for a project and the success of that project. I know it sounds like a flippant witticism, but I'm sure of it, do the research and the figures will prove a direct *causal link* between the amount of money put in and project failure.
I mean, what is it with these large scale IT projects? They take a simple problem and turn it into a money pit. Here in the UK we've had several high profile massive budget IT failures in the last 10 years, air traffic control, national health patient record databases, in fact the more critical it is the more of a spectacular unqualified fuck-up it becomes.
Now, if you got a couple of average hacker nerds and gave then the same specs, but didn't tell them it was for a large scale project, or for whom, they would give you a faultless solution using commodity hardware, stock methods and free software in a few months at one *millionth* the cost we're looking at here. Every one of you here knows it to be true. So, my question is, what goes wrong? How can it possibly go so wrong? Are the people involved complete idiots? Or corrupt?
What are the factors that turn a simple software project into an impossible task? Is it the stress of high budgets? Too many crooks spoiling the broth? And more to the point, when is some bright person going to break from this pattern of failure and realise that to award a major government IT contract to *more than one* complete no-name outsiders bidding a fraction of the cost makes more sense than giving billions of dollars to one contractor and putting all your eggs in one basket?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Yeah, yeah, I know, the evil gummint. That said, this was farmed out to Harris Corporation. How could they screw up so dramatically? Every part of this project is pure COTS. Handheld computers are stock items, in the form of phones, PDAs, tablets, eeePCs, or whatever. In any of those categories one can get a device that'll run whatever software you want it to run for not much money at all. The input software on the handhelds should be trivial, and the backend is standard database. Big standard database; but that is nothing new. How can that start at over half a billion dollars and potentially quadruple from there? Even if you bought expensive commercial software the whole way, giant sun boxxen to run it on, and iphones for every last censustaker it shouldn't run anywhere near that. Heck, for that kind of money, you could develop an openMoko branch to be exactly the device you want it to be, probably three times over. WTF? I realise that the government has a reputation for lousy efficiency; but what about this contractor? How does a company this worthless survive?
The problem is that a bunch of "temporary workers" can't figure out the user interface on those Harris thingys. Well, they should be using Mac Airs ... or Apple AirBooks ...or whatever the hell they're called. Anybody can use an Apple, they're so intuitive! And cheap! Don't forget the cost savings!
And again I have to wonder why I'm not in charge.
For example, by loosening up the definition of "citizen" only slightly, I can double the U.S. population. Every life counts.
"A census taker tried to quantify me once. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a big Amarone.
--Dr. Hannibal Lecter
I'm pretty sure MacGyver did his own 1985 census with a paperclip, a piece of scotch tape, and 3 guys he found standing outside a Home Depot in Tucson.
is why I do not like having official work be done with computers!
XD
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
so, who really is holding them accountable?
Dear Commerce Department, See: Why OldTech Keeps Kicking
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Its been interpretated that an estimate is not a count. And thats what the constitution asks for.
The Dems prefer a count while the Repubs would go with an estimate. An estimate is more accurate for people who own property.
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When conservatives continuously tell everyone that government doesn't work, they are half right. Conservatives IN GOVERNMENT never work.
Occam's Razor- just get all the conservatives out of government, and the problems magically disappear!
Countee: [waves hand] "These are not the droids you are looking for...hee hee!"
Counter: [pulls out pencil and checks 'dork']
projects like this are not just put out for bid, but offered up like an X Prize. For a mere 10 million dollars they would probably end up with a device agnostic system that works with wireless and not, and compiles statistics for serving up to the web automatically. I can see the Google mashup now.
Ferchrisakes, this is WHAT GEEKS DO all day long.
Add a blind double check security login so that people can be counted at home on their computers. Then only check those with addresses and no data as well as addresses with more than one set of data.
Then off you go, into the wild digital yonder of mashups and web pages with pie charts and 'stuff'
Yes, I truly do believe it is that simple. The one guy that has a chance for the netflix prize all on his own is one of those bumps in the bell curve of design. If you put it up for bid, the only developers working on the project will be bound to follow orders from those above, and bright ideas will be lost in the suffle of stale coffee and boring meetings.
Post the bid specs and lets see what happens? why not? I realize this has to secure information about persons but it's not like the system would lose any nuclear weaponry in Taiwan? right?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Just extrapolate or approximate by using a smaller census and count the number of employed and schoolgoing kids and just add the number of unemployed, homeschooled, and births to get a number that would have about a 90% confidence interval? Is a 95% confidence interval really worth that many billion dollars?
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
In 52 years I've been counted once, to my knowledge. It was either the 1980 or 1990 census. Never before or since.
Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.
2 billion ??? you could do the census using OLD trs 80 pocket computers so What will cost that much, 2 billion
"I don't pitch OpenSUSE Linux to my friends, i let Microsoft do it for me
In the US, the government has to go around, manually counting people in the streets??? Aren't you people registered centrally with your citizenship at birth or something? I mean, counting people like that is what I heard they did in a very popular Christmas story 2008 years ago, but I honestly though technology and advances in governmental practices had made manual counting obsolete...
You're right, and the people modding you down are full of shit. Two billion dollars for a census is unforgivable, and I wouldn't be a bit surprised if some of Bush's cronies had stock in Harris. You're right; we should go back to the days when horse thieves were hanged, the days when the tax regime we have now would provoke widespread insurrection.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
This is what happens if contracts are awarded to companies that have CEOs with connections to politicians. Politicians clearly have no fucking clue what it's involved so they simply accept the status quo from these leeches!
The fact of the matter is this job could be done with this setup:
-Each hand held machine would collect data as it's received and store locally.
-Once back at the office they would be connected to the LAN with an Internet connection to a main server at census offices with an SSL encryption that would simply upload the results.
Why is it that companies constantly over complicate the operation?
Videogame developers do a better job of all of this on a tighter budget with less people and are expected to do so in less time!! Why are we paying them if the job isn't done? Cut them off now and get someone else for the job.
Coincidentally, my first paying job was working as a US Census enumerator for the 1980 census. Paper worked fine. The real problems were with my fellow citizens who didn't want to be enumerated (which I can understand, though calling the police on me seemed like overkill).
Finally, apropos of this topic, I recently discovered that the best "organizer" in the world is an empty file folder (or perhaps several) and a supply of sticky notes. Portable, easy to reorganize, no problem if you run your car over it, easy to back up, etc.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
Tech issues aside, the mere fact that we are spending half a billions dollars on the equipment alone, should be enough to tell us it's a rip-off. Whoever gave out that porky contract should be tarred and feathered.
As for tech: Technology is all about giving more bang per buck. When it gives you less, then you shouldn't call it "high tech." It sounds like these computers are lower technology than paper and pen; i.e. an engineer would look at the problem, say, "aha! I have an idea!" and propose upgrading the computers to notepads.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Our last census had the option of filling out the census forms online. I didn't find out how many actually did it, but they were originally estimating 20% usage. Instead of getting the full booklet to fill out, you got an access code.
http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2006/04/27/online-census060427.html
While searching for a reference article, i found that there were some issues with Linux users, although they attempted to correct it.
http://www.linux.com/articles/54366
Indeed. And then bill the horse owner the amount of one horse. Then tax him every year for the horse feed.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
"Also, the computers were not initially programmed to transmit the large amounts of data necessary."
What the hell kind of computers did the contractor provide!? They need to be reprogrammed to support larger data transfers - wtf. And how does a large lot of handhelds (with a custom operating system, apps) come to more than half a billion dollars? I should have been a beltway bandit.
The census is much more than just a count of people. Quite a bit of statistical and demographic data is collected... questions like how many people per household, demographics of the occupants, and this data is not centralized... and no, they don't walk around the street like some Jar Jar Binks clones asking "Excueeze me, have you be-in censified? Mesa taking census!" Every household gets mailed a census form, and you just fill it out and send it back. If you fill something out on it wrong, they may send a census taker around to get the information corrected.
can we not allow people to register for a census on the internet?
;-). But, then again, it IS a federal government operation we're talking about, and poorly specified requirements, unbounded scope-creep and mismanagement know no bounds.
Sure you can. I submitted my census questions via secure website during the last census in 2006...but that was in Canada. It was easier, and certainly less expensive to process (didn't save paper though, because everyone still got the mailer; you could fill it in and mail it back or log in with the information provided in the mailer).
I'm not sure about how it goes in the US, but sending out canvassers only covers about two percent of data collection. Canvassing is only used for the following:
* to survey transient populations--ie. the homeless--
* to collect from remote locations such as the far north, where mail service and internet connectivity are slow, limited or unavailable
* to get data from households who didnt reply via internet or the mailer (and to charge you if you refuse to respond to the mandatory questions on the census)
I can't imagine, even given the 1000 percent larger population, that implementing electronic data collection for canvassers to get that two percent of data would require billions of dollars to implement (the US dollar hasn't depreciated THAT much
So how does yet another Republican boondoggle contract for an essential government service mean that "computers" will thwart the 2010 Census? Are these incompetent Republicans really just a computer simulation?
Maybe this really is all just some kind of Y2K bug VR nightmare. Would someone please reboot Gore, so I can go back to watching _the Simpsons_ when it was still funny?
--
make install -not war
This is not new and pioneering technology. There are companies that take similar surveys for market research purposes. Have you ever been asked to take a survey at a mall? Have you ever been at a bar when a beautiful woman with a tablet computer asks you to take a survey about cigarettes? I have. The Government is wasting billions of dollars to develop technology that has existed for years.
Why doesn't the government just outsource the whole census to a market research company and be done with it?
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
All that information IS necessary for the government to provide all the services they provide today in a reasonable and efficient manner. So you could definitely read it as saying "that" means the information about how many people live there. Again, I don't think that's what the OP meant (mainly from the capitalization of "IS"), but I'd cut Red Jesus some slack on the possible misread. The OP could have done a bit more to make his post less ambiguous.
On this general subject, the Census Bureau has far exceeded its authority with the American Community Survey. If any here has received this, I'm sure you know whereof I speak. Intrusive is an understatement. Here is a link to it (a pdf file on the CB's website):
http://www.census.gov/acs/www/Downloads/SQuest08.pdf
We decided a long time ago that we'll answer the constitutionally mandated enumeration questions only. All the additional data gathering we have ignored. From when they used such data for the WWII round up of Americans of Japanese ancestry to their recent loss of nearly 500 laptops full of data and posting of some 60 thousand peoples' data on the web (including SSNs), we simply do not trust them. Besides, I'm not about to send out unencrypted or give to some random data collector all my personal details (health, finance, home culture, travel habits, SSN, etc.).
If you do not fill out the form, you get regular phone calls for a month - some after 10PM and some before 6AM (at least we did). Then, if you draw the short straw, you get regular visits for a month - up to twice daily near the end of the period (again, we did). Were I to do that to someone, no doubt I could be arrested.
The bizarre thing here is, much of the data is readily available from other federal departments. But that of course is too sensible to use. Fortunately, the web is proving useful in co-ordinating the increasing resistance to this intrusion.
Who the hell is going to contribute to a Congresscritter's reelection campaign, if the critters only give out contracts for paper? Especially if you say it doesn't have to be nice paper. At least with "nice" paper, you can set the specs such that it matches only one company's product.
It needs to be computers instead of paper, so that it costs enough to be worth someone's while to bid for the contract, so that they'll have reason to reward you in the next years' campaign.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
This problem has been solved! Gdod damn contractors.
If they are really this stupid, then they can just find out how UPS does it. I mean you need less functionality.
AARRRGGGG
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Census data was used to round up japanese-american citizens for interment camps during WWII:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-03-30-census-role_N.htm
With the current "war on the unexpected" who knows how current census data will be used to abuse citizens like yourself.
They could have purchased hundreds or thousands of off-the-shelf PDAs and had a company develop a basic piece of census-tracking software for a mere fraction of what this project costs. Instead they'll argue they need some elaborate, over-priced piece of hardware under the pretense that only something so fancy can reliably handle the government's needs. The best part is that the devices might not even work properly. What in the hell are these companies doing that even with this much money thrown at them they can't do anything right?
Still, that doesn't excuse the government's stupidity. It's like that stimulus package. As if enough money hasn't already been dumped into that some halfwit decided they needed to send out letters informing recipients that they were going to be receiving these checks. In many cases these notices will be arriving barely a month before the check arrives. Sending these letters out has cost the government over $40 million.
It's time the government's budget were capped at the rate of inflation making allowances only for population growth. It's time they learned how to manage their expenses like the rest of us have to.
We had an online census in NZ a while ago.
From all reports, it went well.
Had a person come to the household, with the census papers. On the papers, was a web address and a PIN code to access the online version of the census.
If you filled out the online version, you ticked a box on the paper version, and gave it back to the nice person that collected them a week or so later.
Didn't hear any reports about security breaches.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10371468
Searching the site for "online census" will pull up a few more articles.
...posting A/C on Slashdot, naturally! Your tax dollars at work ;->
..what accounts for the differences in the estimate and the cost?
Mainly, in my experience, we're required to predict 1.5 to 2 years in advance what the IT hardware and software will cost, which is a completely unworkable premise, but nonetheless our bosses order us to do it that way. We always pad the dollar figures upwards to account for the complete unpredictableness of the market by some fudge factor. Then we submit those budget estimates up to upper accounting management who completely alter the figures by some completely arbitrary and capricious amounts, almost always downwards, because that's the amount what they wish to spend, not what reality says the stuff will actually cost. Then by the time the upper management forwards their bastardized budget estimates to the executive management, the execs alter the numbers yet again to some mystery values which we have no idea whatsoever how they came up with. Then, there you have the budget estimates that actually get published. After all, the upper accounting managers and execs know far more about technology budget planning than us mere IT monkeys, since they've watched all those IBM ads on TV during the NFL games.
What cost(s) were underestimated?
All of them... by the time the above-detailed process has run its course.
"Harris is committed to assisting the U.S. Census Bureau in meeting its current and future strategic goals of providing Census-related statistics with increased accuracy at a reduced cost."
From harris.com, specifically here:
http://www.govcomm.harris.com/solutions/marketindex/segment.asp?source=market&mkt=Database+and+Information+Systems+Integration&market_id=99&segment_id=68
Comment removed based on user account deletion
No expensive proprietary solution required.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I've always thought that the gender-neutral form of postman should be "post officer".
Sorry... I just like the word! :)
Thwart, Thwart, Thwart, Thwart, Thwart, Thwart,
There is also Thwarter too!
Main Entry: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary
Pronunciation:
\thwort\
Function:
transitive verb
Etymology:
Middle English thwerten, from thwert, adverb
Date:
13th century
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Yup! All of us '55ers seem to have the same problem. Tend to be invisible occasionally. :)
Maybe 'cause we're special?
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
They'd rather spend all this money than admit that they already know all this stuff... ;)
please.
...but it still seems to me that any combination of "Harris", "Florida", "government", and "counting" is just bound to end badly.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
No, I didn't read the article,but I'm ready to bet a donut they're running Windows Mobile. That would explain everything.
Google should be allowed to rebid with an Android-based solution.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Ask any census taker what is the purpose of the census, and I'd bet a dollar to a donut they will either be wrong or will have no answer at all. As stated in Article I, Section 2 of the United States Constitution, the sole purpose of the census is to determine the number of representatives that shall be allocated to each state in the US House of Representatives. Thus, the ONLY question they are Constitutionally authorized to ask is: "How many voting adults live in this household." That is all they need to know for Constitutional purposes and that's the only information I've ever given to them or ever will. Don't be such damn sheeple, people.
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
Then, I decided that "Censorship ftw!" was a good subject line.
Finally, I chose to put forth my own ideas, and rant about the modding as an aside.
Feel free to skip over my rant by jumping down past "Rant Off" (marked in bold) to "My own take on the subject" (also in bold), but please do consider actually reading it, as I feel it adds to the discussion (Of course I feel that way because they're my own opinions. Your level of agreement may vary). Of course, I fully expect to be joining the above-mentioned posts in "modded to negative" land. (Who needs karma?)
Rant On:
Apparently, we here at Slashdot think censorship is ok.
Apparently, "-1, Flamebait" is a good substitute for "I disagree, and am too lazy to reply."
I wish I hadn't spent my mod points yesterday. If nothing else, I would have counteracted the "-1, Flamebait" with a "+1, Insightful", or a "+1, Funny" at the least. I'm not saying these posts need a +5, but a +2 would have been about right. I'm also not saying these score any technical points for grammar or punctuation, and they're a bit crude for my taste, but the sentiment and opinions being expressed are just and proper, and any citizen of the United States should feel a similar level of outrage at this blatant abuse (the stuff mentioned in the article, not the treatment these posts have received).
I am repeating the posts I feel were modded unfairly, because without their context, my own post makes much less sense... and anyone browsing at a level higher than "-1" won't see the posts I am replying to with this one. My own "translation" of the intent of the posts (which may be wrong, of course, but I feel they're fairly accurate) follows each quoted post, in italics.
Flagrant Corruption (Score:-1)
by the0ther (720331) on Wednesday March 26, @03:52PM (#22873934) Homepage
two billion dollars? are you effing kidding me? let's go back to the good old days when they would hang a man for stealing a horse.
This is a reference to the blatant and obvious theft, mismanagement, and/or fraud involved in this situation.
I agree (Score:-1, Flamebait)
by Lilith's Heart-shape (1224784) on Wednesday March 26, @03:59PM (#22874042)
You're right, and the people modding you down are full of shit. Two billion dollars for a census is unforgivable, and I wouldn't be a bit surprised if some of Bush's cronies had stock in Harris. You're right; we should go back to the days when horse thieves were hanged, the days when the tax regime we have now would provoke widespread insurrection.
--
Arioch! Arioch! Hookers and blow for my lord Arioch!
This is an agreement with the first post, and a disagreement with those who modded the first post down. There is also an insinuation of corruption in our government (surprise), and a statement that patriotism should be spurring on those of us who feel likewise to *do something* (Boston Tea Party, anyone?)
I would like to point out that, while crude, both of these posts have valid points. I, too, agree that this ("this" being the topic of the article... remember? that blurb at the top of the page?) is an obvious sign of corruption, and just one more thing to add to the list of items to redress when we begin standing those people responsible for the mess our country is in against the wall.
To those of you who didn't catch the gist of this thread:
The GP was shocked and offended that someone is getting away with this obvious fraud and mismanagement, and no one is being held accountable for this gross oversight (or lack thereof). The comment about horse thieves may have been an attempt at tossing a little humor into the mix, to take the sting out a bit.
This post's parent made the (apparently unforgiveable) mistake of agreeing with that sentiment, and got modded (Can you see the incredulous look on my face? Unbelievable!) Flamebait for it.
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Note: I live in the city that is the home of Harris' main offices. These devices were developed here.
According to some employees I have spoken to, these devices are basically ready for use, within the current budget. They're going through extensive testing at the moment, but all in all the devices work, and work well. The problem lies in the use of the device, apparently it requires a bit of training (estimated at 30 minutes). This was deemed unacceptable to the census bureau, so we have this problem.
I don't think 30 minutes of training on a device before a months long census is that big of a deal, but this is the real problem.
Grandparent was obviously joking. I have no idea why so many replied...
I lost my sig.
They have some really cool video stuff, but their "professional and government services" really blow. We paid maintainance on a piece of their half-working software for like 4 years without an upgrade and their tech support was useless.