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Arlington National Cemetery's Many IT Flaws

Posted by Soulskill on from the may-bobby-tables-rest-in-peace dept.

imac.usr writes "A story in today's Washington Post calls to light the utter failure of the nation's most sacred final resting place to modernize its pen-and-paper record system. According to the story, the cemetery's administrators have spent $5 million without managing to accomplish the seemingly simple task of creating a database record of the site's graves. As Virginia senator Mark Warner points out, 'We are one fire, or one flood, or one spilled Starbucks coffee away from some of those records being lost or spoiled.'"

9 of 191 comments (clear)

  1. That's All? by Haffner · · Score: 5, Funny

    Only $5 million? At first I thought this story was about the failure to store data electronically, but now I realize that it's about government efficiency.

    --
    "Going to war without the French is like going deer hunting without your accordion." ~General Norman Schwarzkopf
  2. Tell me about it! by Late+Adopter · · Score: 5, Funny

    They can't even remember who's in the tomb of the unknown soldier!

    1. Re:Tell me about it! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      They can't even remember who's in the tomb of the unknown soldier!

      Corporal Tables, we call him.

    2. Re:Tell me about it! by syousef · · Score: 4, Funny

      They can't even remember who's in the tomb of the unknown soldier!

      Corporal Tables, we call him.

      -- Okay time for your morning pushups:
      Drop Corporate Tables; -- drop!

      --
      These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
  3. Cut them some slack... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Funny

    Arlington National Cemetery is not an organization that can afford to take the risk of having their servers turned into zombies lightly...

    1. Re:Cut them some slack... by Nadaka · · Score: 5, Funny

      tell me about it. The only thing worse than a zombie is a zombie with stealth and combat training.

  4. Re:Where do I sign up for that job? by ArsonSmith · · Score: 4, Funny

    This is for a government project.

    I'll do it for twice that amount!!

    Bet I get it before you do.

    --
    Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
  5. Re:Accountability by Red+Flayer · · Score: 3, Funny

    Rather than be a rotting corpse, I would rather come back sooner as pine needles in an alpine forest and affect the future through writings, or photography, or my descendents.

    So at the root of things, you'd be pining for your descendants in the woods instead of your descendants pining for you in a cemetary?

    Fair enough. But wouldn't you appreciate the thought of your descendants sprucing up your gravesite in memoriam?

    --
    "Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
  6. Re:Accountability 5 million is nothing by forkazoo · · Score: 3, Funny

    This seems like a really interesting comment. I'm going to schedule a project kickoff meeting for next week where we can discuss some strategies for reading your comment as efficiently as possible. Reading your comment is a very high strategic priority for me, so I'll try to get a hardware provisioning meeting scheduled ASAP after the kickoff meeting so that I can let everybody know that I'm eventually going to request some hardware to use for reading your comment.

    I setting a rough goal of having your comment read before the end of the fiscal year, but there is a good chance that the project will be pushed back a bit somewhere into the next few FY's.