Seriously, WTF? Apparently, our favorite administration has been paying Lockheed Martin $500 Million to upgrade a simple terrorist watch list database with about 400,000 records and yet they’ve fucked it up like John McCain taking an inventory of his real estate… But, c’mon, there has got to be thousands of companies and organizations out there with quite complex membership/subscriber lists of half a million records or more — heck, American Express must have more than 400,000 card members — and they seem to be able to find their subscribers and their non-subscribers quite nicely. I’m also quite sure they didn’t pay that kind of ludicrous sums for their applications.
So what the hell kind of rip off artistry is this? Where to begin? With the incompetent bureaucrats who placed the order in the first place but didn’t spec it so it could be built right? For their accepting a $500M bid? For not doing the Q&A to ensure they were getting what they thought they’d asked for? Or how about Lockheed Martin’s ace coders, who either have been told not to bother doing it right while the money people sock away a windfall profit.
