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Your tax dollars at work

The FBI pissed away half a billion dollars on another unusable computer system.

It's a story as old as software itself. Non-technical mid-level management can be suckers for a slick PowerPoint show. Given a choice between A -- a quality product at a reasonable price, and B -- an outrageously overpriced piece of crap, they have an unerring ability to choose B every time.

As an independent software developer, I can't tell you how many times I've bid on a project only to lose out to a company with a much higher bid that ultimately delivered a huge, steaming pile of crap -- past the deadline and over budget, of course.

This example is especially outrageous since we fund it directly through our tax dollars, but we should remember we pay for the corporate stupidity too, through higher consumer prices and diminished shareholder values. Plus, it gives my profession a bad name.