US fluffs Imperial defences
THE US has made a muppet of its hi-tech border defences along the Arizonian border with Mexico.
Border patrols in Tucson were meant to be patched into a sci-fi panoptoly of surveillance tools from their car-mounted laptop computers.
Instead, Mexican bandits, cotton picking job hopefuls, fugitive axe murderers and kiddy fiddlers were left free to fiesta! under the eye of an impotent big brother.
Battleplans are meant to be displayed on car mounted laptops in border patrol cars. The information is meant also to be linked with police and other government computer systems. Flying robot drones are to add to the mix.
But border patrollers didn't even have their laptops secured properly. So when they bounced over the rugged Arizona terrain in pursuit of banditos, the computers flapped about and got broken.
The radars didn't work in the rain. The cameras were meant to pick out an economic refugee at 10km, but could only stretch to half of that. Residents along the border have been reluctant to give up their private land for the sake of the defences.
The US Department of Homeland Security has been forced to rethink its plans for an omniscient border patrol and contractor Boeing, which worked on the now defunct pilot, has been commissioned to draw up another set of blue prints for the Imperial defences.
Boeing managed in two years to implement a series of automated watch towers with cameras, radar, and other unspecified sensor equipment, but the system was useless because none of the components could be connected, the US Government Accountability Office, Congress's watchdog, reported with a more diplomatic use of language.
The project was rushed, the costs had been under-estimated and the users hadn't been consulted. The command centre system, which was mean to give border patrollers a realtime view of the landscape and anything that moved in it, wasn't any good.
Officials of the Secure Border Initiative, as the programme is ironically known, said that the Boeing pilot, Project-28, was only a test run anyway. The GAO said it would be delayed and cost more than the DHS had specified. µ
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Short article ever? I mean come on people are you paying by the word??
You don't need super-cosmik technology to see illegals coming over the Mexican border. You can pretty much just stand there and watch (its a long border but geography funnels the migrants through relatively small parts of it). The problem is that there are just not enough people to catch the migrants -- you need more boots on the ground (paying the existing ones better might help as well).

Its same problem you've got in town centers in the UK. There seem to be infinite budgets for CCTV and loudspeakers to squawk at you but no money for a couple of plods to actually wander around and harass the drunks.
What?
"The project was rushed, the costs had been under-estimated and the users hadn't been consulted"

Would make a useful case study. The circumstances would appear to be similar to a case study used for a module (software engineering processes 1) in a hnd computing course where we had to study about the 'london ambulance service' when it was changed over to a computerised system.
This is by far one of the most terribly written articles I have ever read. Just bad. I don't even know where to start, but 'panoptoly' seems like a good choice.

Tip #1: Use spell check. It is panoply, not panoptoly. 

Tip #2: Don't use fancy words to cover up your complete lack of writing ability. If you can't spell it and don't know what it means, don't use it 19 times.

Tip #3: At least read some Inq articles before writing one. Wrong style, wrong length, wrong everything.

Tip #4: The first sentence is terrible and does not make a good first impression. Muppet, wtf?, calling a person a muppet might make sense, referring to a failed project makes none. Also, its Arizona border, not Arizonian. Arizonian is a person from Arizona.

Tip #5: Stop writing. Please. I am dumber after having read this.
Is it just me or is Boeing screwing up more projects than usual just around now?

And by the way I thought the article was fine (for the INQ anyway!)