Comments on: Why Asterisk Matters: It’s Katrina, Stupid!

By: kknight

kknight — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 23:53:26 +0000

If I knew where you lived, I’d buy you your choice of drink. Those comments are RIGHT ON TARGET. I have been in business over 20 years and cannot count the number of times I worked with a company that was spending incredible amounts of money on crap or the completely wrong technologies to accomplish their goals.

Keep up the good work!

By: Big Ed

Big Ed — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 17:10:46 +0000

Howard Fineman from Newsweek was on the Imus show this morning. He put it this way: "I was talking to a Congressman from down there named Gene Taylor who was from Biloxi, he said he was in a command center down there, he said he had to send runners out all around his county, literally people to either walk or drive if they had gas in their car, to go report back to him as to what was going on. It's an utter disgrace, an utter disgrace that throughout this country there isn't communications ability among first responders in any city that I know of. That's outrageous. Osama Bin Laden is over there in his cave just laughing in his beard." So maybe the headline ought to be Why Katrina Matters: It's Asterisk Stupid! [WM: When you take into consideration that the FBI reportedly was using FedEx to send Wanted Posters between their offices TWO YEARS AGO because they had no secure e-mail system, nothing surprises me.]

By: eyesopen

eyesopen — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 01:27:46 +0000

Just wanted to thank you for sharing your expertise in exposing the ineptness of what happened in NOLA. It’s even more shameful in view of your suggestions of what they could have done.

By: nroberts

nroberts — Fri, 16 Sep 2005 20:45:04 +0000

EXACTLY!!! I have been wondering the same thing since this disaster happened. With all the resources the federal and state governments have you would think that putting together some communications hubs would have been the first step in disaster relief. And you are correct, it could have been done with off the shelf parts. By the way, I have been a regular visitor to this site since it appeared on digg.com and I wanted to say thanks for the very informative and fun mac projects. This is a well put together site and I look foreward to any future projects you might have on here. Keep up the good work!
nathan