"robert bowman" wrote in message
...
Stu Fields wrote:

I've been offered a job with a contractor who provides service to DoD and
I've refused. There ain't no dollar amount that would make me get in that
insanity again. In fact I've been working on our magazine at no salary
for 6 years. The government is not a solution. It is a problem.

I worked on one DoD project. There were endless meetings in the attempt to
prepare a specification document where the topic of discussion was the
indentation and labeling of paragraphs. I lasted about 6 months, quit, and
went elsewhere. I talked to a friend who stayed about a year later. "Write
any code yet?" "Nope", he said.

It was fun though, especially the resident spook who would lecture about
the
evil Russkies lurking out in the town dump going through our garbage or
would explain the importance of removing all the printer ribbons before
the
IBM CE came, just in case he was a Red too and could glean secrets from
the
ribbon imprints.

You should have seen the Army Cols. that bought a series of Furuno
anti-collision radars and actually told me that they were going to detect a
periscope at 20nm into a prevailing sea state. They had already bought them
about $65K worth. When we started actually evaluating the problem we
finally got to a 300' long ship at 20nmi if we could get the Furunos mounted
high enough and the sea state wasn't too bad. They weren't bothered by the
fact that I had to put a corner reflector up on my sail boat mast to avoid
be run over by ships using Furuno radars.