Fold/Spindle/Mutilate 2.1

In what’s been called the “Academy Awards for Engineers,” four distinguished figures in personal computer history will be awarded the Charles Stark Draper Prize tonight at a dinner in Washington, D.C.

Sharing the US$500,000 prize will be Robert W. Taylor, Alan C. Kay, Butler W. Lampson and Charles P. Thacker — all key players at the celebrated computer science lab at Xerox’s (NYSE: XRX) Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) during the early days of personal computing.

The recipients of the prize expressed surprise at winning the award to be presented by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).

“I was caught in total and complete surprise,” Taylor told TechNewsWorld. “It never dawned on me that we would win this.

“The prize honors work that was done 30 years ago,” he added. “The reward was doing the work and seeing what has been happening over the years, but I never expected anything like this.”

Indispensable Core

This four-generation evolution of the Bushes involves multiple links that could become Bush’s election-year Achilles’ heel - if a clever and tough 2004 Democratic opponent can punch and slice at them. Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry, the clear Democratic front-runner, could be best positioned to do so. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he investigated the Iran-Contra and Bank of Credit and Commerce International scandals, both of which touched George H.W. Bush’s Saudi, Iraqi and Middle Eastern arms-deal entanglements.

Washington lawyer Jack Blum, the ace investigator for Kerry’s subcommittee back then, is said to be advising him now, which could be meaningful. Ironically, the Bush family’s century of involvement in oil, armaments and global intrigue has never been at the center of the national debate since the Bushes starting running for president in 1980. The reason? Insufficient public knowledge. The only Bush biography published before George H.W. Bush won election in 1988 was a puff job written by a former press secretary, and the biographies of George W. Bush in 2000 barely mentioned his forefathers.

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ASHINGTON

Testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, George Tenet was asked why the C.I.A. never picked up the trail of Marwan al-Shehhi, the pilot who crashed Flight 175 into the south tower on 9/11.

Thirty months earlier, German intelligence had passed on a hot tip to the C.I.A.

HEROKEE COUNTY, Ga.

Rob Behler isn’t saying Max Cleland’s Senate seat was stolen by rigged electronic voting machines, but he insists it could have been. Mr. Behler, who helped prepare Georgia’s machines for the 2002 election, says secret computer codes were installed late in the process. Votes “could have been manipulated,” he says, and the election thrown to the Republican, Saxby Chambliss.

Charlie Matulka, who lost to Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska the same year, does not trust the results in his election. Most of the votes were cast on paper ballots that were scanned into computerized vote-counting machines, which happen to have been manufactured by a company Mr. Hagel used to run. Mr. Matulka, suspicious of Senator Hagel’s ties to the voting machine company, demanded a hand recount of the paper ballots. Nebraska law did not allow it, he was informed. “This is the stealing of our democracy,” he says.

Defeated candidates who think they were robbed are nothing new in American politics. But modern technology is creating a whole new generation of conspiracy theories

ENNESAW, Ga.

So, Kevin Phillips

The Governor of Ohio, Bob Taft, and other prominent state officials, commute to their downtown Columbus offices on Broad Street. This is the so-called

Halliburton Corp.’s latest image-rehabilitating television commercial begins with a narrator wistfully declaring, “When I joined Halliburton, I knew I was going to work on some big things.” At Halliburton, the narrator explains, people are constantly trying to improve the lives of others. They fight oil-well fires, they bring supplies to stranded troops. “We built bridges, schools, all over the world.” And that’s not even the best part. “The biggest thing?” the narrator asks as the screen flashes to a group of smiling Halliburton employees dishing up hot meals to American GIs. “Serving our troops good ol’ American food, so they’d feel just a little closer to home. Yeah.”

It’s a nice image. But to Henry Bunting, a veteran procurement specialist who worked for Halliburton’s subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root in Kuwait last summer, this saccharine picture of Halliburton as a beneficent do-gooder doesn’t ring true. According to Bunting, Halliburton’s personnel in the Middle East weren’t looking out for the government as much as they were looking out for the company. Bunting, who has recently been telling his story to congressional Democrats, says that Halliburton, which has been awarded billions of dollars of contracts for work in Iraq, routinely purchased the most expensive equipment and services on the government’s tab. Bunting claims that Halliburton managers frowned on any attempts to save the military any money. They had no incentive to do so: taxpayers would pick up the cost. In fact, they had an incentive to bill high: the more they spent, the more money their company would make.

Bunting worked as a buyer for Halliburton’s “Logcap” contract with the U.S. Army, a $3.7 billion deal under which Halliburton provides the military with logistics support — it builds bases, runs mess halls, does the laundry, supplies water and performs dozens of other tasks necessary to keep the Army running. The contract is a “cost-plus” contract, meaning that the military reimburses Halliburton for all of its expenses, and then gives it an extra percentage as a profit. Experts have long criticized cost-plus contracts as being economically inefficient; companies that work under cost-plus deals have no reason to reduce their expenses, meaning that the government may end up paying more than it should for services.

To keep costs down, firms that have been awarded cost-plus contracts pledge to open their processes to competitive bidding, making sure that they’re getting low prices on equipment they use. Halliburton says that it complies with all federal requirements regarding competitive bidding. But according to Bunting, this is where Halliburton fell short; it constantly failed to seek low prices in its operations, violating the spirit, if not the letter, of its contract with the government. Bunting says that even though his job was ostensibly to get the best deals on equipment for the Army — everything from office chairs to medical supplies — his managers often told him, “Don’t worry about the price, it’s cost-plus.” Supervisors urged buyers like him to keep their orders under $2,500, Bunting says, because orders for more than that amount would need to be submitted to multiple vendors for competitive bidding — a process that would potentially reduce Halliburton’s take.

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