US FederalBureauofInvestigation (FBI) Director told the US House Appropriations Committee that the follow-on to the notoriously failed $170 million Virtual Case File program called Sentinel would once again slip its schedule and cost targets. The latest cost estimate is in excess of $481 million with a total program slip now of some two years and counting. More info here: http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/who-killed-the-virtual-case-file/1 ---- Was this killed by a BlackSwan? or does it not qualify as such because Matthew Patton predicted that it was going to fail? Or maybe it qualifies as a BlackSwan, because it was as if someone would have told biologist "Do not say all Swans are white, there might be black swans", and other biologist answered "you are crazy, nobody has ever seen black swans, that is impossible". ------ While crime CRUD and analysis systems exist, they were not designed to be used on such a large scale. Cross-referencing for pattern and relationship hunting tends to scale poorly compared to "linear" searches. It's a new kind of request that may take some expensive trial and error or even custom hardware and new inventions. Another problem is making data from diverse systems consistent enough to be treated as one. Translations are often not one-to-one. I've worked on projects converting similar info, and had to use almost AI-like techniques to translate one categorization system into another. ---- See also TheracTwentyFive, TheCaseOfTheKillerRobot, RealProfessionalsGetSued, UsersWontPayForQualitySoftware