I’ve found The Daily WTF is a great site to read regularly. They only have a couple posts per day and they’re generally all software-related WTFs. Good stuff, particularly if you’ve worked in business software, since it reflects (and usually magnifies) your experiences with management and bad software.

The best explanation I saw on that thread when I read it [when it was first posted] was that in all likelihood, the original project was sold as a package deal to the government on the guarantee that they would use “neural networks”. Given the nature of government budgets, if they hadn’t spend that vast amount of time and effort on something this pointless, all that money they would have spent would have disappeared, and moreover, their budget for the next year would have been slashed because they obviously didn’t need that much money. Since no one would willingly lower their own budget (especially not in government), we end up with cool stories on DailyWTF. Taxpayer dollars for the win.