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A review by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission released on Tuesday is damning of the contract between the commonwealth and Northrup Grumman for information technology services. The company has failed to deliver on many items and state oversight was plagued with poor leadership and insider decisions made behind closed doors in violation of state open meeting laws. Yet canceling the contract would cost $400 million and leave the state without anyone to manage its computers, phones and other technology. (Check out the report.)

We are writing an editorial for Thursday in which we will urge lawmakers to resist sticker shock.  Yes, $400 million is a lot of money and if the state dumps Northrup Grumman, it would need to spend even more replacing the company.  But if it sticks with the contract, it will incur many other expenses and have no guarantee of better service.  We don't yet know which way the state should go, but we do know lawmakers need to weigh both options as they prepare to move forward.

If the state does stick with Northrop Grumman, lawmakers should at least follow JLARC's recommendation to bring technology oversight wholly under the governor where it would be more accountable.

Wednesday, we'll laud Virginia Tech for its management of an international resource management project that won a Nobel for one of its researchers, and applaud the university's success in winning a multimillion-dollar federal grant for the university's bioinformatics institute. Both are pointed reminders of the important role research has to play in the lives of ordinary people, and the wisdom of investing in it.

Controlling Internet information

Rick Boucher

Boucher, a Democrat, represents Virginia's 9th District in the U.S. House.

Broadband networks are a primary driver of the national economy, and it is fundamentally in the nation's interest to encourage their expanded use. One clear way Congress can promote greater use of the Internet is to assure Internet users a high degree of privacy protection, including transparency about the collection, use and sharing of information about them, and to give them control over that collection, use and sharing.

Read more.

Net neutrality would protect consumers

The Internet grew and prospered based on a spirit of open access.

The individual zeroes and ones of Internet traffic might look the same, but put a few of them together and networks can tell where they came from and where they are going. With that knowledge, Internet service providers can control which data speed along the fastest. Virtual tollbooths could stifle competition as ISPs open the fast lanes only to companies willing to meet their price.

Read more.

We're writing an editorial for Monday about network neutrality. That's the idea that Internet Service providers should not be allowed to charge more to deliver certain data faster. In other words, Verizon DSL should not be allowed to say to Amazon.com that it will throttle consumers access if Amazon doesn't pay up.

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission on Monday proposed adopting net neutrality rules. (Read his speech.) We'll endorse his ideas, especially a forward-looking view that would apply the rules to more than just land-line Internet.

We're writing an editorial for Tuesday about gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell and the 1989 master's thesis he wrote at Regent University. McDonnell has portrayed himself as a moderate in the campaign, but the person who wrote this thesis came from the far-religious-right extreme of the Republican Party.

We believe people can change over time as they learn new things.  McDonnell even says he does not hew to everything he wrote in his thesis. In our editorial, we'll ask him to affirm or deny some very specific claims in that document, many of which manifested throughout his political career, and to explain what changed his mind where he no longer agrees with his 34-year-old self.

(Read his thesis here.)

In a recent column, David Pogue, The New York Times technology critic, hit on one of those minor annoyances that plague modern life, and then put it in shocking context. How many times have gotten someone's voice mail, then waited through the stupid instructions at the end: "Record your message after the tone. To send a numeric page, press one. To leave a callback number, press five. When you are finished recording, hang up, or for delivery options, press pound."

As Pogue put it: Do we really need to be told to hang up when we're finished!? Would anyone, ever, want to "send a numeric page?" Who still carries a pager, for heaven's sake? Or what about "leave a callback number?" We can SEE the callback number right on our phones!

I've had the same thoughts countless times, but wrote it off as a mere annoyance and a waste of a few seconds. That's where the shocking context comes in. From Pogue again: Is this really so evil? Is 15 seconds here and there that big a deal? Well, Verizon has 70 million customers. If each customer leaves one message and checks voicemail once a day, Verizon rakes in — are you sitting down? — $850 million a year. That’s right: $850 million, just from making us sit through those 15-second airtime-eating instructions.

Pogue doesn't just want to complain, though. He wants to affect change. To that end, he's begun a "Take Back the Beep Campaign." Click on the link to join in and find out where to complain to each carrier.

Invite cable TV competition

Radford and Blacksburg should stop awarding monopolies to cable companies.

Radford City Council has had it with JetBroadband, the cable television provider in the city. It owes the city $50,000 and does not want to pay, so the council will consider revoking its exclusive license to provide cable. If it comes to that, and it probably should, the city would need a new cable provider.

Meanwhile, Blacksburg is renegotiating its license agreement with Comcast. That, too, is exclusive.

As the two towns negotiate licenses, they should reject government-enforced monopolies. Non-exclusive license agreements would serve citizens better.

Read more.

The dangers of texting while driving seem apparent to those not addicted - and even to some who are - but calls to make it illegal have come up against a lack of scientific evidence. No more. The Virginia Tech Transportation Institute is to release a study on Tuesday based on videotaping long-haul truck drivers over 18 months. The result: When drivers texted, their risk of collision was 23 times greater than when they were not.

John Cameron has been warning us since 1984, but humans keep flirting with dangerously good artificial intelligence. Even some scientists, generally the last in movies to realize the horrible potential of what they've created, are starting to raise the alarm:

Impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence, a group of computer scientists is debating whether there should be limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of society’s workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone.

Ok, so they're not actually concerned about the birth of Skynet or the rise of The Matrix, but they do suggest we should at least be thinking about the implications of killer robots and artificial intelligence powerful enough to put humans out of work.

Though, reading the article in The New York Times linked above, I wondered whether the real concern shouldn't be humans today:

Despite his concerns, Dr. Horvitz said he was hopeful that artificial intelligence research would benefit humans, and perhaps even compensate for human failings. He recently demonstrated a voice-based system that he designed to ask patients about their symptoms and to respond with empathy. When a mother said her child was having diarrhea, the face on the screen said, “Oh no, sorry to hear that.”

A physician told him afterward that it was wonderful that the system responded to human emotion. “That’s a great idea,” Dr. Horvitz said he was told. “I have no time for that.”