"A bizarre operation": Why West Virginia stuck $22,600 routers in tiny libraries

West Virginia's Charleston Gazette has been hopping mad this week as one of its reporters learned that the state has been sticking 1,064 high-end $22,600 routers into “little public institutions as small as rural libraries with just one computer terminal.”

By the time someone in the state Office of Technology wrote in an e-mail that “this equipment may be grossly oversized for several of the facilities in which it is currently slated to be installed," it was too late.

"At the end of the day, I suspect we've made some mistakes," State Commerce Secretary Keith Burdette said this week. "I'm reading stuff in your stories and learning stuff in the process."