ASIDES
EDITORIAL

17 August 2003
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
B-6

WITH John Poindexter and a plan to take bets on terrorism behind it, the 
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is back on track. A team of 
robotics experts at Carnegie Mellon University is one of several groups 
around the country preparing for a March 13 race sponsored by DARPA. The 
challenge is to build a fully autonomous vehicle that will guide itself from 
Barstow, Calif., to Las Vegas. DARPA hopes the race will yield new ideas 
that might prove useful to the Pentagon and is offering a $1 million prize 
for first place. The project has exciting potential, not least of which is 
the chance to find out what a team of robotics experts will do with $1 
million in Vegas.

IT DOESN'T take brains or money to do something risky, however -- as proved 
Tuesday by three young men who inexplicably fired paintball guns at children 
on a playground in Garfield. The targeted children were frightened, but -- 
thank goodness -- not seriously injured. Two of the three gunmen were not so 
lucky. Further down the street someone returned fire, but with real bullets, 
hitting one man in the arm and another in the posterior.

RANDOM paintball gunmen weren't enough to keep one local family off the 
streets. After camping for 17 hours in the parking lot of a new Krispy Kreme 
doughnut shop in Collier, the Markiw family won the year's supply of 
doughnuts that awaits the first in line at the grand opening of every 
franchise. How much is a year's supply? According to Krispy Kreme, 52 dozen 
(624 doughnuts) should be enough to last one trip around the sun. That seems 
a tad skimpy for a family of four, especially one so dedicated. Then again, 
at 12 grams of fat per doughnut, maybe the Markiws should file a lawsuit.