Hey Gibbon -- I'm not sure what catamaran you were looking at, but the America's Cup boats are actually even LARGER than that ...
The AC45 (the boat being used in current cup events while the larger AC72's are being designed and built) uses a 21.5m (71ft) wing ... and the boats that will be used in the actual Cup (the AC72) are even larger beasts -- a wing 40m (131ft) tall [1].
The design of and technology going into these AC class boats is fascinating. It's been a lot of fun watching the AC45's race and the AC72's will be quite a sight out on the water once they begin pushing 'em to their limits.
I haven't researched the full contract award or pulled a copy of the original RFP, however, work on the Census FactFinder website was part of an $89.5mm contract awarded to IBM Federal in 2007 (for, potentially, 9 years) [1]. I wonder if the $33mm quoted in the FOIA request response is the total cost incurred to-date on that award (including services performed for the entire Statement of Work) rather than the actual cost of ONLY building/updating FactFinder.
I wouldn't be surprised if the $33mm price is correct ... but not 100% sure it is without spending more time looking around and, potentially, seeking further information through FOIA.
It was changed, yes -- and there was already a previous comment to this submission discussing it (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4163318) ... and it was killed. I'm disappointed in the continued editing of submission titles as well.
[Edit] And now the referenced comment has been un-killed. :-)
> There was a similar HN post/Google+ post last week. I can't remember where I read it. Something along the lines of an avid lawyer decided to kill her account because she read the ToS and drew exactly the same conclusions as what you had just wrote.
