A Message from Washington. (January 21, 2007)

A reader of TFW who lives and works in Washington DC sent the following message which is making the rounds of the scientific computing cognoscenti.

 Subject: Message to the world

Dear World:

We, the United States of America, your top quality supplier of the
ideals of liberty and democracy, would like to apologize for our
2001-2008 interruption in service. The technical fault that led to this
eight-year service outage has been located, and the software
responsible was replaced November 4. Early tests of the newly installed
program indicate that we are now operating correctly, and we expect it
to be fully functional on January 20. We apologize for any
inconvenience caused by the outage. We look forward to resuming full
service and hope to improve in years to come. We thank you for your
patience and understanding.


Sincerely,
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA