- By Dan Veaner
- Opinions
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No software is perfect. Memory is taken but not put back, reducing the total amount available. Sometimes an application writes over a piece of memory that is being used by another program or the operating system, and that can crash the whole thing. Eventually programs can't run and you have to reboot. You turn the computer off, then turn it on again and everything works great again -- at least until you have used the computer for a while and you have to reboot again.Last month we shut down the government, and then turned it back on about two weeks later. But everything isn't running great. We rebooted it to no avail. When that happens on a computer it means that the operating system is corrupted, infected or buggy. It's when you decide to reinstall everything from scratch. Maybe we should do that in Washington.
Republicans want to overwrite Democrats' memory -- well, their laws -- which is the collective memory of the nation. And vice versa. They are aggressive in trying to undo what the other party did, and do something else in the same space. Take the Affordable Heath Care Act. Republicans certainly want to overwrite that memory space, but they probably don't have to because it is so buggy in the first place. Literally! You've certainly heard or read about the bugs in the online software that has all but brought the program to a halt.
And the budget. Love him or hate him Clinton showed us that we can balance our budget if we want to. So I can only conclude that Washington doesn't want to, because we're over $17 billion in debt, and rising. Shutting down the government didn't help that. Reopening it reopened the hemorrhage ,and let's just say the debt isn't getting any smaller.
The last time I looked at the National Debt Clock Web site we were $16 billion-plus in debt. That was in October. As of this writing it now says we're $17,159,092,444,155.93 in the hole. The site tells us, "The National Debt has continued to increase an average of $2.67 billion per day since September 30, 2012!" Reboot! Reboot! Reboot! (Please!)
And it seems that our President's anti-virus software hasn't been enough to crash his program. Disclosure about NSA spying and the health care rollout debacle seems to have propelled President Obama into an endless loop.
An endless loop is a programmer's nightmare. It's when you write some code that goes around and around with no way to exit. For example you can say count from one to ten and hop up and down one time each time you get to the next number. That loop ends when you get to ten. But lets say you forgot to tell it to stop at ten -- you keep hopping until you crash, and in the meantime the computer can't do anything else.
(Yeah, you programmers out there are thinking about sandboxing to protect the rest of the computer from one program crashing. But seriously? Sandboxing in Washington? Uh uh, doesn't happen. There are no protections in that city against bad legislating).
That's what happens in computers, and that's what's happening in the White House. The news cycle keeps coming back to the NSA problem as more countries learn they have been victims of American eavesdropping, and the national press is having so much fun reporting on the ridiculously buggy health care software that it seems that issue will never go away.
What Washington needs right now is a hacker who can rewrite the algorithm* from the ground up and get elected officials to cooperate in bringing down the debt, cutting waste and things like unfunded mandates that force local governments into untenable situations, and getting the basics right before going off on crazy tangents. This needs to be done before the next reboot, which could happen in January if Congress can't agree on money again then.
Or maybe the 'kick the bums out' and elect an entirely new government folks are right. The status quo government has been like an escalating computer virus with no evidence that an anti-virus program is having any impact at all. Heck, I switched to a Mac after the abomination Microsoft called Windows Vista. Maybe Washington needs a Mac attack, a totally different operating sytem.
Take a lesson from software developers, Washington! In fact, maybe it's time for the IT guys to run the government. Who do YOU call when something goes wrong with your computer? And what happens after that (they fix it). That's my best idea yet!
* Since I am talking about algorithms and Washington I can't resist the old joke: What's the definition of 'algorithm'? Clinton's Vice President dancing (say it out loud slowly).
Sorry! Like Washington I had no restraint!
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