If the United States were an Operating System, which would it be?

nerdiest question ever

Congressionally, it is Windows ME. Archaic and dysfunctional.

Understanding, describing, and addressing this problem of complexity and incoherence is the next great American political challenge. But you cannot come to terms with such a problem until you can properly name it. While we can name the major questions that divide our politics — liberalism or conservatism, big government or small — we have no name for the dispute between complexity and simplicity in government, which cuts across those more familiar ideological divisions. For lack of a better alternative, the problem of complexity might best be termed the challenge of "kludgeocracy."

A "kludge" is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "an ill-assorted collection of parts assembled to fulfill a particular purpose...a clumsy but temporarily effective solution to a particular fault or problem." The term comes out of the world of computer programming, where a kludge is an inelegant patch put in place to solve an unexpected problem and designed to be backward-compatible with the rest of an existing system. When you add up enough kludges, you get a very complicated program that has no clear organizing principle, is exceedingly difficult to understand, and is subject to crashes. Any user of Microsoft Windows will immediately grasp the concept.

POS

Microsoft Bob

Amazingly enough, Windows ME was my first thought as well.

Of course, I might also characterize it Lion (OSX 10.7) - has a veneer of smoothness and richness that appeals to elitism, but is an utter resource hog.

MSDOS- because this country is run by an ass clown.

Daily Double wrote:

MSDOS- because this country WAS run by an ass clown.

Naw, Bush v2 was absolutely MS Bob.

CP/M

Tandy TRS-DOS.

Mac OS 9. Glossy on the outside, f*cked up on the inside.

BSOD

STOP!!! (Secure Trusted Operating Program)

Daily Double wrote:

MSDOS- because this country is run by an ass clown.

This doesn't make sense... at all. The simple minded struggle with anything that a 3 year old couldn't navigate. When you and Zoolander were slapping that old Mac trying to get the files out of the computer, I laughed. Great scene!

If it were a Operating system, it would be Droid.

A solid, scalable, framework that gets implemented hundreds of different ways on different devices depending on provider and manufacturer.

So, what's an open source code base ends up being a tool to manipulate consumers into the spiral of spend money to upgrade device with the promise it's better than the one you have running the same OS, sign 2 year service agreement, be unsatisfied, repeat...