Just a letter from a friend I thought you might al find mildly amusing.

> Dear World,
> The United States of America, for over 200 years your high-quality
> supplier of the ideals of liberty and democracy, would like to
> apologize for its 2001-2008 service outage.
> The technical fault that led to this eight-year service interruption
> has been located, and the parts responsible for it were replaced
> Tuesday night, November 4.
> Early tests of the newly-installed equipment indicate that it is
> functioning correctly, and we expect it to be fully functional by
> mid-January.
> We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the outage, and we look
> forward to resuming full service --- and hopefully even to improving
> it in years to come.
> Thank you for your patience and understanding,
> The USA

A bit of advice if I may. Politically charged posts like that are probably not a good idea considering there are those of us here, myself included, who find that this type of thing is offensive at the very least. Especially in light of the fact that there are plenty of people who would argue that such a letter should be modified to reflect the pending outage for the next 4 years rather than over the last 8.

Before this gets out of hand.... I'm locking it. I should have locked it when I saw it this morning, but I was barely awake, and hung over, and thought nothing of it.

[Edit:] Also, as Samson said, this type of topic probably isn't well suited for this because of the very nature of politics, and the fact that one of the admins is very politically oriented. It would be best if we avoided these kinds of discussions from now on. Thanks.