Well, having worked in the army's budding "info center" (as it was called then) movement to micro PCs (as they were called then), and after retiring from the army, working in the same field for USDA, I can attest to the fact that the government is a bit more lax when it comes to outages. One reason is because we're non-profit--the same reason contractors don't suffer penalties for "failure to perform" (I know, because I really really tried to pin $86,000 in late penalties on a contractor once when I was the COTR--contracting officer technical representative). Because we're non-profit and because the systems I work on now aren't classified as essential (for example, the White House's DCA system), they don't build in any more redundancy (i.e., complete banks of servers) than the extra server drives for failover. Conversely, my step son is working as an electrician and is assisting with the buildout of Google's data center here in Atlanta and they are installing 18 (yes, EIGHTEEN) huge corporate (bring them in with a forklift sort of thingy) UPS systems for their data center.

Like any place, we have good dedicated knowledgeable people working for the government and we have deadwood (that can't be gotten rid of). And, as we know it, that kind of situation permeates our civil servants from the presidents on down.

To throw everyone into the same loser category in one sweeping statement is a bit unfair. Like, for example, saying all blacks play a great game of basketball...and "White Boys Can't Jump" (wink).