If the line at the Apple store is any indication, American consumers seem to believe they have to upgrade their systems and devices every few months. The American government suffers no such compulsion. Say someone wanted to send an emergency message the U.S. nuclear forces. The system they’d be using “is running on a 1970s IBM computing platform, and still uses 8-inch floppy disks to store data.” (And to think I was embarrassed when someone noticed that my vacuum cleaner doesn’t have Bluetooth.) According to a new report, about three-fourths of the $80 billion budget goes to keep aging technology running.