16 June, 2007

Technology vs. Simple Logic

A cowboy was herding his cows in a remote mountain pasture when suddenly a brand-new Hummer roared up, crashing gears and with thundering exhaust advanced out of a dust cloud towards him and screeched around in a skid stop in front of the cowboys horse.

This made his horse jump and startled several cows that the cowboy had to round up and calm down in the hot sun. The cowboy was mildly irritated when he returned to the Hummer and encountered the driver. This individual stood beside his large red, white and blue painted Hummer leaning against its fender.

He was a young man with a beautiful Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and a Skull and Bones tie. His hair was perfect, his smile dazzling, he quickly strode over to the cowboy as he dismounted and nearly crippled his hand in a crushing dry palmed handshake that lasted forever.

They exchanged names, and George took off on a great tale of his harrowing but extremely trip up to here in his Hummer, and he was certain that "Mr.? Yes Herbert, wasn't it? Yes, anyay he was certain he, from his lonely life, must also be bored , and in the spirit of fair play, he was offering a diversion problem that would break the monotony.

George asked Herbert, "If I can tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?"

Herbert, (who's Saturday night poker opponents know to be a calculating vicious mean spirited son of a bitch at the best of times), calmly considered the offer for few seconds, sized up the man, obviously a yuppie, then looked at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answered, "Sure, Why not?" But you've got to give me a challenge and return it if I win."

"Why of course, thats the sporting American way," says the yuppie.

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo. The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany. Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses a MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with email on his Blackberry and, after a few inutes, receives a response. Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turns to the cowboy and says, "You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves."

Herman grinned broadly "That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves."

He watches the young man select one of his animals and looks on amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.

"Now isn't the sporting American way, my turn?" asked Herbert, "before you take off , if I can tell you what your business is, will you give me back my calf?"
George thinks about it for a second and then says, "Of course, why not?"

You're a Congressman for the U.S. Government", says the cowboy.

"Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie, "but how did you guess that?"

"No guessing required,.Sonny," answered the cowboy. "There were 6 things obvious in your whole act

1. You showed up here wrapped in American colours to inspire my patriotism and loyalty

2. You showed up here even though nobody called you.

3. You want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked
4. You tried to show me how much smarter than me and. you screwed up.

5. Your ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet has a flaw and you didn't have the update from Windows. Your system counts the legs of the critters, divides the result by four and comes up with a result. Your wrong in your count in that you totally ignored all those false returns from the low hanging ball sacks of the 14 bulls I've got out there, and

6. you don't know a goddamn thing about cows .

Now

"Take my fucking dog out
of your trunk!!"

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