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Shmuel Halevi
| | Posted on Tuesday, August 29, 2006 - 10:02: | |
A West Texas cowboy was herding his cattle in a remote pasture when
suddenly a brand new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud towards him.
The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, Serengeti
sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the window and asks the cowboy, "If I tell you
exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give
me a calf?"
The cowboy looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his
peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, "Sure, why not?" The
yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to
his AT&T 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 opens the digital photo in Adobe Photo shop 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 minutes, receives a response.
Finally, he prints out a full color, 150 page report on his hi-tech,
miniaturized HP Laser Jet printer and finally turns to the cowboy and
says, "You have exactly 1586 cows and calves."
"That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves," says the
cowboy.
He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on
amused as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.
Then the cowboy says to the young man, "Hey, if I can tell you
exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?"
The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, "Okay, why
not?"
"You're a consultant for the Federal Government." says the cowboy.
"Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie, "but how did you guess that?"
"No guessing required." answered the cowboy. "You showed up here even
though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I
already knew, to a question I never asked. You tried to show me how much
smarter than me you are, and you don't know a damn thing about
cattle.
Now give me back my dog."
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The cowboy