How many cows?

[medimus]

(The joke is still funny, but the tech hasn't aged well...)

A cowboy named Bud was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture in California 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, RayBan sunglasses and YSL tie, leaned out the window and asked the cowboy, "If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?"

Bud looked at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looked at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answered, "Sure, why not?"

The yuppie parked his car, whipped out his Dell notebook computer, connected it to his Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone, and surfed to a NASA page on the Internet.  There he called up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location which he then fed to another NASA satellite that scanned the area in an ultra-high-resolution digital photograph.

The young man then opened the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exported it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany.

Within seconds, he received an email on his Palm Pilot that the image had been processed and the data had been stored. He then accessed an MS-SQL database through an ODBC-connected Excel spreadsheet and, after a few minutes, received a response.

Finally, he printed out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer and finally turned to the cowboy and said, "You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves."

"That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves," said Bud.

He watched the young man select one of the animals and looked on amused as the young man stuffed it into the trunk of his car.

As the young man was getting back into his car Bud said to him, "Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?"

The young man thought about it for a second and then replied, "Okay, why not?"

"You're a Congressman for the U.S. Government", said Bud, without hesitation.

"Wow! That's correct," exclaimed 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 thing about cows.  This is a herd of sheep.  Now, give me back my dog."