This may be truly where we are headed... - Bill

A short story...

 A shepherd was herding his flock in a remote pasture when suddenly a brand
new BMW advanced out of a dust cloud toward him. The driver, a young man in
an Armani suit, Gucci shoes, Ray Ban sunglasses and YSL tie, leans out the
window and asks the shepherd, "If I tell you exactly how many sheep you have
in your flock, will you give me one?" The shepherd looks at the man,
obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing flock and calmly
answers, "Sure. Why not?"
 The young man parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects
it to his AT&T cell phone, 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 hundreds of complex
formulas. He uploads all of this data via an 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 LaserJet printer
and finally turns to the shepherd and says, "You have exactly 1586 sheep."
 "That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my sheep," says the
shepherd. 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
shepherd says to the young man, "Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your
business is, will you give him back to me?"
 The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, "Okay, why not?"
"You're a consultant," says the shepherd. "Wow! That's correct," says the
young man, "but how did you guess that?" "No guessing required," answered
the shepherd. "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; and you
don't know crap about my business. Now give me back my dog."

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