How the world works by way of two cows.
DEMOCRAT
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
You feel guilty for being successful.
Barbara Streisand sings for you.
REPUBLICAN
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
So?
SOCIALIST
You have two cows.
The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor.
You form a cooperative to tell him how to manage his cow.
COMMUNIST
You have two cows.
The government seizes both and provides you with milk.
You wait in line for hours to get it.
It is expensive and sour.
LIBERTARIAN
You have two cows.
You sell one, buy a bull, and build a herd of cows.
You feed the world.
DEMOCRACY, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows.
The government taxes you to the point you have to sell both to support a man in a foreign country who has only one cow, which was a gift from your government.
BUREAUCRACY, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows.
The government takes them both, shoots one, milks the other, pays you for the milk, and then pours the milk down the drain.
AMERICAN CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You sell one, lease it back to yourself and do an IPO on the 2nd one.
You force the two cows to produce the milk of four cows.
You are surprised when one cow drops dead. You spin an announcement to the analysts stating you have down sized and are reducing expenses.
Your stock goes up.
FRENCH CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You go on strike because you want three cows.
You go to lunch and drink wine.
Life is good.
JAPANESE CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. They learn to travel on unbelievably crowded trains. Most are at the top of their class at cow school.
GERMAN CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You engineer them so they are all blond, drink lots of beer, give excellent quality milk, and run a hundred miles an hour.
Unfortunately they also demand 13 weeks of vacation per year.
ITALIAN CAPITALISM
You have two cows but you don't know where they are.
While ambling around, you see a beautiful woman.
You break for lunch.
Life is good.
RUSSIAN CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You have some vodka.
You count them and learn you have five cows.
You have some more vodka.
You count them again and learn you have 42 cows.
The Mafia shows up and takes over however many cows you really have.
TALIBAN CAPITALISM
You have all the cows in Afghanistan, which are two.
You don't milk them because you cannot touch any creature's private parts.
Then you kill them and claim a US bomb blew them up while they were in the hospital.
IRAQI CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
They go into hiding.
They send radio tapes of their mooing.
POLISH CAPITALISM
You have two bulls.
Employees are regularly maimed and killed attempting to milk them.
FLORIDA CAPITALISM
You have a black cow and a brown cow.
Everyone votes for the best looking one.
Some of the people who like the brown one best, vote for the black one.
Some people vote for both. Some people vote for neither. Some people can't figure out how to vote at all. Finally, a bunch of guys from out-of-state tell you which is the best looking cow.
CALIFORNIA CAPITALISM
You have a cow and a bull.
The bull is depressed.
It has spent its life living a lie.
It goes away for two weeks.
It comes back after a taxpayer-paid sex-change operation.
You now have two cows.
One makes milk; the other doesn't.
You try to sell the transgender cow.
Its lawyer sues you for discrimination.
You lose in court.
You sell the milk-generating cow to pay the damages.
You now have one rich, transgender, non-milk-producing cow.
You change your business to beef.
PETA pickets your farm.
Jesse Jackson makes a speech in your driveway.
Cruz Bustamante calls for higher farm taxes to help "working cows."
Hillary Clinton calls for the nationalization of 1/7 of your farm "for the children."
Gray Davis signs a law giving your farm to Mexico
The L.A. Times quotes five anonymous cows claiming you groped their teats.
You declare bankruptcy and shut down all operations.
The cow starves to death.
The L.A. Times' analysis shows your business failure is Bush's fault.
This is a great audio-visual illusion of the McGurk Effet presented by a short video clip. Fooled me...I guess I'm in the 98% percentile.
Some really excellent technology-art...I personally like the BucketHead and WaterBoy displays the best.
Also a list of art and robotics artists....highlighting such artists as:
and Beatriz da Costa
Bruce Schneier is what The Economist calls a "security guru" and is the author of Applied Cyptography, Secrets and Lies, and his recent book Beyond Fear which tackles the problem of security both personal and national.
He also publishes the very interesting free e-newsletter Crypto-Gram. After a few minutes of reading I found how to fly on someone elses plane ticket and that it's cheap and easy to fool fingerprint readers (scroll down to the letter by Ton can der Putte). Lots of quality info....
My personal favorite? An article detailing how to run a real life Denial of Service with the US Postal Service for free. Even funnier, is that it was done spam king Alan Ralsky courtesy of some /. folks.
Unique ID - The numbers that control your life
Alan De Smet wrote a nice article detailing how they generate some of the "unique numbers" that control your life. He decodes 7 state driver's licenses and what kind of data is included within your ID number....
Also links on using an algorithm to validate a credit card number.
glitchbuster.com - Your source for PICs and stuff
Randy at GlitchBusters has his act together and has GREAT prices on PIC parts and related components. No minimum order and really cheap shipping (unlike DigiKey and others).
I've had a long time fascination with large art installments, especially if they are technology oriented. The Art of Burning Man provides a look into some of the more interesting, self-funded group toys and experiments recently created.
Spin is a technology that I did experiments and designs with while getting my BSEE degree.
Lights 2000 worked with a large array of 2000 orange pods that users could control through a remote panel to form huge displays.
Dr. MegaVolt is performance art with Tesla coils and a wire mesh bodysuit.
Beaming Man is a 4000 foot tall body projection that used 3 green lasers totally 13 Watts of projection power.
Telestereoscope is one of my favorite ideas and utilizes a set of mirrors and optics to simulate vision if your eyes were 3 meters apart instead of 2 inches.
The test at PoliticalCompass.org is a nice way to divine your Left - Right / Authoritarian - Libertarian stance (if you didn't know it already).
My numbers were:
Economic Left/Right: -3.25
Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.44
...making me Libertarian Left - and after reading the recommended reading list for this quadrant, I'm not surprised. It included books from the likes of Michael Moore, George Orwell, Eric Schlosser, Thomas Paine, Noam Chomsky, and Ralph Nader.
What's your score?
Chuck McMannis is the President of the Silicon Valley Homebrew Robotics Club. Cool. He also has a great webpage on robotics with some interesting projects, asides, and other notes. Also some good info on casting plastics with Alumilite.
Good info on Wheel Encoders , quadrature, and feedback for robotics as well.
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Need I say more?Ok, I'll say more. No, no, I won't. Let me think about it for two hours and I'll get back to you on that. Hmmmm... I'm pretty sure I won't say more but I'll keep thinking about it. I'll let you know, or maybe I won't. Just stay tuned watching this screen and maybe more will be written, but probably not. But just in case, keep watching!