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[Dec 1, 2006] Signature deletion fairy tale

How Mario fought sun glare (a fairy tale :-)

Mario and several other drivers bitterly complained about sun glare when driving home on Interstate 80.

A meeting of prominent AAA members was called and they found a solution: divide his front shield into 37 horizontal stripes and find the most worrisome.

Stripes were numbered and several experts were assigned with each studying a separate subset of stripes. After a couple of weeks of investigation they gave their recommendations. The results were integrated into the large spreadsheet and each stripe assigned a priority code reflecting the level of glare as perceived by experts. After that another AAA meeting was called.

At the second meeting AAA members discussed the findings and recommended to paint the most worrisome stripes black. They told Mario that this should definitely minimize sun glare on Mario's way home and mentioned a couple of success stories. One guy volunteered to buy a can of black paint and do the job. At the evening the work was done.

But the next morning Mario was not happy with the results. Something was definitely wrong he thought: black stripes did not completely blocked sun glare and they make it difficult to ride the car in the traffic. He also noticed that some people look strangely at him at the parking lot and smiled behind his back.

No problems said members of the AAA commission: just paint more stripes black.

The next day Mario did not come to work. People heard that there was a crash involving a large truck and a small car on Interstate 80.

Softpanorama 91a (vol.9, No.2; March-April, 1997) Computer Humor/Review of The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll

The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll is a book about a German student, a hacker actually. This hacker had a strange hobby breaking into military sites. Bad guys from KGB forced him to bring some US military documents. The hacker did not know that KGB guys already obtained everything they wanted using girls and vodka instead of Internet. These backward Russians usually rely on good old tricks. Anyway, even if they obtained something useful it was almost always lost in the huge bureaucratic machine KGB was, or left by drunken agents somewhere in the subway...

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Last modified: November 08, 2008