Date: Fri, 20 May 2005 15:40:11 -0400 (EDT)
From: Michael de Mare
To: oreilly @ foxnews.com
Subject: on technology sanctions against Poldavia


Much has been said and written about the plight of the Poldavian people, and I will endeavor to show why our high technology embargo against them is causing much misery. Their political struggles are well known. No one can forget the incident at the ENS in France where the President of the Poldavian Parliment in exile gave a speech and revealed that he was living in such a state of poverty that he did not even have a set of trousers.

The technology embargo is particularly unfortunate because it is forcing the great member of the Poldavian Royal Academy, Nicolas Bourbaki, to submit all of his paper in a handwritten form. This particularly causes a problem for blind reviewers as he is the only one to do so. Since the embargo was put in place in 1990, Poldavia does not have any 32-bit computers. They use sixteen bit computers with either MS-DOS 8.0 or the open source alternative by Andrew Tannenbaum, Minux. Since they do not have any web browsers, they are forced to retrieve information from the Internet using Gopher and FTP. This is harming the intellectual and cultural development of the Poldavian people so much that in recent tests, the average IQ of their schoolchildren has actually dropped three points since the last survey in 1984. This is in contrast to the three point gain predicted by the Flynn Effect.

-Mike