Puzzle of the Day

When you examine a system for security problems, or design a system with strengthened security, creativity in anticipating problems is a major factor in the success of your work. Here are some creative answers to the riddle, "Why did the chicken cross the road?" A child might answer: "To get to the other side." But what would others answer?

Plato: For the greater good.

Aristotle: It is the nature of chickens to cross roads.

Karl Marx: It was an historical inevitability.

Timothy Leary: Because that's the only trip the establishment would let it take.

Saddam Hussein: This was an unprovoked act of rebellion and we were quite justified in dropping 50 tons of nerve gas on it.

Jack Nicholson: `Cause it freaking wanted to. That's the freaking reason.

Ronald Reagan: I forget ...

Captain James T. Kirk: To boldly go where no chicken has gone before.

Hippocrates: Because of an excess of phlegm in its pancreas.

A consultant from Arthur Andersen: Deregulation of the chicken's side of the road was threatening its dominant market position. The chicken was faced with significant challenges to create and develop the competencies required for the newly competitive market. Andersen Consulting, in a partnering relationship with the client, helped the chicken by rethinking its physical distribution strategy and implementation processes. Using the Poultry Integration Model (PIM), Andersen helped the chicken use its skills, methodologies, knowledge, capital and experiences to align the chicken's people, processes and technology in support of its overall strategy within a Program Management framework. Andersen Consulting convened a diverse cross-spectrum of road analysts and best chickens along with Anderson consultants with deep skills in the transportation industry to engage in a two-day itinerary of meetings in order to leverage their personal knowledge capital, both tacit and explicit, and to enable them to synergize with each other in order to achieve the implicit goals of delivering and successfully architecting and implementing an enterprise-wide value framework across the continuum of poultry cross-median processes. The meeting was held in a park-like setting, enabling and creating an environment that was strategically based, industry-focused, and built upon a consistent, clear, and unified market message and aligned with the chicken's mission, vision, and core values. This was conducive towards the creation of a total business integration solution. Andersen Consulting helped the chicken change to become more successful.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: I envision a world where all chickens will be free to cross roads without having their motives called into question.

Moses: And God came down from the Heavens, and He said unto the chicken, "Thou shalt cross the road." And the chicken crossed the road, and there was much rejoicing.

Richard M. Nixon: The chicken did not cross the road. I repeat, the chicken did not cross the road.

Machiavelli: The point is that the chicken crossed the road. Who cares why? The end of crossing the road justifies whatever motive there was.

Jerry Seinfeld: Why does anyone cross a road? I mean, why doesn't anyone ever think to ask, "What the heck was this chicken doing walking around all over the place, anyway?"

Sigmund Freud: The fact that you are at all concerned that the chicken crossed the road reveals your underlying sexual insecurity.

Bill Gates: I have just released the new Chicken Office 2000 that will not only cross roads, but lay eggs, file your important documents, and balance your checkbook.

Oliver Stone: The question is not, "Why did the chicken cross the road?" Rather, it is "Who was crossing the road at the same time, whom we overlooked in our haste to observe the chicken crossing?"

Charles Darwin: Chickens, over great periods of time, have been naturally selected in such a way that they are now genetically disposed to cross roads.

Albert Einstein: Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road moved beneath the chicken depends upon your frame of reference.

Buddha: Asking this question denies your own chicken nature.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: The chicken did not cross the road; it transcended it.

Ernest Hemingway: To die. In the rain.

Colonel Sanders: What, I missed one?