I went through the whole being transferred to HCL malarky a few years back and wrote about it in my journal (UK perspective): 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

From my experience, the boneheads were almost exclusively in the HR agencies.

About a year ago, in my previous job, I was recruiting for some Linux Kernel/Drivers/Embedded C (with a bit of C++) people. I was dealing with some of these boneheads but I made sure I had a very good, strongly-worded chat with them to explain the types of candidates I was looking for, making it absolutely clear that I needed people who were proficient in C, not just C++.

The reply that took the biscuit was, "To be honest, you'd be better off looking for C# programmers."

...of simpler times hundreds of years ago...

Maybe Occam's razor could come in handy here. Maybe you smoked too much weed today.

Haven't you heard of Area 51 and the Zeta Reticulans?

Man, do they groove!

What use is a car if gasoline is not available on your planet, right?

You've heard of Stonehenge, haven't you?

Goodie goodie yum-yum....

The Skinkworks is where the lizardmen work.

....making fish soup.

No way.

I'll bet money that Lockheed have already had this working for years in a Black Project. I'm also willing to wager that some UFO sightings are secret experimental aircraft with fusion reactor power sources and combined electrical/thermal engines (glowing lights, hovering, vertical flight....).

Since they know it already works, they're announcing it so that they can do a (fake) clean-room reimplementation of the physics and engineering research, that makes it work, in the open so that they can get away with commercialising it/patenting it.

We live in a world where software is expected to be the kind of crap any simpleton could write.

Once upon a time, Microsoft brought out this product called Visual Basic...

Greenpeace should use a PWR to power their ships.

One fuel load lasts 30 years, there's plenty waste heat to keep the crew warm, plenty of spare power to generate electricity, and all the waste products are contained within the fuel cladding, so no pollution! And no pesky carbon dioxide, oxides of nitrogen or acid rain...

To be even greener, they could have their reactor loaded with MOX fuel i.e. reprocessed (used) uranium mixed with plutonium, thus helping to reduce nuclear waste from old reactors.

I'm sure Rolls Royce Nuclear Engineering could do them such a great deal.

DRM

Google Glass (or similar small, wearable camera, preferably hidden).

Blimey, in about 1998 this old guy from the Jo-Hos knocked on my door and presented me with some literature including something about how "all scientists" believe in god, especially the Great Fred Hoyle, so God must be there.

It also said that "scientists are telling us" about this vast, untapped wealth of hydrocarbon deposits on the deep sea beds in the form of these methane thingy-ma-bobs, so God had provided us with all the energy we'll ever need. He's a great guy that God dude! He didn't mention atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and global warning, though.

So, the Jo-Hos are right. God is really there! And we will never run out of energy!

Slackware does things The Right Way(TM). I've been using it since 1995 as my main distro with a brief detour into SLAMD64 in 2007 when I bought a 64-bit AMD and Slackware was still x86-32.

I've had the misfortune to have to suffer Debian. RedHat/CentOS, Ubuntu and Arago for work over the years, but Slackware is the best. Everything I've learned from Slackware has empowered me to be productive with all of those other distributions.

why?

Learning a language that comes from a completely different school of thought (i.e. "paradigm") will give you a far larger perspective than only having learned one language or family of languages. For example, if all you ever saw was C++, Java and C# your world view would be extremely limited. Someone who has learned a little FORTH, LISP and Smalltalk, not to mention various assembly languages, would be an order of magnitude more productive than you, produce fewer bugs and be able to think of more good solutions to difficult problems.

If all you ever do is write GUIs for the corporate Oracle or MS database, then stay in your C# paradise.