There is a Usenet group dedicated to finding kooks on the net. Often kooks are identified by the content of their Usenet posts, and when identified, they're made infamous by someone posting their kooky post to alt.usenet.kooks.

One surefire way to get yourself reposted to alt.usenet.kooks is to make some enormous leap of association, by attempting to associate some current-day thing with the king of all kooks, Hitler. There's even a theory that a usenet thread can't go beyond, say, about 20 followups before someone brings up Hitler, making that followup a prime candidate for induction into the alt.usenet.kooks arena, where it becomes a mockery of itself.

I'm going to go out on another limb and assert that we have a computer-geek version of the Hitler faux pax, and that is the irrational desire to draw parallels between everything bad in life and Microsoft. I hithertoforth nominate all bad Microsoft analogies for alt.perlmonks.kooks.

Of course by making this point, I myself have broken all the barriers of kookiness, by mentioning Hitler and Microsoft in the same rant. That is the catch-22 of kookiness; just involving yourself in a kooky discussion creates a guilt by association. To this end, I must nominate myself as well. Sorry.

Not everything tragic in life should be trivialized by mentioning it in the context of some large software manufacturer. A lot of people died in those Tsunamis.... please, a little respect.

Apart from being OT, your example is not pertinent, IMO.

Moving Mount Fuji is, from an engineering point of view, a much easier task than the one you are referring to. After all, all you need to do is some calculation and, provided you have the money, you may come up with the amount of the needed people, escavators, trucks, and explosives, and eventually be able to flatten Mount Fuji in a finite amount of time.

"Helping the victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami," instead, is not an engineering project. It involves diplomatic, economical and political issues, and it is not clearly definible in terms of money, materials, human resources. To help the victims, you need to get cooperation from a dozen governments and a few dozens NGOs, to direct your efforts in a direction that makes sense. If such cooperation is not given, you won't even know what kind of help is needed and what you should in which areas.

Besides, what is "help"? Is it giving first aid to the injured? Bringing fresh water to the survivors? Cleaning the existing water? Bringing food supplies? Rebuilding the shattered economy?

I have to tell you this: if I were having a job interview with you, and you dropped that question, I would not want to work for such a confused employer.

I think it may be a valid question, but certianly gives you very different information about a potential employee. "Move Mt. Fuji" is only slightly vauge -- the only problem is that it is huge. It's a good question when you want to see if someone is easily troubled by the enormity of an otherwise do-able task. "Help the victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami" is much more vauge. It would be a decent test of the ability to start narrowing down an assignment, which is an important skill. I suspect almost all projects start out as a poorly defined idea, like "improve what people about to make a purchase think of our product". There are a lot of ways to approach that -- changing marketing vs changing the product, for example. Asking the suggested question provides information about a canidate that can help judge if they'd provide a viewpoint missing from your present team, and is thus useful. However, it provides very different information then the moving the mountian question.

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"It involves diplomatic, economical and political issues, and it is not clearly definible in terms of money, materials, human resources."

This is true of any project executed within the context of a large organization. My experience in working in and with various organizations is that there is no such thing as a pure engineering project.