EVERY cert test I've ever taken tests not knowledge of the subject

Because that's not their main value.

Hiring managers don't know enough to qualify candidates. So they hire people with certifications. That way, if the employee sucks they just say, "hey, he was properly certified - blame the certifier, not me."

It's CYA, blame-shifting, etc. The ability to deflect blame is quite valuable to people who are not qualified to be in their jobs, so they're willing to pay more to such employees, because such employees are valuable to them.

If the tests get too tough, the candidate pool will dry up, so that's never going to happen. For qualified interviewers, asking the questions isn't hard, so they don't have a use for the certifications.

Another factor is that such middle managers tend to be in the corporate world, as startups cannot afford either the inept middle managers or bad employees. Corporate jobs tend to pay more, so 16% does not seem unlikely at all, in aggregate of the two factors.

For that 16% you probably have to work at a dreary soul-crushing job, but if your interview doesn't consist of smart people asking you tough questions, you probably knew that already. Get busy with the 401(k) allocations so you can live out the end of your boring life in a median retirement community!

No, it means he wants shit for free and doesn't care if artists or their heirs get paid.

Your fallacy is strong with this one. Creator-endorsed is a much more civil system - copyright isn't the only way to get paid. It may be one way to get paid more, but that gets paid for with lives of innocents (and no, profit reduced from a hypothetical does not make one a victim).

The recent heroin overdose uptick seems to be caused by massive cutting with fentanyl and other adulterants, so people can't determine a safe dose.

Short of having generic heroin available at WalMart for five bucks, people are gonna keep dying. But, hey, why else is the US Army guarding the opium fields?

That is why you use Statistical Process Control.

I'm familiar with the system, but am still glad they do ultrasonic inspections of stress-critical airplane parts, not just a statistical sampling.

This has to do with costs vs. expenses. Settling all those wrongful death suits is expensive. Buying new rockets and payloads is expensive. Replacing dead cell phones is cheap.

If I were Musk, I'd hire some techs to do ultrasonic inspections of every strut on the way in. Or, even better, set a contract so that the failed vendor has to absorb the cost of the failed launch if the parts are not to spec.

Right, and what if hl2 uses small, low quality textures but you can force the renderer to do that badly with another app through some driver tunables? Crap rendering but OMG FPS! Be careful what you measure.

It would be nice if all the tunables were at least available as environment variables or in /sys so tuners could be happy regardless.

iOS doesn't allow Android-style widgets on the phone - only on the watch, so there is an [artificial] niche to fill.

The big problem is risk management, though. Apple was quite permissive when only 5 million iPhones were on the market. Over time they tightened their grip. Now developers need to ask if they can afford to put their money into an iWatch app only to have Apple capriciously ban it and wipe out their investment - all for a tiny niche market.

shooting practice

At night? The only option real option here is to ignore them.

If the Royals are doing things that piss people off and thus live in fear of them, then perhaps they should stop doing those things.

10 years? You can rape and/or kill someone and not get that much time. Pure insanity.

But that's only one disposable serf - we're talking *corporate profits* here. Perhaps millions of dollars.

Privatize the gains, socialize the risks - that's the true nature of governmental systems.

the whole point of having a State is that there is one set of rules for State actors and another set of rules for everybody else. Qualified immunity, massive pollution, wasting resources, welching on promises, breaking every damn law on the books when it furthers wealth and power; how about you go work for a business that's not so wildly corrupt? - heck, even on Wall Street you'd do better.

I know - the transistor count should have enabled us to build neural nets to filter out inane AC comments by now.

Never go full-InfoWars. Christ, I can barely get a 3G connection *with* an actual antenna connected to a radio.

How exactly do you prepare for a mag 9 earthquake?

I've prepared for a mag 9 earthquake - I know they happen so live in a geologically stable location. I'm inland enough to survive an oceanic comet strike as well as La Palma collapsing into the Atlantic and hurricanes are weak by time they get here. The worst weather here is heavy rains from tropical storms and the odd tornado. Ice and snow are just an inconvenience.

But go ahead and live the high life on the coasts and then come begging for bailouts from everybody who had the sense to not live there. The under-capitalized insurance companies aren't going to save you from economic ruin because they will be completely wiped out.

A train in a vacuum is called a 'train', not a hyperloop. Nobody outside of journalism students thinks Musk was the first to have the idea, but perhaps he has the methodology to get it built.

Why do we have to fight ISIS at all?

Haven't you seen the pictures of the hooded ISIS "warriors" where they forgot to cover up their US Army tattoos?

Everybody else in the world has.

No amount of college coursework will fix someone being too lazy to use Google. Or Amazon.

Both of those sources will mislead you into thinking IPSec is a good solution that's not a giant pain in the ass in the real world and appropriate for this kind of install.

pfSense and OpenVPN, as everybody has been saying, is appropriate, solid, and on the easier end of the scale.

His requirements are 99% like mine, and that solution works great. My parents' pfSense box is in their basement, nailed up next to the FiOS demarc, and it works great.