You must mean that notoriously goddamn liberal hotbed of politics called Texas. They really don't like that whole goddamn liberal free market direct sale model. If only they could learn from that famous bastion of conservative thought that started the whole mess: California. Let's not cloud the issue with facts. They're terribly inconvenient.

Really? Your reponse is "everyone does it so we shouldn't even try to change it"? An extension of the "everyone else does it" defense that every kindergarden child can tell you won't get them off.

It's not the community of gamers that's objecting. It's the small, virulent subset that sees it as an attack on themselves. The ones who can't conceive their attacks are exactly the problem and prove her right by doing what they do. People who say "what should you expect" are the enablers.

Absolutely. A company or university can then discard all of the applicants that attended through high school in those states that do this crap. Makes it so much easier on the rest of us who have an education and might possibly have learned something that requires use of our brains.

There's no absolute in this. Some companies will pay for your training/certification and have you do it on company time. Others not. It really depends on the company.

I'm fortunate enough that the first option is pretty much always what happens for me. But it's entirely because of the type of company I work for. I'm a storage engineer for a big data center VAR, so I need to be up to speed on a huge number of different storage systems. The company gets financial incentives from the vendors to have employees get and maintain those certifications. The more of us with certifications from a particular vendor, the bigger the financial gain for the company. I take as much advantage of this perk as possible, and I'd suggest that anyone who can get their employer to pay for training jump on it. It makes you more valuable to the company, and in the job market in general.

Whether any of those certification is worth the paper they're printed on is a completely different discussion. :)

I just change the permissions on my cookies file to read only.

Accept all cookies and change the permissions for your cookies file to read only. Done.

Interesting tidbit: The only record of Socrates is in the writings of Plato, and is very possibly just a screen for Plato's own ideas. It's easier to avoid execution when saying the things you're writing about are someone else's opinions rather than claiming them for your own. It's highly likely that Socrates never actually existed.

See? I did actually get something out of my degree in Philosophy. :)