[Gllug] Computer literacy, was: ed vs emacs/vi, was: ed vs emacs, was: OpenMoko Neo Freerunner

[Nix]

On 15 May 2009, Christopher Hunter verbalised:
> Little or nothing.  Educational standards in this country are laughable
> and the last thing this government really wants is an educated populace!

Do you *really* think that any major UK politicians are monsters? 
Because *wanting* the population to be uneducated is the province of the
worst sort of dictator only. UK politicians for the most part haven't
even regressed to the point of being a distinct class (as opposed to say
the US), and are a long way from the "education is bad, they just need
to know to vote for me" approach used by, say, the ex-president of
Turkmenistan.

My impression is rather that all parties have been thrashing at the
educational system for ages and have been hitting it with so much change
so fast that it simply can't adapt in time. (Also, much of the change
has been of the "must be seen to be doing something, this is something,
therefore do it: oops, didn't work, can't admit it, can't be seen to
lose face, make another panicky change instead of reversing the first
one" nature. Labour's changes have definitely failed, but the GCSE that
the Tories came up with was hardly an unalloyed success either.)

> The only truly positive steps I've seen recently to promote "safe"
> computing and to actually get the public to learn something were in the
> Netherlands and in Finland.  In both instances, there are now a couple
> of small ISPs that refuse connection from Windows users on the basis
> that they might compromise their networks.

While in the UK the major corporation I work for has a work-from-home
system which starts by downloading an ActiveX component to uninstall
your virus scanner and install Norton Antivirus instead: they refuse to
allow anything *but* Windows-in-Administrator-mode to connect,
suggesting that we buy a Windows box to pander to their MS-philia. No,
thanks.
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