"In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history will be the majority and will dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance."
No Shiite! (Seriously: the Muslim Brotherhood which is the pretext for this investigative report, is Sunni, so “No Shiite!” is correct… in more senses than one*… )
*Recently, in “polite” conversation, I have taken to substituting “”Shiite!” for a word that means much the same thing but which has only one “i” and no “e”.
Jerry Pournelle notes:
Civilization is more fragile than most believe. Note that a true dark age comes not when we lose the ability to do something, but forget that we ever had that ability: as for instance no university Department of Education seems aware that in the 1930’s to the end of World War II, essentially the only adult illiterates in the United States were people who had never been to school to begin with (see the Army’s tests of conscripts). My mother had a 2-year Normal School degree and taught first grade in rural Florida, not considered a high intelligence population. I once asked her if any of her students left first grade without learning to read. She said, “Well, there were a few, but they didn’t learn anything else, either.” The notion that a child could get out of elementary school unable to read was simply shocking up to about 1950 when new University Education Department theories of reading emerged. Now a majority of students read “below grade level”…
Oh, it’s far worse than that, Dr. Pournelle, if the results of the Adult Literacy Survey of 2003 aren’t reversed soon:
Literacy experts and educators say they are stunned by the results of a recent adult literacy assessment, which shows that the reading proficiency of college graduates has declined in the past decade, with no obvious explanation…
The test measures how well adults comprehend basic instructions and tasks through reading — such as computing costs per ounce of food items, comparing viewpoints on two editorials and reading prescription labels. Only 41 percent of graduate students tested in 2003 could be classified as “proficient” in prose — reading and understanding information in short texts — down 10 percentage points since 1992. Of college graduates, only 31 percent were classified as proficient — compared with 40 percent in 1992.
Do note the simplicity of the tasks tested. Other text samples in the test were extracts from a bus schedule, a newspaper editorial and a prescription med label, all of which proved too daunting for an overwhelming majority of college graduates.
With a basic reading skill set like this, is it any wonder that the ISI’s survey of civics literacy indicates such a abysmal grasp of basic civics in our adult population–most especially in college graduates?
More interesting, although I have posted similar posts for five years or so now, I have yet to read a defense of public education here–even when my traffic was regularly in quadruple digits several years ago–that was… literate.
See “The National Assessment of Adult Literacy” (PDF file) for more–especially if the background data is still available (I didn’t check, but sometimes such things are… redacted, shall we say, to be less embarrassing when the actual data isn’t as rosy as the particular government department wishes to portray. If such proves to be the case, I may be able to find a copy of what I read several years ago.)
Addendum: I debated using this linked info in my comments above but decided against it because of the subliterate use of terms I found in it, for example, “Over all [sic], the average prose and document literacy scores for Americans were basically flat between 1992 and 2003… ” The proper term for discussing the limits of the scores between the denoted boundaries of “1992-2003” is “overall” not “over all”. *sigh* But still, I find the following paragraph delicious:
Based on their scores, participants in the survey were deemed to have “basic,” “intermediate” or “proficient” literacy (Whitehurst noted that a National Research Council committee that recommended the literacy levels initially called the highest level “advanced,” but that department officials ultimately concluded that the skills required for that category — comparing viewpoints in two editorials, for instance, or calculating the cost per ounce of different grocery items — weren’t really all that advanced.)
“[W]eren’t really all that advanced”? Indeed. And that’s the level that only 31% reached. Barely above mouth-breathers who’ve been chemically lobotomized.
…so you don’t have to.
I try out various softwares all the time, so that when someone asks about a certain need or issue, I am more likely to have a reasonable suggestion to offer them. Now, this applies to apps for ‘nix and Windows environments only, but, frankly, most (though certainly not all) of the time, the “stupid things” applies to Windows app testing, simply because there are so many more Windows apps to test and so very, very many ways for such apps to screw things up.
Often, problems with apps don’t show their faces until the app’s been around a while. Such is this latest “stupid thing”.
Comodo Cleaner and Windows 7 64-bit. Not a good combo. Here’s why. I had downloaded and installed the app to see how well it performed as opposed to such apps as CCLeaner and Glary Utilities, neither of which have–yet!–screwed up any Windows computers I’ve tested them on. It seemed to perform well, apart from the stupid “reboot between each action” behavior. For that, I tagged it as less useful than either CCLeaner or GLary Utilities.
But. All of a sudden last week, I started receiving a strange error every time I tried to save a file of any kind, via any means (except for one, which I’ll explain later as a workaround for folks who really, really want to try Comodo Cleaner on 64-bit Windows anyway): “There are no more files”.
WTF?!?
Searches for solutions on the web turned up all kinds of answers that did not apply to my testbed computer, and so, of course, did nothing to correct the problem. I decided to effect a temporary workaround until I could solve the problem, and so I used dropbox, saving files I needed by ftp-ing them to a remote site (that meant sending the temp file Windows created of them, since temp files weren’t affected) and transferring them from there to another computer (no, I couldn’t save on locally networked drives, either), then dropping them in that computer’s Dropbox folder, which would sync with the testbed’s Dropbox folder and be accessible for use.
It worked but was a real PITA. (BTW, I could use Teamviewer 6 to do all the necessary things on the other computer directly from the testbed. *heh*)
So, where did Comodo Cleaner come in? About 15 Google pages into searches for “There are no more files”, that’s where. Someone on a Comodo forum noted the behavior in a Windows 7 64-bit environment, and that the error disappeared on a simple uninstall of Comodo Cleaner.
Uninstalled Comodo Cleaner.
Bob’s your uncle. Problem gone.
Now, note that I had previously applied each suggested solution, even such things as using a Restore Point predating the issue, and rebooted after each proffered solution to no avail. Hmmm, even after a Restore Point? Yep. So it wasn’t a change I had made manually or an app I had recently installed myself. Nor was it some sort of malware, as I scanned the testbed with six different well-regarded anti-malware scanners in Safe Mode, even outside the Windows environment entirely etc., and noted nothing that could cause such things (I did eliminate some tracking cookies, though :-))
Here’s what I think probably happened. I tested Comodo Cleaner just as I think most users would have: I allowed it to perform auto updates. Although it’d been on the computer, rarely used (because of the stupid “reboot between each and every action” behavior), for several months, apparently the most recent auto update had screwed things up.
Simply uninstalling the app solved the problem. Sure, I rebooted after uninstalling, but the very next thing I did after uninstalling Comodo Cleaner was to test whether I could save files both of original creation and from the web. Works now.
As a side point, this is one of the reasons I suggest that folks who only use thir computers for web surfing, email, typical office app stuff and listening music to or watching videos seriously consider a Linux environment: it really is harder to screw a ‘nix computer up b y installing a “bad” app, and recovery is usually more straightforward. Configuring a ‘nix computer for use is still, unfortunately, not as easy as a Windows computer, especially as slickly as Win7 does the job, but it’s getting there.
With the open display of antipathy toward democracy in recent days–so-called “Democrats” using various tactics to avoid the outcomes of democratically-decided elections, beginning with the “Democratic” State senators of Wisconsin fleeing the state to avoid providing a quorum–isn’t it time the party was formally renamed the Anti-Democratic Party?
Mel, writing at The Trouble With Angels has another game to play. Here’re the guidelines:
“A picture is worth 10 answers.”
I challenge you to answer all these questions by typing your answer into Google Images and picking the 1st through 10th images as your answer. SO, put each question into your blog post (on your own blogs, please) and post the image instead of the answer, and the image number should correspond with the question number.
Example, if question 3 is “What did you eat for lunch yesterday?” and you ate Pizza, type “pizza” into Google Images and get the 3rd image for your answer. (For question 4 get the 4th image, etc.) Don’t type the answer into your blog, if the image doesn’t make sense then that’s just too bad. If the image is porn or something you don’t want to have on your blog, then get the next image.
There’s the usual about trackbacks and such like appended.
OK, I’ll play.
1. What was your first job? You’ll never guess it.
2. What is your job now? (No, that’s not me, but it is the first image that represents my true calling that didn’t have obvious restrictions on use.)
3. What is your firstborn child’s name?
[Canceled due to unflattering images that don’t come within an order of magnitude of Lovely Daughter’s nature.]
4. Fav Childhood cartoon.
5. What genre of music do you listen to most?
6. Where were you born?
7. Who is the first president you can actually remember being in office?
8. Where would you most like to visit that you haven’t been?
9. Describe in one word your first girlfriend[I missed this one, somehow, first time I posted, so this is a “correction” of sorts]:
10. What would you say to Barack Hussein Obama-Soetoro if you could use five words or less?
Nah, I didn’t play exactly by the rules, but then I rarely do. I selected images that were most suitable, in my estimation, to each question rather than just blindly adhering to the “pick number such and so”. So, ya gonna sue me or what? 😉
Orson Scott Card, as he so often does, says it better than I can:
In America we’re all voters — but nobody checks to make sure we have any sense at all about how we vote. I urge every American to regard history as the first and most important study of our lives — the minimum requirement to be a good citizen.
And instead of relying on our castrated and/or politicized textbooks (by Left and Right), which grossly under- and mis-educate our young, we should be reading independent histories every chance we get.
As I have often said–heck, it was long in my blog header–
“In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history are in the majority and dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance.”-third world county’s corollary to Santayana’s Axiom
No, despite the frequent tone here at twc, the post title’s not sarcastic. *heh* It’s this stuff:
In fact, the whole range of Caig DeoxIt products are great for a wide array of electronics. Example (one of many), I fished an old 2GB flash drive out of the washer the other day after it had apparently been through more than a few cycles. The plastic case was beat up a bit, it was full of water and the connector had even begun to rust.
Not good, eh?
Nah, not good, but a wee spray of the product pictured above, some careful wipes with one of the non-static wipes included in a small computer maintenance kit from Caig and a lil judicious cleaning with one of the sponge-tipped swabs and… plug the thing in and it was fine.
Now, would it have worked had I just dried it out? Maybe, maybe even probably. But cleaning all the contacts (and removing the rust) was a Very Good Thing. Why did I reach for my lil DeoxIt kit first thing though? Because over time I’ve had very good experiences restoring bad electrical/electronics connections in a lot of different applications. Bad memory modules? Maybe not. Clean contacts (both on the memory module itself and on the motherboard of the computer) and… in every case but one, flakiness has been abated or completely done away with. Nice. Peripheral card flaky? DeoxIt has frequently saved my bacon there, too. In my experience, just about anything that needs a good electrical connection and removal of or protection from corrosion, etc., can benefit from DeoxIt.
And Caig doesn’t pay me a dime for my opinion.
The computer I’m using to write this post? It was a “barebones” HP that I very nearly gutted, did disassemble, and reassembled and modded with appropriately upgraded parts and… the appropriate Caig DeoxIt product everywhere an electrical connection is–including, but not limited to, the CPU, memory and all peripheral cards.
Memory slots in the lil Asus that’s my first-in-line secondary computer, battery connection, power connection, hard drive, etc., all DeoxIt treated.
It just makes sense to me to have those potential failure points protected. My computers reward me for this kind of treatment with mostly limiting their problems to just software issues. *heh*
Of course, since I’ve fallen behind on treating some other equipment (why have I not treated the new stuff in my networking closet? Why? Laziness?), now that I have gotten my lil kit out again, I suppose I need to get on some of the other stuff laying around. I’ve been “promising” myself I’d get that done Real Soon Now for too long. 😉
Well, one of the other Celtic patron saints, but Saint Andrew is patron saint of more than just another Celtic group.
No, this post is just to ask how many other folks (besides me, of course) among my wee readership will wear a leek or daffodil today in honor of David, patron saint of Wales.
Takers?
From a previous year’s St David’s Day post:
“Gwnewch y pethau bychain mewn bywyd”*
“Be joyful, and keep your faith and your creed. *Do the little things [in life] that you have seen me do and heard about. I will walk the path that our fathers have trod before us.”–reputed to be the last words of St David–Dewi Sant– patron saint of Wales (the only Celtic patron saint native to the land of which he is considered patron), is said to have died at age 100 on March 1, anno domini 589.