In 1910 there was 10% literacy???

Hint: If you're going to pull a number out of your backside try to go for something that at least sounds semi-reasonable to the average man.

I will say if you're the product of one "of the other things funded by government taxation" over the past century then you prove the parents point I'm sorry to say.

Also in the early 1800's (to go back two hundred years in case you can't count either) there was about 80-90% literacy and the average ten year old who spent three days a week at the local parish school getting rapped over the knuckles for not deciphering Shakespeare correctly was more literate, articulate and well versed in logic, debate and reason than the vast majority of individuals coming out of the public education system at present.

Sorry to bring a fact into your hazed pop-culture oriented distortion of history.

Whatever is necessary to advance your political religion right?

Go back to 1910?

I hate to shock you but it was hardly the wild west.

Erm 100 years ago was 1910, not 1610 and hardly as uncivilised as you assume it was. The majority most definitely could read and write, life wasn't fundamentally that different than it is now. It was in the middle of the industrial revolution, compulsory education had been around for awhile and creature comforts were starting to flood into the home.

Second, food preservation has been around since the early 1600s, using glass jars to preserve fruit and veges has been in the home since the mid 1800s. In fact I have a food preservation boiler passed down to me from my great, great grandfather that was made in 1890 and he was a poor as poor convict farmer who took up a 200 acre selection in the mountains when he was pardoned in 1850.

Third my family is spread across the world and most of that movement was started from about 1830. Poverty came in the depression but before that the "average person" was reasonably well off and could most certainly travel. Otherwise just who exactly populated the US, Canada and Australia? The majority were certainly not just the European aristocrats. My great great grandmother for example brought herself over from Ireland in 1847. The travel cost wasn't the problem, the six months at sea was why people didn't often do it.

You really should read a few proper history books and not simply assume that because you think something that it's true.

In fact it's extremely chauvinistic that you just write the past off like that based on nothing but pure ignorance of your own past.

So very very ignorant.

"I can't think of anything more likely to validate the government's actions in the eyes of its socially conservative constituents."

I hate to shatter your world view like this but our current government who are trying to implement this are progressive, pro-union, pro-abortion, spend like drunken sailors metro left wing.

Otherwise known as the Australian Labour Party.

The "social conservatives" just spent 12 years in power and the closest they ever came to implementing something like this was telling ISPs they had to offer Net Nanny as a download to their customers who wanted it. In the (gasp) conservative belief that mass censorship is wrong.

The coalition just spent 12 years in power and despite pressure for this from various angles never gave it much notice, instead telling people to install their own software.

The left wing come into power and it's pretty much first on the agenda.

And somehow on the boards like this, it still gets twisted to be about the right wing.

Cognitive dissonance.

Nice try at painting this as a right wing failure but it's actually *anti-abortion* sites that are already on the blacklist http://www.somebodythinkofthechildren.com/acma-anti-abortion-prohibited/ .

The last government we had which was deeply conservative refused to implement a system like this, instead pointing people to the multitude of private solutions that they could implement on their own machines.

The current government - Labour - is left wing, pro-abortion, pro-union and now pro-censorship and have already censored anti-abortion websites.

I'm sorry if object reality is the exact opposite of what you and the individuals who modded you up wish that it were but this is not being implemented and abused by the mythical whipping boy of the internet the conservative right wing. No, the biggest censorship push in our history is being implemented and abused by the allegedly cool, metro, technocrat left wing.

So where are you going to look at it from now?

Which bit of that quote from a multi billion dollar companies senior programmer's personal experience is funny?

But then, deep within your comments I found this: "I am a web developer and I know lots of PHP"

Me thinks you're just trying to be cool, kinda like the kid who laughs at the losers when he's around the cool kids but then goes to sleep overs at the losers house on the weekend because he hasn't really got any friends.

Nice try you PHP *web developer* but you're busted.

Their entire business is built on PHP.

In the 90's people used to make exactly the same types of comments about Perl. Perl and Perl Devs were the whipping boy of the language snobs.

Now PHP has stomped Perl into the dirt, for very good reasons IMO having written many CGI apps and maintenance / glue scripts with Perl for many years. Now that PHP is the new king of the useful / accessible language world somehow Perl has become something "great". Apparently being sidelined and teetering on obsolescence now makes it something wonderful. So great that nobody uses it anymore in any real sense except purely due to a small amount of inertia and a fraction of server side maintenance scripts that are now quickly being eaten by Python and ... PHP/CLI.

Perl is just as much of a mess as PHP, though in different ways and most who whinge about PHP are just used to Perls BS and don't even notice it anymore.

The fact of the matter is PHP *is* one of the most productive languages around otherwise it wouldn't have absolutely blown Perl away in less than 4 years from when it was introduced. For years hosting companies used to have Perl and only Perl available, now it's not even on the radar. Yes PHP is simple, it's easy to program in, easy to maintain (even the worst PHP is better than most average Perl code I've ever had to delve into over the years) and of course inherently easy for noobs to write dodgy broken applications in.

Python and Ruby will always be niche as they are developed by ideology, not by practicality.

The @ symbol suppresses warnings, just like programming in Perl without -w. And in 11 years I've never seen it used as a "try catch block" and I've seen a hell of a lot of code, which makes me understand that you've never actually programmed in PHP and are just regurgitating off old troll lists. Also PHP has had exceptions for over half a decade now...

Finally PHP doesn't need to be compared to Perl or Python or Ruby, it's now at a place and running some of the biggest sites in the world along side Java a place where Perl once was and Python and Ruby will *never* be. (How's that performance going Ruby?).

Such is the state of reality at this point from a Java first / PHP second / Occassional-Python (the more I use it the less I like it) Assembly for microcontrollers, very Ex-Perl programmers point of view.

Flame on!

Good teachers were purged in the 80's then again in the early 90's when the last hold outs from the old guard (pre baby boomer) who believed that their profession was about teaching and not about cultural and social indoctrination were forced into retirement, sidelined or outright maligned.

It's all very boring. Good normal people won't go in en-masse because the teaching profession is chock full of psuedo-science and slightly unhinged useful idiots. They figure that out during Uni and get the hell out. No normal person wants to go into a classroom full of children 5 days a week completely disarmed and without any sort of authority and real disciplinary regime to back them up ("contracts" I LOLed as a teenager). Anybody who actually does attempt to teach outside of the mandated and bizarre "whole child" policy guidelines are very unpopular individuals and go no where in a hurry.

My most memorable teachers were the ones who would bark at the trouble makers (me included) and mean it. They no longer exist, even the most conservative private schools don't do punitive discipline anymore.

Allegedly a child can do no wrong.

Weep for the west.

This keeps cropping up but nobody ever takes it to it's conclusion.

Every civilisation has declined over the course of generations.

Perhaps each generation notices that the next is lazy because it really is true, historically speaking it certainly is anyway. Countries rarely implode, rather they mostly just dribble away into irrelevance as each generation pisses away the freedoms, legacy, prosperity, luck, whatever, of the couple of generations before them that put in the extremely hard yards to build the place up to its peak.

Great Britain is the latest victim. America will be the next and perhaps western civilisation in general is about to be eclipsed by Asia purely because they have the hunger that our grandfathers and greatgrandfathers did to build something amazing and we're to busy worrying about whether cooking crabs alive is a deep moral question that actually requires significant thought and time. Not to mention are binding ourselves up in so much legislation, petty beuracracy and infantile ideological "warfare" while borrowing money from Asia to fund our impossible state programs - while they go without and run their states far more frugally and realistically.