It's both a pity and a blessing that Orwell didn't live long enough to see the geek in full flight.

The organization and planning of a crime, the recruitment of others to assist you, is more than thought, it is action.

The problem is that the Slashdot geek seems increasingly resistant to any story outside his comfort zone.

You see this most clearly when a story cuts close to the bone on issues of race and class and gender in tech --- but it comes through elsewhere as well.

I just gave you facts. You have facts, then present them.

Which is still the truth, in general. Photography on a cell phone does not equate to photography with a digital camera -- knowing what f-stop is, or shutter speed, or focal length, or a LOT of the other of the fine-grain minutiae that comes from a lot of time spent with film and digital cameras taking hundreds, if not thousands, of photographs.

No, photography on a cell phone does not equate to photography that deals with fine grained minutiae. But, so what? Technical minutiae isn't art. It's what geeks and wannabees toss around in order to puff themselves up and make themselves feel important.

All that experience can be accumulated hundreds of times faster in digital where you can see immediate results.

I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you on that for the vast majority. Why worry about composition, aperture, exposure, and white balance when one can burn through dozens upon dozens of photos, previewing the results immediately waiting for something worthwhile to show up, and sort/crop/align later.

You aren't disagreeing with the grandparent, you're talking about apples while he's talking oranges. And in reality, you're both correct.
 
He's correct in that by speeding up the loop (from taking the picture to reviewing the finished product) it's possible to learn photography much faster today than in the film era. You're correct that it's possible to produce a good image by sheer luck and Photoshop.
 

I've seen this first hand with my daughters and their friends. The shotgun approach may produce the occasional interesting photos but does not lead to refined skills required to produce stunning images.

But here's where you go off the rails into apple territory - your daughter and her friends are not all photographers. And just because they aren't interested in actually learning photography, that doesn't preclude those that are interested from taking advantage of the faster loop to learn from doing so.

Looking at Bezos's New Shepherd Vertical Takeoff Vertical Landing vehicle you might think that somewhere along the line Jeff caught a glimpse of Boeing's old design.

Maybe, maybe not. The same basic design was proposed as a reusable first stage for the Space Shuttle (in it's first incarnation as a crew taxi) by (IIRC) McDonnell Douglas back in the early/mid 1960's.

New keyboard. New Problems.

I think it is a safe bet that the folks back home are running Windows and that is all their local dial-up ISP can reasonably be expected to support.

Local support is the only answer here.

Not the once-a-year parachute drop --- and not the trans-oceanic telephone call that has to be scheduled across five or six time zones, perhaps more. There is no joy in that even when it is IT Pro to IT Pro.

There's a reason that the trope page for Decade Dissonance has a real life section.

I don't see enough thought being given here to how his parents use their computer besides sending and receiving their emails.

Technical support by telephone across multiple time zones does not appeal.

His parents live overseas and he visits them only once a year.

To me that suggests that they are living in time zones at least six to eight hours apart, perhaps more.

Normally I'd recommend a dumb phone, but HalAtWork refuses even this.

Like a police officer ready to stay you for indecent exposure. I would not find permanent sex offender status worth not carrying a phone.