> Which part of India are you in?

South.

> But some people I've talked to have indeed switched from TV to smartphone, and that's in the city outskirts.

Yes. So have I (I am in the outskirts of a small town, BTW). I do not watch any TV here and entirely consume my video via Internet (from my residential connection). But I do not represent an average Indian and would be a statistical outlier. So would the Indians that you are in contact with likely be. The Indians who work in engineering and science, especially those who do some overseas work (assuming it is these that you are in contact with), either perhaps moving back and forth or working with western clients, have developed country preferences and have similar ideas as slashdotters. But we are just a small demographic.

> I know several towns in Western Europe that used to share a single cell tower.

You are talking about having a single cell tower. The parent and I are talking about having a single shared cell phone for the entire village. It used to happen back in the land line era when a village might have had just one or two pay phones, but not now.

> Some villages only have one cell phone that everyone shares

You don't seem to be talking from experience and seem to be simply conjecturing. I am in India. I have never heard of any village sharing just one cell phone. It is not even plausible. Now, it used to be, several decades ago, that there were just a handful of landlines per village. But a cell tower will not be setup unless the provider is sure that there is demand for enough to make an economic case. And there always is. Mobile phones are not expensive (but not cheaper than the cheap options in US). Mobile plans are however incredibly cheap compared to US. I know poor ($13 rent for a family of 4) families in India who have multiple mobile phones, one per working adult.

> So think of it as each person in India putting out $1100 for their phone

Poor people are not buying smartphones yet (its the lower middle class and up that is driving smart phones now). They still buy Nokia dumb phones and are now beginning to shift to cheap Android phones at $100. Firefox Phone helps by further lowering that barrier of entry. The minimum monthly talk refill plan I know is 30 *cents*... very cheap. You may not get many outgoing minutes, but you don't get charged for incoming calls, unlike US. So everyone in India who needs one, can afford a mobile phone plan.

$1100 for a phone is very expensive in India. I know several people who have them, but they are all rich. And it is often a status symbol rather than for an actual need.

> which they use in lieu of land line, TV and computer

No one in India uses a smart phone in lieu of a TV. Having cable TV (60-80 channels) in India is very cheap ($3 per month in poor neighborhoods). Indian mobile data plans start very cheap ($2) but are not robust enough to be used for routine video consumption yet. They won't be replacing TV anytime soon. Anyone who owns a $1100 mobile phone already has a pricey HDTV.

Mobile phones are also not replacing computers yet since most of the phone users, unlike US, were not computer users to begin with. People here use cheap service stations nearby, to pay bills online, where the operator sits in front of an online PC, accepts cash and pays bills for a few cents of service charge. This is much simpler for most people than using data plans and mobile web apps, for now. Around here (a small town), there is such a tiny store for every neighborhood and they provide small jobs that serve populace that is not yet computer savvy enough.

Will Scarlett Johansson break my wrist otherwise?

Well. I do write Python. I have seen no cause for hostility. I still write in Python 2.7 (there is no reason AFAIK to still use 2.5 or 2.6 other than just not bothering; 2.5 is just too old) but intend to switch whenever Linux distros make 3.x the default.

> "if you want to start a Python 3 fork, fine, but you'll get zero recognition or help from me"

That's pretty anecdotal. Here is something a bit more objective.
http://docs.continuum.io/anaco...
Of the 197 Python 2.7 packages from Anaconda distro, 141 are there in 3.x. So it is 71.5% there among the more common packages. At large, pypi shows 3.3 at 35% of 2.7 or 50% of 2.6.

More like the baby they had 14 years ago is starting to grow one.

Yes, I know the one about hackers and beards.

True. Indian Internet is not great for heavy media usage. It is quite adequate for posting to "forums" the OP was talking about.

The broadband plans I have seen have x speed, a relatively low cap, but an unlimited x/2 speed hence after. Not too bad. The cheapest broadband I have seen is 1 mbps for $8, 20 GB cap, further usage is unlimited at 512 kbps. I don't recall what the more expensive plans offer. Low-cost, lower-tier alternatives are more important for India. India's primary concern ATM is access, not throughput. The speeds and caps are not show stoppers for most part. HD Video and game services like Steam (or even plain game consoles) won't take off in this environment, but everything else should be fine.

Your sig: "Eat Locals!" somehow does not go well with the case you just argued :-).

> I am sure if a common person used a database to collect information on the judge or the judge's family and then wrote a detailed plan of how the family was to be murdered, we would not be getting of with a simple misuse of private information.

Which is why the law will not allow that judge to take up that case because he will no longer be able to judge objectively. That argument... what if he did it to the judge?... is never a good argument.

He is talking about states in India, not US.

Jokes aside, many Indians just use laptops and 3G data cards which have quite cheap and affordable plans compared to US (start at $2 a month). So power cuts don't really effect computer use. If you are middle class in India, you probably might also have battery backup or a generator subscription for the house essentials.

> A power grid that can't be kept up reliably? That's not something customers want to see when you're trying to convince them to let you launch multi-million dollar pieces of equipment up into space.

Wanna bet? Go to Indian forums and try to find people complaining that no space projects should go on until they get uninterrupted power supply.

Don't do space projects that get us (or help get in near future) profits in foreign exchange said no Indian ever.

Civilized countries are not necessarily the same as militarized countries, just as a civilized man is not the same as an armed-to-the-teeth man. We have our gentlemen and we have our soldiers.

> Educational research is profoundly flawed, and often reflected the biases of the researchers.
> Most education are humanities people, without the decades of training in the scientific process and statistics.

That's not true. Every one with a PhD is expected to have statistical training. You don't need "decades" of training in stats. Most hard science PhDs don't have that. 4-5 grad courses will generally do. Research projects with any quantitative component will typically consult a statistician for at least a sanity check.

Scientific process differs from discipline to discipline. As for rigor, it is mostly dependent on subject issues. Rigor is hard in any discipline where human subjects are involved and where the research question involves multiple factors that cannot be easily controlled for (often for the lack of money, since very large samples will be required, if done by the book - so researchers settle for more humble expectations of clarity).

As you said it yourself, brain research is still not quite operational for everyday use. Isn't brain research (whatever you mean by that: neuro science, psychology, psychiatry?) a hard science? Even something as basic as nutrition science is pretty poor today for the basic questions we have for it. So why have great expectations over education research? Its just the nature of the problem domain.

Snowden did not engage in civil disobedience in the vein of Gandhi/MLK/Thoreau. But that's fine. Civil disobedience is just one type of civil resistance. Civil disobedience only works against petty laws with limited punishment.

In this case, the legal consequences were dire. Can you name any act of civil disobedience (submitting oneself willingly to punishment as an act of disobedience) that carried the maximum possible punishment of death or life in prison? Gandhi, MLK and Thoreau broke laws where the punishment was just a few days/weeks/months. I am sure Snowden would gladly accept such a punishment if that was the choice, since the current alternative is to spend his whole life, in fear, in a foreign country.

What he did was different. He broke a law with dire repercussions in his attempt to expose constitutional violations. What you are suggesting is closer to telling the members of the White Rose Movement to willingly expose themselves to the law. Yes, I know: Godwin. A better US example would be demanding the FBI burglars to submit themselves to law. I happen to think the burglars did the right thing by not submitting themselves to the law then. Do you? How do you see Snowden as different from them?

Unlike the burglars, Snowden could not keep himself anonymous after the leak, since the NSA, unlike the case with the FBI burglary (since the burglars were completely unrelated to the FBI), would have quickly identified him. They sent someone to his house, almost immediately after the leak. So he had to run and go public. And if he ran to the only places that can resist US extradition, without going public as he did, he would have been easily labelled a spy. Going public made that charge not stick with most people. I believe that Snowden, once having chosen to expose the constitutional violations, had no real choices other than the ones he exercised.

True, but some unintentionally end up encouraging it and some discipline against it by design.
Its not the possibility that matters, but probability.