Baloney. I learnt it that way and it was a waste of time. Math should be about learning the splendor of numbers, shapes, change etc... not about learning to be a clerk in a pre-digital age. I recommend you to read "A Mathematician’s Lament" by Paul Lockhart. Don't argue with me. Argue against his arguments.

I was thinking of the LiveCD they provide. I agree that it should not be called a distro since it is just an optional build environment.

Does anyone use LFS for production at all? It is more of a learning distro.

Suse minimal install used about 7MB RAM to run, when I tested it some 3 years ago. Most popular server Linux distros provide a minimal option. Ubuntu had (had - because I am not sure if it is still being maintained) JeOS (Just Enough OS) just for VMs.

Evolution and social studies, I get. But math? How is that even remotely against their religion? Wasn't most of school math present or developed during caliphate days? Algebra is an Arabic word. Sure, Geometry was developed adequately before their religion came along and they stopped short of Calculus. But in what conceivable way would math be seen as against their religion? I am almost tempted to smell pre-war propaganda that exaggerates some real findings.

> 4mbps is not "enough" for the modern Internet

Oh, it is enough for Internet as it stands today. It may not be enough for poorly optimized sites and services, but it is otherwise fine.

> even low bandwidth streams wouldn't work well.

I am not in US. So I don't do Hulu or Netflix. I do however do a lot of YouTube. YouTube classifies 360p as low-def. 480p as standard-def. I do 360p, with ease, on my *1 mbps* connection.

I also do Coursera. Its 480p videos are very well compressed. 1 mbps is about 7.5 MB/min. Coursera vids are often about 1.5-3 MB/min, and not commonly, 5 MB/min. I used to do video conferencing for work with 6 other people on the same 1 mbps connection.

Video compression technology has come a long way in the last few years. Google's VP9 codec is said to do 1080p at under 3 mbps.

I am not disputing that more bandwidth is always good and I certainly would not mind more. Telcos do need to keep up with times to earn their keep. But I do want to make a point that you can do a lot with humble speeds and quite comfortably at that. I feel that the things that I am missing are only a few unimportant things. I have used Internet at 100 mbps at the university and so know what it is like. But it has not been hard to adapt to much slower speeds. I can actually pay US prices and get typical US residential speeds. But meh, this works well enough.

> In a year or two, when it becomes clear that there are certain kinds of things that can only be done on that years' hardware

Rather than argue speculatively like this, why not argue more concretely with a case where what we have have today is not possible with 3 or 4 year old hardware? I can't think of anything off the top of my head. Even if there is some technique like that, how widespread is its use in today's content? And how much would a person miss by not having that itty bitty feature?

PC gaming has worked fine on 5 (or more) year old hardware for a while now. It is not a requirement to have to max out every setting of diminishing return, all the time, or to miss an occasional Crysis like game that is intended to show the future than anything else. Our lives won't be empty without that extra little post-processing, which in most cases, would not even be something we would even notice unless specifically told about it. Statistically speaking, the users that chase the edge are a very small minority. Yet, we make them the face of PC gaming and chase away regular people to console gaming, which is far more expensive once all the costs are exposed, based on this faux need to upgrade constantly.

> 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.