I think you're going to run into a general problem here, in that modern computers are generally not built to work off of such slow Internet connections. They're constantly getting big updates and patches.

Some people have pointed you in the direction of Chromebooks, which to my knowledge doesn't have a POP3 client available because Google assumes you'll have web access. There may be other reasons why it won't work.

I think your first instinct might be best. Install Linux. Figure out exactly what applications they need, and install only those apps. You can probably hack something together to run a script when they receive an email from you, but I think you'll be better off just having them run a script manually (tell them 'click on this button') that will collect diagnostic information and email it to you, if you want to do that.

Pick a relatively stable distro (Debian?), strip it down to the bare necessities and use a lightweight desktop environment. Set it to only download security patches. For any updates more than that, bring a disk when you visit.

I'm afraid none of this will keep them from responding to Nigerian scammers. Maybe set up their email to only accept messages from whitelisted addresses? Or maybe your parents just can't have the Internet.

Ok, so what I'm taking away from this conversation is simply that you are a highly opinionated person who doesn't know what Attic Greek is. It's a dialect of ancient Greek, and it was not pronounced the same as modern Greek. So when I'm talking about Attic Greek being pronounced in some way, it's not really a sensible argument to say that I'm wrong because modern Greeks pronounce it differently. They're different dialects separated by thousands of years. It would be like insisting that people in Renaissance England used the same pronunciation as the English do today, when we know very factually that they did not.

Your arguments, frankly, are crazy and ignorant, so I don't feel like arguing anymore.

You can, and people do. In order to study dead languages (or dialects, or accents that no longer exist), linguists can sometimes find old writings from the time and place that describe how things are supposed to be pronounced. That makes things relatively easy. Without those kinds of sources, they can do things like analyze poetry or songs from the time, and figure out how the poetry was supposed to sound. They can look at puns and figure out which words were supposed to sound similar. It may not be a perfect science, but through years of studying these kinds of things, people can get a pretty good idea of how words were pronounced.

Not in Attic Greek, it's not.

Well in the ancient Greek, IIRC, it would have been more like A-kill-e-oos (except the K sound would be a sound that we don't have in English), and Americans tend to pronouncing it as Ak-kill-ees, but that's neither here nor there. It sounds like you're maybe making the mistake of thinking that your German pronunciation is the absolute correct pronunciation, regardless of what language is being spoken or how the original language would have pronounced it.

Well you implied that you weren't American, so maybe it's your accent? Because pronouncing the "eu" like you would in "feud" makes "Zeus" pronounced like "Zoooooos".

Except for the fact that people have studied it quite a lot, and have a pretty good idea of how it was pronounced.

Under Jobs at least, that didn't seem to be the design philosophy. The design philosophy was more to make things, simple, clean, elegant, and transparent to the user. Making a product that people can't get anywhere else? That's not that hard. Making a good product is hard, and if you make a good enough product, then people won't be able to get it anywhere else.

Yeah, I guess it's not so bad if you assume that you're going to have a case, and that the case thickness will result in a flat back to the whole thing. I hadn't really thought of that.

Still, I think it's a bad choice. It seems kind of dumb to design your product with the idea that the dumb design won't be quite so dumb if you also buy a case.

I don't know how their design people allowed a protruding lens in the first place. It really runs contrary to Apple's design sensibility, but I guess we're seeing the first evidence of what happens to Apple without Jobs. The protrusion is ugly, and it mars the flat, smooth design.

And for what? Assuming that they can't make the camera any thinner, make the phone slightly fatter, and make use of the extra space. It's not as though the iPhone 5 was obscenely thick and needed to be made thinner. Hell, just fill the rest of the thing out with additional battery, and give us more battery life.

Yeah, I think part of the mistake here is in using the term "critical thinking". It's vague. And the talk about "Liberal Arts degrees" is also a bit misplaced.

I would sooner accept your description of "expansive thinking", in that it gets closer to what I think all this talk is about.

I think what's really being said is, if someone is educated exclusively (or dominantly) in a STEM field, without other things to add to their background, there will be a inclination for that person to deal with things in factual terms. In a sense, they're being trained to think about things statistically and factually, to think that things are either true or false, to be dismissive of opinions or emotions or interpersonal relationships as valid reasons for doing things. There are realms of human life that they are not only not-trained in, but they are trained to see as "without value".

The problem is, businesses-- and other groups of people trying to accomplish things-- make heavy use of those things which are "without value". When you're trying to figure out a solution to a complex problem, it often helps to have someone in the room who educated in those things "without value". Really, you want people with a bit of a balanced background, having studied various topics, including "worthless" things like literature and philosophy.

So I think what they're really saying is, there's a need of people with broad and expansive minds, able to think intelligently about many different subjects, both technical and non-technical. Unfortunately, a lot of extremely technical minds will think that's an insane statement, since only technical knowledge is needed. Really, those people are just serving as examples of the problem.

None of this necessarily needs to be bound up with degrees. I've known people with Liberal Arts degrees who know quite a bit of math and science, and people with STEM degrees who've studied a fair amount of the humanities. And degrees often fail to be an adequate measurement of qualifications anyway.

The word "utopia" comes from the Greek "eu" + "topos", i.e. "good place". The English spelling "utopia" is supposed to preserve the pun of confusing eutopia with "ou" + "topos", "no place".

I don't know about modern Greek pronunciations, but in Attic Greek, "eu" wouldn't have been pronounced as 'oy', as in the enlish word 'joy'. At least not as far as I've ever heard. It would have been more like the "eu" in the english word "feud". My recollection is that the pun is used in Platonic dialogues, though I wouldn't be able to remember where it appears.

Well, and who decides if a fork is good or bad? I thought the ability to fork has always been held as a strength of FOSS, as long as they release the code back to the public according to the licensing terms. X.org forked from XFree86, and it was considered a good thing. What about LibreOffice forking from OpenOffice? Webkit itself was a fork of KHTML, IIRC.

It often seems like the attitude of the FOSS community is something like, "You think you can do a better job on this project? Fork it and let's see what you got!" And then some company does it, and everyone whines and complains that they should be working within the community.

I'm not sure I'm understanding this, because I have no idea what the difference is supposed to be. People are saying, "We don't want you to throttle Netflix, trying to extort extra money out of both Netflix and the consumers for faster access." And then AT&T says, "But what if we throttle Netflix first, then wait for consumers to complain, and *then* extort money out of Netflix and consumers for faster access?"

Isn't that exactly the same thing?