A fair point, but I think you should consider something as well: food security.

If a rural place is so backward and so lonely that no one wants to be a farmer, what do you think that will do to food production? Not to mention the simple distastefulness of having barefoot poverty within the US. Sometimes market efficiency has to take a back seat to other priorities.

Size has nothing to do with it. Each ISP has local networks connected to each other (and other ISPs) by larger connections. The exact same is true in Europe. If what you say is true, then US cities should have wonderful broadband, but that is clearly not the case. Europe is larger than the US, with a similar population, so your comparison isn't at all accurate, and the more you trot it out in discussions like this, the longer it will take to fix.

Of course they're not as bad as ISIS, but to call the Christian Right "harmless" is not very accurate. The sheer number of people dying from back-alley abortions is a testament to that, and that's just one of their areas of "expertise".

As much as my libertarian side wants to agree with you, I can't help but notice the positive effects of rural electrification and phone service. Damn you, history and pragmatism.

But usually not capitalised, at least not since the late 1700s.

Well, sort of. There has been a much larger outlay of cash necessary to break into digital photography. You may realize a break even point sooner if you would have shot lot of rolls of film, but the initial barrier to entry is much higher than it was for film cameras, which really only needed to be a light-tight box. Having said that, the price of good digital cameras has come down a lot since the late 90s, so what I observe is more of a trough where film was pretty much phased out yet digital cameras were still really expensive.

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.

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.

1 Make a bold, dramatic assertion.

2 and. in your next breath, argue that is useless to offer any proof.

Such a talent is wasted in tech, You really ought to go into politics.

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

1) the technical aspects are not really photography - they are details of a tool. They are not composition nor lighting nor mood nor concept.

2) The iPhone with iOS8, and version of Android for a while I think let you control all of those aspects in advanced camera apps (well focal length you had to add adaptor lenses, but lots of people do use those).

Flickr already missed the boat on being the social media image sharping app of choice.

They are not the social media sharing app of choice.

They ARE the primary choice for sharing images from people who are photographers, and also happen to primarily use smartphones. Yes, even over sites like 500px... Flickr has far more volume.

Those who have done the math have joined the tea party. They have read ahead to the end of the book. The rest of us have no clue the economy is unsustainable in it's current form.

You *do* know IOS has a search, right? Makes it kind of difficult to fail to find an app you're actually looking for.

As for the rest, different strokes, etc. I have no objection if you choose not to use such a feature (for that matter, perhaps the OS could contain a switch to turn it off for those who are unable to manage more than a single level of folders.

As for not being useful, you're not qualified to say what's useful to me.

Would you care to explain how, or point the way to a howto?

Thanks.