I have a number of friends who are cellphone salespeople and they're ALWAYS told to push Android phones (and afaik there are no incentives or commissions to push iPhones). iPhones are expensive to carriers, both in what Apple charges the carrier initially and in the long term hit to the network (iPhone users use more data). That's not to say they aren't happy to sell you an iPhone (especially if you're switching from a cheap dumbphone plan), but they are much, much happier to see you switch away from an iPhone to a Samsung or whatever.

1.3 men for every woman. Of course, the women see through this - the extra 0.3 he's claiming is typical male exaggeration.

No shit, I didn't say Thunderbolt invented docking stations. I said docking stations are very much a "legitimate use" for Thunderbolt - probably the most common. And previous custom docking connectors rarely had the flexibility of Thunderbolt (being a PCI bus you can put damn near any kind of ports you want at the other end, not just what's pre-built into your laptop's custom pin-out), nor a standardized port that allows for many different brands/products to interact.

The first? There are any number of "docking station"-style solutions that are less specialized and therefore legitimately useful to even more people - the primary one being the one integrated into Apple's Thunderbolt display (but there are cheaper solutions from Belkin, Sonnet, Matrox, CalDigit, etc). Get home, plug your laptop in, and with that one connector it instantly has access to your 30" display(s), gigabit ethernet, and your USB 3, Firewire, and other Thunderbolt peripherals (and the speakers, mic, and webcam built into the display, too). For a laptop, Thunderbolt can be remarkably useful. On a desktop less so IMO.

That myth about Apple getting a one-year exclusive deal on Thunderbolt was debunked by Intel the day after it's release, three years ago. On top of that, Thunderbolt could never work as a standard PCI add-on card, because it is lower-level and needs to expose/act as an entire PCI bus itself. Asus makes add-ons for certain of their motherboards that have an additional specific Thunderbolt header, though - and Displayport is optional there, busting yet another one of your claims.

I got to see Jobs give the commencement address at my friend's graduation from Stanford a while back. But I'm pretty sure that by the time this kid is a senior, Jobs won't be there. He's kind of dead already.

I've always hated the move toward "omnibar" seach field/URL field combos for this very reason. Add in dynamic search suggesting and every damn thing many (if not most) of the people on the planet put in that field gets sent to Google. Anything Google does with the URL bar is solely for their own advantage. No thanks.

Uh, the California Aqueduct was created in the 60's to do exactly that. (Map for the visually inclined.)

The plant is, in fact, a reverse osmosis plant.

The plant is a reverse osmosis plant.

iPad sales aren't down at all - compare the combined q1 and q2 of last year and this year and they're basically even. The difference is for the 2013 fiscal year, Apple was unable to fulfill the holiday backlog in q1 so more sales fell in q2. This year that backlog didn't happen, so Apple had "record-breaking" sales in q1 and "omg-less-than-last-year!" sales in q2. This is a nonstory to anyone who puts the slightest thought into it.

You say that in response to me pointing out my local schools send and authorization form to parents...? I doubt there's a school anywhere that's stupid enough to give kids an email address without parental permission and signing of a waiver. All it takes is one precious snowflake unexpectedly getting porn spam and the school is in hot water. In loco parentis doesn't mean schools can do whatever they want.

Teachers don't want your essays on paper, that would make it impossible (ok, very difficult) for them to use automated grading or at the very least automated plagiarism detection. Everything must be submitted digitally nowadays.

No, but their parents are. The parental authorization for Google Apps for Education comes home with all the rest of the paperwork at the beginning of the school year here.

Literally none of your post addressed the parent post's point. And given that the complex (and still obviously not stringent enough) process of "deeming someone unfit" to live actually costs society more than life improsonment, I don't see your point either.