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.

You say this as if it was true 100% of the time. Sadly it is not.

But that's not how it works. Nuclear regulations in the US require companies to build trust funds over time for the decommissioning of nuclear plants. Nobody is waiting until the last minute. (Though as TFA points out, the estimates of decommissioning costs are turning out to be ~ 1/5 the real cost.)

No, the original iPad has 256 MB of RAM. The iPad 2 has 512, and every other generation so far has had 1 GB. The original iPad is definitely quite pathetic and that's why Apple threw it to the wayside. All the others seem to run great to this day though.

I'm typing this on a 3rd gen iPad right now... Neither iOS 6 nor iOS 7 have caused any trouble, performance-wise. The 3rd gen was already quite powerful compared to the first two (the first iPad, with its tiny amount of RAM, is a dog IMO) and the 4th gen didn't change much at all (one extra GPU core and that's it iirc). The current 5th gen (iPad Air) is better cpu/gpu wise but still has the same amount of RAM as the third gen. What it boils down to is the third gen, capability-wise, isn't really all that far behind the current model. It runs great, as a matter of fact. That's kind of the point of TFA - there's no reason for 3rd or 4th gen users to upgrade to the current model, because the difference is negligible (unless you're *really* concerned about weight).

Also worth noting is that Apple now allows users on older OSes to download older versions of apps, so they're not locked out anymore.

Not a huge fan of the iOS 7 look though.

As for the two MacBook Pros (I assume you meant one is running Mountain Lion, because no 2013 machine will run Lion), is your colleague accessing files over a network (seems likely)? Mavericks now defaults to SMB2 where possible instead of AFP, and in my personal experience I've found it to be a good deal slower - I make sure to connect to my NAS via AFP. Perhaps that could be the root of your colleague's issues ("slow" is vague so this is mostly a shot in the dark).

A powerful rebuttal, full of information to answer my question. I assume you're posting from 10.9 now, and one of the regressions is lack of support for the shift key. Can't imagine how terrible it must be to work in such an environment!

(Shame on me for expecting an intelligent answer from a troll.)

Out of curiosity, what is it that makes you think 10.9 is a "toy operating system"? The only significant regression between 10.6 and 10.9 IIRC is Spaces is now one-dimensional, but TotalSpaces does a good job of fixing that.

I disagree - memory compression has made Mavericks run much better at 4GB than either of the Lions in my anecdotal experience.

To the GP umafuckit, check the hard drive in that mini carefully; in my experience strange OS X slowness is often a sign of a dying hard drive (I've seen this probably a dozen times on various clients' computers). OS X is annoyingly sensitive to hard drive issues.

IIRC this tends to be caused by misbehaving kernel extensions (old ones that are not compatible with ML). Blackberry sync driver, logmein driver, sometimes HP's shitty printer drivers, etc. Check /System/Library/Extensions/ for old cruft.

It's not mimicking the protocol that seems (to me) like it should be illegal, but rather using AOL's chat servers when you explicitly do not have permission to do so. AOL pays to run and maintain those for the benefit of their customers, not for the benefit of Microsoft. To me is feels something like a crappy restaurant handing its customers a plate of food and a red suit jacket and then telling them, "our dining room kind of sucks. Go down the street, third door on your right is a restaurant with a better view and awesome service. If you wear this jacket they'll think you're part of tonight's wedding reception and you're set."

They are perfectly legal and enforceable in the United States, so long as the clause applies to both parties and specifies a neutral 3rd-party arbiter (at which point they are "fair").