FTFA:

At least they're honest about it, I wish I saw that kind of disclaimer on more articles where it's needed even more.

I'm not sure what curriculum this is for, but in my experience (engineering in the U.S.) it is not the case. I would have to think hard to identify a class where the majority of the material was to be learned out of a book before the lecture. All my classes in my major (undergrad and grad, two different universities) were 3-4 hours of lecture per week where all the new material was presented, and then reinforced by homework assignments and us reading the book [again?] outside class. I have one class now where the homework is on material that had not yet been covered in lecture, but is related and expands on it. I've also had multiple courses where there was no textbook at all and the professor just emailed out the lecture slides an hour before class for us to refer to later.

Regarding the grandparent post here, you must have bad profs. I've been a TA for the past 3 semesters and have witnessed a bit of cheating during tests (sophomore level class), but only to the extent of 2 or 3 people out of 150 looking at their neighbors' tests a few times. We even had a student come to the proctors under the pretense of asking for help just to say that the kid next to him was constantly looking at his paper and he was annoyed about it. The cheater still did badly on the test even with cheating so we didn't make an issue out of it though. It seems to me that cheating is more a function of the mindset of the students than what the professor is doing.

Of course in my major it's quite rare for there to not be an equation sheet provided or the students being allowed to bring their own crib sheet, so there's little motivation to cheat when it's not a multiple choice test, the method is worth more than the final answer, and they already have all the equations provided (the test is on how to use them correctly).

I agree with you about seeing more netbooks and fewer macs, but while your reasoning may be true for the hipster crowd that doesn't actually use the laptop to any capacity, I have another possible explanation.

Speaking as a graduate student who still has a G4 Powerbook, I've loved it but honestly in the past 2 years I've been looking to replace it with something that can actually stream flash videos and show a block of animated gif smilies on a forum reply page without being choppy or using full CPU. Since I also have a windows desktop to do my real engineering work on, I want a smaller laptop that is easy to carry around and fits in my backpack. My first choice would be a 13" Macbook Pro, but Apple seems to have left that one useful model on the short bus and gave it a Core 2 Duo while the other pros in the line have decent current-generation chips. I've talked to other friends about it and I know at least 2 other people that would go out and buy a 13" within the next month if only it had a better processor.

So that leaves me with getting a netbook or a 'hackintosh', since if I can't have OS X on the laptop then I might as well have something tiny and cheap. (Maybe it's just me, but OS X is a lot more usable with only the keyboard than any other OS I've seen, one reasons I want to use an Apple laptop)

It may not be a big factor, but Apple is losing people because they can't compete in the small laptop market, or at least those of us who want a real keyboard, hard drive, CD drive, and real ports. I have no use for a SSD in a laptop, because I know how to not drop it while I'm using it, and the speed increase doesn't matter when you're just doing research and writing papers. As much as he may want it to be, the iPad is in no way a replacement for a small laptop for anyone who does any amount of text input like writing code or writing papers.

Yeah, but that old trackball works perfectly anywhere, and has a tiny footprint!

For what it's worth, the whole Electrical Engineering department at my university uses HP/Agilent scopes as part of the lab stations. The scopes are now all have the Agilent brand on them; though the voltage sources and other boxes have the same design, stack together well, look like they are meant to go together, even are part of the same daisychained cable to/from the computers, and about half still say HP.