A server is probably running a lot more tasks at once than a desktop, and the amount of memory per task may in fact be less for a server than for a desktop. This is why an entry-level virtual private server has less RAM than even an entry-level desktop PC.

The desktop box in question was probably built a decade ago when 512 MB was a lot. It shipped with 128 MB and the motherboard had two PC133 slots that maxed out at 256 MB each.

Memory is cheap today. It wasn't cheap when your user bought his device.

In an event-driven environment, it does. Event-driven environments make it much harder to predict which object will be the last object to hold a reference to a given object.

How do you copy a non-memory resource such as a network connection? Why would you copy a resource as big as (example from article) a multi-megapixel photo unless you plan to modify one or both?

A program may need improving on users' machines even if it doesn't need improving on the developer's substantially more powerful, substantially cleaner machine.

The article states that users expect phones to run camera applications that quickly process effects on multi-megapixel photographic images. Most people who are not creative professionals tend not to run such applications as often on PCs, especially PCs manufactured when 1 GB was standard.

For one thing, shunting stuff out of memory involves committing unsaved changes to slow disk or slow NAND flash memory. For another, closing an application means having to call all its destructors, finalizers, or whatever your favorite language calls things that unwind in-memory data structures and release non-memory resources that an object holds. Responsiveness to user actions requires doing this sort of shutdown in the background rather than when the user is waiting for the application's memory allocation request to complete.

Even if the network costs $10 per GB up or down? Prices like this are common for cellular Internet in the United States. How much money does a page fault cost?

if (!document.querySelector) {
  alert("IE pre-8 is still widely used in China.")
}
if (!document.addEventListener) {
  alert("IE pre-9 is even more prevalent throughout the world.")
}

What do most people on the Internet use to fulfill the use cases that RSS fulfills to nerds?

At $10 per gigabyte to upload and $10 per gigabyte to download over a cellular network in the United States, this safety has a substantial cost associated with it.

What keywords please? Google cell phone contract lease brings up nothing relevant.

Then your iPad is inferior to a Galaxy Note or Galaxy Tab that includes a built-in Wacom digitizer.

Consider a household where the kids can use the tablet as much as he wants, but the PC is daddy's, and either the kids aren't allowed on it or even if they are, it's for only a half hour at a time. So if one of the kids gets an idea to learn to program, how will he fulfill it?

I'd agree with you for something like a Galaxy Note or Galaxy Tab that includes a real Wacom digitizer with a real pen. But the capacitive digitizer in most phones and tablets is much less precise with a comparatively large uncertainty caused by the irregular shape of the finger's contact surface, and I don't see how it beats even a mouse.