what happened to that VERY handy feature if one wanted to rig say, a robot, where u parent the armature to the objects. Theres use armature, use object, and use bone. The USE BONE box is no longer in the newer version, how to get around this problem???
Select the armatures and go to Pose mode. Select the object you want to parent, shift-select the bone, Ctrl-P ->To bone. The trick is that you can now have armatures in Pose mode and meshes in Object mode at the same time.