I agree with you almost completely. The only exception that I take is assuming that a competent IT staff is available.

This may be a given in industrial settings, but municipal government is an area where you often don't even have an IT function -- the role just doesn't exist in the organization. I would guess that this is even more likely to happen in sewer and water districts, which are often quasi-independent government entities on their own that are dominated by a combination of appointed political hacks who need help tying their shoes and civil engineers who think in terms of pipes and backhoes.

Furthermore, I think any physics or math exam that requires a complex calculator really has a wrong approach. Assuming everyone at this level has already demonstrated their ability to perform arithmetic several times over, the calculator should only be there to free them from making mistakes on the menial number crunching (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, squares, squareroots, proper value of e,Pi, etc...). The exam should test for core concepts: ideas where you simply must understand the knowledge through prior practice and learning.

One problem: In your hypothetical world, where hypothetical students just use their notes and other aids, the students probably don't have a clue, since they can't do basic math because some idiot math teacher back in 4th grade decided that understanding the process of using a multiplication table was enough. And using notes as a reference isn't fair either, since some dumbass english teacher decided that actually having the ability to write legibly was ho-hum in the era of the internet.

If you can't hack using a standard 4 function calculator, than you can't hack physics either.

I also hate to be rude, but most universities require that students speak and read english. While I can appreciate the fact that a Korean may not have the best grasp of written English, I also think it that individual's responsibility to learn the language or work outside of class to create notes in his or her native language. I sat through a number of situations in school where I was struggling with difficult material while foreign students were either talking during exams in their language, "sharing calculators" or similar, blatant examples of cheating that went unchallenged due to the political situation at the university.

After being written up in the campus newspaper, one professor "took a stand" by curving everyone's grade up one letter grade, essentially bribing the class into submission.

It's done in a Mac Business Unit separate from the Office team.

This article is about someone in a third world country who is literally witnessing death and mayhem on his front step and wants to shame the local police into doing something about it. Some folks are skewing the comments to talk about how speedtraps suck, etc.

Some municipalities abuse speed laws for revenue purposes, and some cops write dumb tickets such as your scenario. That's why we have courts.

If you don't believe that speeding is a major factor in car accidents, Google for articles citing NHTSA. Look at the numbers yourself and make your own judgement.

Also consider that you may be a driver with better skills than average. My wife's a great driver... I'd happily hold an uncovered cup of hot coffee while she drives. I'm an awful driver, and my passengers would be chugging the coffee down before I put the car in drive.

There are many drivers on the road who are dumb, illiterate or otherwise inept. Do you trust their judgement?

There are literally hundreds of studies that demonstrate that higher speeds are correlated with a larger number of car accidents. This is particularly true in crowded urban environments and general access highways.

The other big issue regarding speeding in urban environments is that not only does it increase the risk of accident, but it increases the impact of the accident as well -- the energy involved in a 60 mph crash is double a 40 mph crash. So when some idiot drives 60 mph on a sidestreet and hits a parked car, he's more likely to hurt himself and other and will likely cause much more damage.

The top 6 causes of US car accidents are, in order: distraction (including rubbernecking), fatigue, drunk driving, speeding, aggressive driving and weather.

Also, speed limits have minimal or no measurable impact on traffic density. In the US, traffic density is generally a byproduct of too much road infrastructure. Read about the impact of the Triborough Bridge on NYC traffic in the 1930's for an illustrative example.

Only in a discussion about teachers does this level of nonsensical excuse-making emerge in a serious discussion.

As a programmer, truck driver, physician, dog walker, mailman or accountant, you're expected to perform a job as well as possible. A truck driver who is great until he gets stuck in traffic is a problem, as is an accountant who can't work if people in the next office are too loud or because the laser printer smells like toner.

It's not about condemnation, but about effectiveness. If different teachers are better in different environments, we need to study those differences and learn from them. The union's agenda is about preserving the power of the union -- and not necessarily improving the lot of the teachers or students. That's why they react so irrationally to potentially negative news stories and budget discussions -- it's about saving face.

That's an issue with all cloud providers. Even the secure Google facilities are probably unmanned. Intel has some videos up about one of their new datacenters, and I think they say there are 4-5 night watchman type staff assigned to each facility. No IT, no offices.

No, I don't need one of the many 3rd party hacks that have been built due to Mozilla's insistence on developing software like it's still 1996.

Why not?

- Users don't have admin rights. They cannot write to the registry. They cannot write to program files.
- The nice folks at Mozilla break these 3rd party packages every few months. (Ask the Debian/Ubuntu folks -- this isn't just a Windows problem)

The authors of trivial software packages have been getting this for a long time. Even Apple Safari on Windows is better than Mozilla. And Apple doesn't give a hoot about anyone! Mozilla doesn't care, and yes, I've worked with people in the past willing to write code and put up cash to get work done -- we were rebuffed and called a bunch a newbie idiots for daring to make a contribution.

Guess what? The 45,000 people I provide services to are not using Firefox, and are not clicking on Adsense while using the Firefox search box. This is one of the top 3 reasons we didn't deploy desktop Linux to a subset of users as well. We're on IE and doing proof of concepts with Chrome.

Your gmail is located somewhere in some central Google server

Nope... your gmail is located on a Google Filesystem (http://labs.google.com/papers/gfs.html), which could be located just about anywhere.

Google knows that I use Road Runner, that my iPhone is on AT&T, and that my employer uses AT&T. It's pretty trivial to replicate my data to cluster inside of a shipping container inside of a network that I frequently use. It also makes for a compelling reason to dump Road Runner for FIOS and AT&T for a VZ Droid, if Verizon has some sort of premium access.

Microsoft Foundation Services (the guys who operate the Azure and hosted Microsoft products) have even published videos about their vision of massive scale hub datacenters, supported by smaller, forward-facing city datacenters for providing Microsoft services. That stuff has been published for a year or more. You can't tell me that Google -- the people who invented this stuff -- aren't a generation ahead of what MS is doing. And a strategic partnership with a telco who owns all sorts of valuable telco real estate and needs a compelling counter to the iPhone is just the way to deliver that vision quickly.

True for PCs, but not for phones. One of the big complaints about AT&T regarding the iPhone is that while AT&T has the "fastest 3G network" many of their remote towers are connected to the internet with a couple of T1's, and don't have enough bandwidth to provide a satisfactory browsing experience to a few hundred iPhone users.

Google is probably looking at partnering much more closely with Verizon than you realize. VZ has thousands of CO facilities all over the country that are essentially empty -- the footprint of equipment needed to provide landline services is shrinking dramatically. Plus the wireless side has the best site placement of any of the carriers, and the backhaul internet connectivity for many of the cell towers runs through these COs.

Throw some Google clusters in these facilities... and you have an ability to deliver extremely fast application access without traversing the internet or having to increase bandwidth to the thousands of wireless sites.

I'd love to be able to actually deploy and maintain Firefox in the large enterprise that I work in. Users want it. Unfortunately, users don't have admin rights, and Mozilla makes applying updates and configuring the browser from a central location difficult and has a history of not thinking about and actively shooting down any proposals which would potentially benefit system administrators trying to support Firefox.

I don't get why they don't get it.

Totalitarian governments breed corruption, because the only way for folks to get resources or attention from the government is to influence the dictator or some government functionary. Democracies become more corrupt as they become more dictatorial.

Without pesky "electoral circuses" and a free press, nobody ever asks those inconvenient questions that bring down politicians.

You're smoking crack. Chinese banks are actually worse than many US banks. And once they make enough, the Chinese people are buying lots of cars and HDTVs.