With the mean amount per victim so (relatively) low, I guess it's just not worth it for the criminals doing it on an individual basis. All the rational criminals must be moving to more lucrative sources of ill-gotten gains.

This is one thing government gets right, I think: employees' salaries are matters of public record. In my opinion, salary information should be available to all employees of the company, and in publicly-owned companies, to the stockholders as well.

Get back to us when you get everyone to completely agree on the definition of "free" in this context.

This is nice, but...call me again when it's cheap enough to make buildings out of.

Well, to be fair, Washington, Jefferson, and Adams were dangerous radicals—preaching sedition and mutiny against the lawful government set over them.

.

Well, he could set a fire in the Patent Office.

I'm not doubting you, but I've never heard this. If this is true, in such a case, while the administration might not legally be required to provide you consideration, the instructor is in my opinion morally required to make his best effort to do so.

Care to provide some citations or a pointer? If this is true in my state, I want to complain about it to the appropriate people.

Since the discussion is about laptops in class—and thus presumably for notetaking—I'm not sure “Searching, backing up, sharing snippets, [and] linking” are apropos. These are all useful things, but wouldn't they be done after a class? And if it's after class, time isn't a factor—if those things are important to you, you could scan or retype your handwritten notes (as part of your study time, even).

Also, I would argue that for some notetaking activities, pen and paper are clearly a superior tool unless you're already an expert at the computer equivalent: diagrams or quick drawings, and mathematical equations. (I did once try to take notes in a math class for a while using LaTeX. It...did not end well; I kept have to look up how to express what I wanted.)

Except that students often aren't paying their own money. It's scholarship money, or government grant money, or borrowed money.

I almost wish I hadn't commented yet on this discussion—if I could mod this up I would. Good to know someone shares (at least some of) my view of college's problems.

You'd think so, wouldn't you? But my wife, a professor, assures me that such is not the case.

For the record, I agree with you that we ought to treat college students as adults. That said, my wife is a professor, so I often get an earful about just this; here are some things you may not have thought of:

1. When decent-sized proportions of students consistently fail an instructor's classes, this reflects poorly on the instructor to the administration. Sometimes this is valid because the instructor is a poor teacher who is not adequately teaching the material. Other times it isn't valid because that student never did any work and never came to class—how can you grade work you don't have from somebody you've never seen? Yet both those students' failures look exactly the same to college administrators, who rarely (never) inquire into particulars. So instructors have a strong personal incentive to do all they can to ensure that of the ones who go to class even marginal students—who might well be distracted enough by someone else's screensaver that they miss important information—perform decently. If you want to treat students like adults, find a better metric for administrators than "On average, Dr. So-and-So has a X% pass rate."
2. If you think there isn't pressure from administrators to treat gently students whose parents or grandparents are prominent (read: generous) alumni, please give me some of the happy drugs you're on. No, this shouldn't happen. It does anyway, though.
3. A large share of the problem lies not with instructors or even administrators, but with parents. More than once a parent has called my wife to harangue her about a low grade she's given (students complain, but by and large they don't scream), which again, is an incentive to not be harsh.
4. Relatedly, parents are also not doing a particularly good job of preparing their children to be adults; it's frankly unreasonable to coddle someone for eighteen years and then expect them to instantly adultify.

And colleges have a mechanism for making exceptions to rules for such disabilities: you get a doctor to document the need for the administration, which then grants you the exception, which you then give to the instructor. My wife, who is a professor, has in the past told me about

• Students with ADHD getting extra time on tests
• A guy with an anxiety disorder being allowed to (quietly) leave whenever he needed to without sanction
• A blind person who had someone read tests to him (in a separate room, so as not to distract the other students)
• A older gentleman with severe arthritis who got a work-study student to take notes for him

Et cetera.

While I think it's probably reasonable for you to use a laptop, my point is that you're a special case; and thus your situation has no bearing on whether banning laptops is in general a good or bad idea.

I realize that you're just being an asshole, and that you didn't even respond to my actual argument; but I'm bored, so I'll give you a straight answer regardless.

Part of communicating is realizing that there are varying levels of formality according to the circumstance at hand; diction appropriate to (or at least tolerable on), say, a pseudoanonymous tech-related website, might very well be less formal than that in an academic paper or something an employee might turn in to his boss. It's not like there is One Grand Magically Correct English for all people in all situations. If you think there is, you are simply mistaken.

The elephant in the room is that in American society, people are in general far more educated than they need to be. I have a bachelor's degree, none of the knowledge gained in pursuit of which[1] is of any help to me whatsoever in the course of my daily life, whether personally or professionally. And while I have no data, if the scuttlebutt is to be believed, I am very not alone in this. Furthermore, even a lot of the knowledge I gained in high school has proven completely useless to me[2]: outside of a class, I have never used any mathematics more advanced than the Pythagorean theorem.

As long as unreasonable academic credentials are required for jobs, though, there will be incentive for people to cheat—that is to say, cheating is not the problem; it's a symptom. Elminate the degree inflation in the job market, and you'll eliminate most of the cheating.

[1] Aside, possibly, from reading comprehension and writing skills, but those were not developed in college—I tested out of all the required English classes and all but one of the history classes—merely honed.

[2]The important words here are of course “to me.” I know lots of things which, objectively, are of no utilitarian use in my situation, but which I have sought out the knowledge of simply because it interested me; my enjoyment of them constitutes their usefulness.