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.

I believe you're referring to the legal doctrine of Coverture, which is mostly no longer valid.

The Kroger in my area always closes down the cashier-staffed lanes after a certain time. The Walmart does so intermittently.

I too love the self-checkout—except for the two years that I worked from 2:00 PM to close (often midnight or later). For various reasons (my wife's work schedule, and therefore, childcare, mostly), the best time for my grocery shopping was always when I got off work. By the time I got to the store, all of the cashier-staffed lines were closed; only the self-checkout was open. Because I lived a ways out from a small town, it was also always optimum for me to make one grocery trip a week (i.e., not to buy small quantities of things as we needed them), so I usually had at $100-$200 worth of groceries in my cart. Ever try to self-checkout $150 worth of groceries, of which a large portion is produce? Hugely annoying, and took forever because I didn't have all the produce codes memorized like the cashiers did.

Often, the self-checkout monitor would take pity on me and just do it for me.

I once read—in a novel, actually—that since cops often have to sit in their vehicles for hours at a time, they often end up eating in those vehicles. And doughnuts are one of the few calorie-dense foods that both

1. Are safe to leave sitting at normal temperatures for hours at a time, and
2. Taste fine after such long sitting.

Makes sense, really.

Trantor is prettier.

As long as they're applying this across the board and not playing favorites (at least not without a damn good in-writing reason), I'm okay with this. I fact, I don't really see IPv6 being adopted soonish absent measures like this.

It depends on whether you consider economic and diplomatic sanctions "aggression."

Sort of. For example, the Linux emulation support in OpenBSD is based on Fedora 4, which was originally released June 13, 2005. I've never bothered with it—and wouldn't even if Netflix released a Linux client (that's what I have a Roku box for)—since it really seems like a headache I just don't need.

I dunno. Maybe you're just asking the wrong question.

I seem to recall that the Library of Congress gets a copy of every book published in the US.