It is the student's responsibility to learn, and he can make use of whatever tools he has at his disposal to achieve that aim.
On the other hand , and in the real world, a majority (citation needed? I can give you anecdotal evidence from each of my 18 years of classroom education) of the students would be distracted by laptops. Forget laptops, I bite my hand regularly in classes just to keep awake and concentrate on what the soporific prof was talking about. Even a scribbling sound would distract me in his lectures, and I would end up dreaming from scratching to itching to that advert about itches to that model in the ad to that film about a struggling actor to latest movie to upcoming movies to next week plans to booze and sports. In an economics class. This actually happened.
I felt it was the professors reponsibility to stop me from dreaming by atleast pretending to not mumble. But I would be pissed if some other tech, which enables me to take notes, is banned.
All said and done, I wouldn't be too sad to see laptops banned.

Actually it is a cycle. De-centralised to centralised then centralised to de-centralised. A lot of concepts work this way. From political power (Local government to kingdom to local government) to computing (mainframe to data centre to cloud), we see this cycle a lot.
I actually hope that someone does a study of this phenomenon, and finds out an equilibrium which has advantages of de centralisation and centralisation. That would be something.

It's not over folks. Keep your Tor up and running.
BTW, I really hate it when media spins it to the advertisers. Wonder if an 'open' news site exists. One that gives me plain texts and actual information, not commentary along with facts.

What it means in Diplomatese is that they are going to set up a commiteee first, talk to each and every nation about their preferences, and then create a document, laying the bare minimum regulations that need to be imposed. Of course, some countries will not like this, and will not opt-in. A few will opt in, but the implementation will be so broken, that each country will set up its own regulation mechanism on the top of it. As these clash with the UN, the UN regulation mechanism will be completely broken.
The UN cannot tie its own shoe laces. This will only justify the creation of a government approved 'regulation' process, which is often referred to as cencorship.
The Internet was nice while it lasted.

What you are supporting is basically a return to the European Dark Ages, where the leaders operated in the dark without the people's knowledge, and the citizens were just pawns in their leader's games.

This.
Wikileaks is there only to serve you and me. It is a leak, not a discovery.
The way I see it, the leaks are not meant to embarrass the governments or bureaucracy. They already know this. Wikileaks works for us. You and me. We see the real stuff what our governments are doing, and if we have a chance, vote for or against the government. If Saudi Arabia was not a kingdom, the ruler would be given the boot. Pakistan now knows what it's government is doing. You guys know what US is trying to do.

Don't play strawman with me.
Gandhi, Mandela, Martin Luther King are honest and simple people. I prefer them. Maybe you would like to be ruled by extremely intellgent and motivated people behind the credit crisis, I want honest and simple people to do the job. Learn some history and come back to play strawman with me, I can play better than you.
What you imply in your post is that simple==dumb. This is not true.
The dumb guy at top was a joke. The criminals getting elected is continuing the joke.

I always wondered why automated twitter like systems are not used to solve this kind of problem.
Here is what I would like: Have a device which measures the traffic at one point installed all across the highways (Simple IR device looking at the number of passing vehicles per second should do). These devices act as social beings, sharing their data to a server to give out to everyone. They should come cheap, especially while buying in bulk (Make them solar powered, if you want to). Let them transmit the data to the nearest cell phone tower or to a server on the internet. The connectivity should be cheap, it is sending bytes of information. Have the GPS in your car (or your $20 cellphone) receive the 'feed'(or SMS) from the server based on the input route.
I dont think you need an algorithm to predict the travel time, you can just calculate it (Can be done server side too).
The costs in implementing this should be lesser.

I am not an American, but aren't simple and honest folks more trustworthy than a highly educated and dishonest people? I consider myself a part of the latter group, and I want to be led by a guy with a simple and honest plan, frankly. Never trust a guy who is more intelligent than you. Of course, I want the more intelligent guy to work UNDER me, which is better for both of us. Put the dumbest person at the top, and lets steer towards progress.
This is also why I feel more people with criminal records get elected in my country. They were dumb enough to get caught, they will be dumb enough to give me what I want.

Excellent. What you have shown to the slashdot crowd is the difficulties in manufacturing in a way no one has ever done before.
That said, you need to remember that the decision to do so has been made by the company itself. They wanted to take on the risk of manufacturing in China for more profits (or to stay with competition). There is a risk there, make no mistake.
Even when you sell a 'Made in America' laptop for $899, there is a risk that you are taking. The risk is associated with the manufactuing process itself. Dell did nothing to plan against that risk. When the problem appeared, they lied. They cannot be excused.
Summary: They are supposed to do all that AND sell me a laptop at $10, which is my reservation price for any electronic device.

Actually we have a lot of faith in our corruption. Look, its not that I just know that somebody is corrupt, it is also that I know how to use it.
In a previous attempt, this same exercise created many dupes and gave birth to many non existing people. I am talking about iris scanners here, and the officials themselves, top civil servants can be trusted. It is not a bad database design too, remember, we create most of the designs for your systems. It was later found out that a political party created these, and the method was by bribing some of the data collectors.

Every system is corrupt, even this one. If your authorities want to screw you, trust me, they don't need this. This is only for the better.