You obviously don't know much about learning and teaching. Having a student reread pages until they pass the test is a waste of time. If you don't understand the material after reading (maybe twice), you need a different explanation of the material; something that any competent teacher will recognize.

The 'haab' actually has 365 days, it's the 'tun' which only has 360 days. Depends on which of the two you want to call a 'year'.

Cats can be kept in house perfectly well. I live in a smallish apartment and our cat is used to living indoors. She can wander around on our small balcony if the weather permits (and she loves it), but living indoors is not a problem at all. Large dogs, on the other hand, will probably go crazy.

No, genetically speaking, we have evolved to cooperate as a tribe. Now we can crash the skulls of other, smaller tribes and take their bananas.

Better yet, our alpha males have learned how to frighten lesser tribe members into believing that other tribes are out to take our wives and kill our babies, in order to convince them to go crash some skulls and bring the bananas home.

How is it then, that everybody and their aunt complains about the fact that the Windows distributions have included a browser for ages? Aah, you mean because of the stable, maintainable and patched part of the requirement...

Nonsense. Software does not cease to function as it did by itself. As you say, it can become outdate and incompatible because people stop targeting it just as with peripherals. You really don't have a convincing argument to back up the statement that hardware remains fully functional when software does not.

Why do you say that? If my webcam worked under Windows 95 ten years ago, it will still work under Windows 95 today. The software doesn't stop working anymore than the hardware does. On the other hand, if you choose to upgrade your OS...

They tend not to eat as much cabbage and beans as they used to, so that's less effective...

Ehm, the fact that you couldn't download a browser with 128-bit encryption is, as you said, due to US export regulations. You were, in that sense, subject to US laws. I don't think the German law prohibited you from downloading American encryption software.

It does have an accelerometer to switch the screen orientation. See the specs from Palm: http://investor.palm.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=358392

Customer satisfaction is about as easy to quantify as AHT. We routinely send out surveys to measure customer satisfaction and correlate that information with our productivity metrics and our internal quality monitoring. Yes, high AHT is a problem in call centers, because it costs money, lowering our profit margin. But low customer satisfaction is a bigger problem, because it drivers customers away, effectively reducing our profit margin to somewhere approaching zero.
I understand there are a lot of not-so-good call centers, but the majority really is no longer just hiring monkeys to read out scripts to calling customers. And agents really are not fired just for failing to meet AHT targets.