Dude, in North America, spending $500 on a goof-off device is called fiscal restraint. How many people do you know who've spent more than $1000 on a widescreen TV in the last 3 years? Or bought an ATV? Or a snowmobile? Or a home theatre system? Or ...
We spend a lot of money on toys. If the iPad turns out to be a toy, so what? If some people manage to use it for actual work, great.

A key ring with house keys and bike key. Another key ring with house keys and car keys.

I don't know that they will be punished at exam time. Many professors grade exams on the curve, meaning that they pass X percent of the class. If many students do poorly on the exam, clearly the exam was too hard.

When my father was in med school, ca 1950, attendance was taken and affected your right to take the exam, so this is not a new concept.

All that said, it won't work. For example, I walk into class and the sensors detect my card, so I'm logged as being in attendance. Woo hoo. Now I put my card in a metal wallet that prevents the sensors from reading the card and walk out the door. The sensors do not detect me leaving. Or, equally silly, I oversleep and I'm in a rush to get to class and leave my card on my dresser. So I'm in class, verified by many classmates and possibly the professor, but I'm logged as absent.

I'll second this. I once read a book published by the author on a vanity press. Although the content itself was good (and the writing was not too bad), the formatting looked like it had been done by a 10-year-old. Much of the text was either bold or underlined or italicized (and note that those 'or's are NOT exclusive ors), to the point that it was almost unreadable. Had it been formatted by an adult, I might well have purchased several copies to give to friends. As it was, I did not manage to read the entire book - the formatting was just too awful. Editing is NOT the same thing as writing. A good editing job is worth money.

It's not just familiarity. We have web-apps at work that work on IE6 but not most other browsers (even later versions of IE don't completely work properly). The underlying problem is IE6 was nowhere near standards compliant and, unfortunately, a lot of web apps were written for IE6. In short, there is plenty of blame to go around:
- the web developers who used non-standard "features" of IE6
- MS for standard non-compliance and for adding proprietary features to IE6
- companies who accepted web-apps that used non-standard features in IE6.

What province might that be? And could you please cite the relevant laws/regulations?

Just did a google search. Estimates on the cost of solar power (searched in the last year) range from $0.10/KWh to $0.19/KWh. I'd imagine that Arizona would probably be on the low end. So, depending on the cost of electricity in your area, solar might be a rational alternative.

Today, the use of remote control is relatively sane and benign. Tomorrow, who knows? Given the tendency of nut-jobs to enter government service...

Yeah, when I was a kid, flying was an adventure and a lot of fun. Now it's a PITA. It's been several years since I seriously considered a vacation that involved flying. I'd rather drive. If I have to fly to do it, odds are I'm not going to do it. If my attitude spreads, the airlines are in trouble.

On the other hand, your ISP sends no money at all to any of the web sites that you visit. Expanding on your own analogy, your ISP owns the streets. The billboards that you want torn down belong to the owner of the amusement park at the end of the street and they enable the amusement park owner, which is not the ISP, to provide you with free access to the amusement park. If you tear down the billboards, you will find that the amusement park either institutes an entrance fee or goes out of business.

Keep in mind that the people on slashdot are not typical computer users. We want to be able do whatever we choose to do to our computers, and we have both the skills and the vision to choose to do some things that really stretch the abilities of our computers.
Mundane, ordinary people basically use their computers to read email, visit facebook, surf the web, and play the odd game. They don't understand much about their computers and they really don't care. For that group of people, the iPad is an excellent device as it does everything they need to do, most (if not all) of what they want to do, and it's darned simple.
The iPad is the device for the masses. It is not the device for the ultra computer geek. If you don't like it, don't buy it. Better still, design and build something better (that's called the free market).