Everything you've said is true. You've also made largely ethical arguments, and ethics in business is dead. Yes, the parasites in the suites are costing the big guys money and face time. The big guys are also doing everything within their power to put the little guys at a competitive disadvantage. That's how business is done. That's not a justification, it's not an excuse, it's a statement of fact. The companies exhibiting in suites are, at worst, in breach of contract with the hotel, and it's quite likely that that breach is with the tacit consent of the hotel. You cannot convince me that an entity which spends tens of millions of dollars deploying surveillance hardware to catch people cheating or counting cards doesn't know exactly what's happening in each and every one of their rooms and suites. This time, the CEA got pissed and told the hotels to play ball, and they did. Individuals go to Vegas to gamble, it's not surprising that companies would do the same.

You're damn straight, and there's nothing wrong with it. When 40-50 of your customers are in one place at the same time, you'd be an absolute fool not to go there and meet with them. It's the most bang for the buck you'll get all year. How far, exactly, do you need to be from the show floor before you're not trying to "get a free ride"? If I'm at CES and a buddy of mine's at CES, and we get together and talk business somewhere on the strip, are we trying to "get a free ride" because we're not buying the CEA's beer? Where's that line drawn?

Seconded. I've been to CES a number of times with a wireless startup, and we've always been in suites in the hotels. There's no way they don't know exactly what's going on when they see us roll up in a loaded minivan with boxes that say "Dell" all over them. We chose suites for two reasons: the obvious expense aspect, and there is no way we'd try to demo on the show floor...the RF environment is just too congested. It's also a much nicer way to engage a customer, and gives them a break from the insanity of the floor. I can't imagine that the use of suites will ever go away...CEA will just find a way to drive the cost up.

It's a solved problem. I flew Northwest from Portland to Tokyo, an A330-300, pretty regularly between mid-2005 and mid-2008. 120V, 60 Hz was available in coach class forward of row 21, and throughout business and first. Seat Guru is your friend here. Sadly, after the Delta acquisition they moved the A330 elsewhere and replaced it with a ridden-hard-and-put-up-wet 767. At least I don't have to make the trip any more, I'd probably be bored senseless.

Amen, brother Derek. Having worked for a startup, and with friends at many others, and now working on my own, I have to say I'm sick of the "Have a marginally clever idea, befriend an MBA, write a business plan, find an angel, work your ass off, get some venture capital, IPO" model. That's just not appropriate in so many cases. My role models are welders and plumbers, not Pets.com. Will it work out? Who knows. I do know that I'm not starving, I sleep well at night, and my son knows what I look like.

I'm sure this will come off as hokey and nostalgic, but put me firmly in the "bad idea" camp. I earned my BSEE 10 years ago now, and my hours in the engineering department's lab were some of the most memorable and useful of my undergrad years. They taught me how to work informally with my colleagues, bouncing ideas off of each other and helping each other out. They taught me the value of learning from the mistakes and successes of others, and how engineers truly work as a team, far better than any contrived design project could. They taught me the value of peer review far better than any "formal" design review could. I see the same spirit in the cubicle farm I inhabit in industry, or when a group of my co-workers and I sit down to lunch, that I saw in the lab with my classmates working feverishly on our lab reports at 2:00 in the morning on a Saturday in the engineering lab.

I think collaborative spaces are a good start, but there's still a place for big-iron workstations with large monitors that make it easy to point out things to your friends. As many other posters have pointed out, there's also the issue of tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of dollars of software licenses that in many cases aren't reasonable or appropriate to expect a student to have on his or her personal machine. It's far easier to secure a grant or donation to equip a lab with software than it is to procure a whole slew of student licenses.