Comment It can be irritating, but shouldn't be banned (Score 1) 804
I fully sympathise with this viewpoint. Occasionally there will be someone playing a game on their laptop during lectures on my course (physics), and it is incredibly distracting. It's a challenge to concentrate on the quantum mechanics lecture being delivered when you have someone playing GTA in your eyeline, and these people should be shot. However, the number of people using their laptops for this is statistically insignificant when compared to the number of people using their computers for note taking or supplementary reading. Most of the computers I see turned on in lectures are either on a word processor or the relevant Wikipedia page. The lecturers know this, and will occasionally even ask for clarification of some insignificant yet interesting point (the date of an experiment or something along those lines). I see laptops, generally, as a positive addition to lecture halls.