Just geographical confirmation of where my skills will be applied. Nothing more! Things might be different in mainland Europe or Muricaaaaa!

I'm in East Kent - Just outside Canterbury. London is close but not close enough for my likings. I've got a buddy in the city and he is saying the contracting thing is worth looking into. Yes, the only people I know "in business" are all ex freelance clients and aren't much use for finding work!

Javascript runs locally :)

This is a yet another rehash of the thin client paradigm. Once some of your data is remote, why not make it all remote, and keep your local machine as thin as possible?

So is using the internet for anything other than transmitting reliable military commands and research results.

Well, the trick is having them open for longer than the frequency of querying the server. Most server software (unless you use a very inefficient code/server) tend to be CPU and not memory-bound (noteworthy exception - cheap virtual machines).

Besides, creating a connection is more costly than actually maintaining it for longer, even if done at the same frequency. You might run out of file descriptors, you might want to mitigate it, besides that, a single open stalled connection is maybe 4-32kB of RAM, depends on the chosen platform, if a single thread can handle multiple connections.

This is the magic cometd does - it basically herds these connections.

Having worked at a large firm that is one of the local market leaders in social networking, I can tell you that polling your system every 5 or 10 seconds can cost you a lot of money in hardware and bandwidth.

Even an empty HTTP request is about 1kB with all the overheads (browsers sending cookies, etc). If you've got 1M visits daily, each spending 60 mins on your site, that easily gets you in the bandwagon of 720GB of traffic *daily*.

This is in addition to all the server workload - the best server can roughly deliver 1000 requests/s. Your 500k of peak simultaneous users would then require 50 servers just to handle their idling.

At the same time, a long pooled connection can stay open at least 3 minutes, and often enough well over a day, sending small (60byte) keep-alive packets every few minutes.

This is much, much cheaper.

Wrong answer. It seems that for today's population, texting is more important than driving. This always-online trend is going to continue.

Possible solutions:
-> Car-pooling. Everyone but the driver can text
-> Usable public transit. Everyone can text
-> Commercialization of Urban Challenge winner: Cars that just drive themselves.

I believe if the money spent on ridiculous policies was spent improving alternatives, people would choose those.

I choose public transit or taxis.. precisely because I can have a phone call, text, review documentation.. and leave the mundane tasks like actually driving to others or machines.

I also own a car, enjoy driving and drive quite aggressively. That's for my enjoyment, and almost never in heavy traffic - which is why you're most prone to text anyways.

I am not a lawyer, but it might be grounds for a very interesting loophole.
(I wonder how HS could get out of it).

File a police report, talk to a lawyer, try getting a restraining order against her for harassment/willful destruction of property (it can be done prior to hearings about the actual conduct, if there are grounds to believe she'll commit additional petty crime).

I wonder if the teacher would even be able to legally work at that school.