But how do you know it's 3AM where Grandma lives? You would have to know what Time Zone she is in, what Time Zone you are in, what the current (they change frequently in some areas of the world) offsets are and then do some math to figure out what time it is for her.

Or, you can just ask Grandma, "Is it ok to call you at 3am?" and she says "That's wonderful, we can talk over lunch."

You don't need to know Time Zones, and you don't need to know what everyone else's Time Zones are. You just need to know what time you wake up, when you get to work, when you take lunch, when you leave work, when you go to bed. Things you already know. Then when someone says "Meeting at 10am?" you can say "That's my lunch time, how about 11am?"

Perhaps, but the question is easier.

These days you ask "Bill can you do a meeting at 10am? What Timezone are you in? Is it DST? Ok so what time is 10am for you?"

Without Time Zones you ask "Bill can you do a meeting at 10am? That's the middle of the night for you? Ok, how about 3pm?"

Currently everyone needs to know what Time Zones everyone else is in and the offsets to schedule. Without timezones everyone just needs to know when they get to work (or wake up, or go to bed, etc) and then they can quickly say yes or no to a proposed time.

<input type="submit" value="Delete" style="background:transparent;border:none;" />

or

<noscript> <input type="submit" value="Delete" /> </noscript> <script>script_form(); //puts a submission interface into the DOM</script>

Easy-peasy. User-Agents without JS get a crappy but functional interface. Graceful degradation

I'd rather be forced to read the cursive writing of any of my four grandparents (only one of whom even graduated high school) than the printing of most high school students today. (I've taught high school recently, so I've spent a lot of time grappling with the problems of modern handwriting trends.)

The legibility problem is caused by a lack of practice in handwriting in general. Cursive has a number of standard forms and a few standard variations even in very calligraphic scripts. If you use a standard form of cursive well, it's just as legible as printing.

Take a look at public records written before typewriters; for the most part, they're pretty easy to read if you're familiar with standard cursive forms (abbreviations are often more a problem than sorting out what the letters are).

(Btw, I'm not arguing for continuing education in cursive. But the problem of legibility is more about lack of practice in proper handwriting than the particular script used.)

Graphing calculators aren't a useful tool. They're a contrivance that students have to put up with because of other factors.

Namely: they're a small, nearly useless computer that fits in a backpack and can be dropped. They don't do anything that couldn't be done 100x as fast on a netbook. Heck, they don't do anything that couldn't be done better on a PDA or an eBook reader if it has enough juice to play mp3s.