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Except they still want standardized,

Already handled by public school. This is trivial to have people up to a minimum standard. If they can drive a car, speak necessary local languages, know basic math, familiar with local geography, have proficiency in the field they intend to work ing and don't act like those found on Not Always Working, then they meet minimum standards.

The problem is with schools that don't confirm any of this.

punctual

Also trivial. Actually, that's handled simply by having anything on a regular schedule, such as church or places of worship that have things occur at a given time.

obedient

Question: Do you want a disobedient worker? At best, you're giving money away for nothing when some other person would be more willing to get better wages. At worst, others rely on the disobedient worker and suffer problems, causing you to lose much more money than that single worker.

docile workers that will take substandard wages and living conditions

That's the only special bit that the employers prefer. Everything else is actually expected from a normal person.

This story reminded me of this story.

Not sure if the new standard will help with extreme user-idiot issues like that one (no time to RTFA). Nothing to chisel out of the port, I take it? :)

If you launch an app then hit the home button, that app stays running in the background.

If a task involves two applications, each with its own user interface, it's still more jarring for the user to have to switch back and forth between two maximized windows than to split it down the middle. It gives the user doorway amnesia.

Also the latest firmware update [for the Samsung Galaxy S3] gives you a split screen option to run 2 apps on the same screen at the same time.

I'm told very few applications support this, other than those few applications supplied by Samsung, because variable window size is not a standard feature of Android. See my reply to Cenan.

Even on my desktop, with my 20" monitor, I always run anything maximized

You do. Others don't, and they have good reasons. One of them is that switching between maximized windows of multiple applications involved in a given task is slower than switching with your eyes.

This is scratching the surface. Basic windowing concepts like "cut/paste" and "drag/drop" are severely hamstrung when you have a UI that forces all apps to be fullscreen - clearly in the case of a size-constrained phone, this is a reasonable tradeoff (and even the original iphone had drag/drop to rearrange icons and such).

For a desktop/workstation, mandatory full-screen-only mode is beyond useless. It's a downgrade, and robs the user of a major portion of the utility of a modern PC... with no reasonable justification nor trade-off in other features or cost.

Even on my desktop, with my 20" monitor, I always run anything maximized

You do. Others don't, and they have good reasons. One of them is that switching between maximized windows of multiple applications involved in a given task is slower than switching with your eyes.

What's a general purpose computer?

A computer for which an end user can in theory write and run code with no more limitations than the applications that come with the device. An iPhone or Windows Phone becomes general-purpose only by paying the manufacturer a recurring fee. It's based on whether one can, even if (as I acknowledge) 99 percent of the population happens not to do. Even if the average user does not compile applications from source, the mere fact that one can acts as a check against the platform suffering from blanket bans on application categories, as the iPhone suffers from lack of (say) wireless network troubleshooting tools.

Does it include netbooks?

I'm typing this on a Dell Inspiron mini 1012 that I routinely use to write applications in Python and in 6502 assembly language and on which I have used GCC. So yes.

Does it matter if someone loads Android on their Windows netbook?

Like other operating systems whose user interface began on phones, Android is oriented toward full-screen applications, and some tasks become more difficult with an always-maximized policy. But it's still at least a general-purpose computer as long as the distribution of Android can load applications from unknown sources.

What's the differnce between an Android netbook and Android tablet with keyboard?

A netbook is more likely to include a touchpad, which I've found to be more precise than a capacitive touch screen in some cases. It's also more likely to have full-size USB ports to plug in mice and storage devices.

Is it a problem if I hook my phone up to a 60" TV and use a bluetooth mouse and keyboard to control it, playing games and movies in HD on a TV?

If you've docked your phone to a large monitor, external keyboard, and external mouse, it's still a general-purpose computer if it allows users to write code and send it to the device. If it's an iPhone, turning it into a general-purpose computer costs about $748 (Mac mini + developer program membership) for the first year and $99 for each additional year. Android, on the other hand, doesn't impose a recurring fee and lets one run Eclipse on a $300 Walmart computer if one wants.

I can even do 'real' work on it when I have to with very little trouble.

Even when "real" work involves displaying things side-by-side? Android's window management policy is all maximized all the time. Switching between two maximized windows isn't very efficient, yet it's the assumption that Android has always made.