The movie is filled with impossibilities, true. But have you seen Bollywood movies? Have you known the Indian audience they cater to? The impossibilities are the reason the movie did well; no half educated person is going to seriously attempt delivering a child with a vacuum over a webcam. At the same time, these stupid feats brought people to the movie, and forced them to realize how pathetically screwed up our education system is. Sure, we didn't do anything to fix it from that one movie--but for at least a few months, every time the movie was brought up, people started caring about changing the way our kids were taught.

I'm not suggesting this movie was something that raised awareness about an unknown issue, but it did succeed in bringing it to the forefront for quite a while, as Aamir's movies have been known to do. If you've seen other Bollywood movies, you know that 3 Idiots is a godsend when compared to the literally thousands of song filled intellectually vacuous love stories that we've been inundated with.

Furthermore, that suicide wasn't for the helicopter. It was after the dean called his (sick?) father, and told him that his son was not graduating that year. I do not remember the specific circumstances (I have terrible memory and watched this movie a few months ago), but claiming that the suicide was due to an engineering failure is ignoring many aspects of the student's life.

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As for the string solution--I don't really see why you need precision in cutting a pizza in 11 slices for a random customer. It's an interesting solution, one I hadn't thought of, and I'd say one that many others hadn't thought of. The point was to deal with what a cook would have in his hands, not a mathematically sound approach. While the latter might be clean, it would be physically impossible to implement with a pizza cutter that might not be sharp enough, or a pizza where the cheese and sauce still oozed over the crust* (in which case you never could get equal slices).

* You can tell I haven't had lunch yet.