actually, after counting the provisional ballots that margin shrunk to about 30,000 votes. I'm not sure of this erroneous 4000 is in that margin or not but the State was far from a blow out.
If the situation were reversed you can be certain that the "republicans" would be crawling up the orrifice of anyone who ever got near to anyone who ever touched one of those voting machines and contesting every single vote in a last ditch effort to get their man in power.
I hate Bush. I really, really hate what he has done to America and what he is doing to the world.
However, given the way the Dems gave up this fight, one has to question whether they'd have the bottle for the battles they'd be facing on a national and international level. I'm doubting they would.
I think a lot of this thinking may be a result of the number of people who got into the business when it was booming and either haven't been "made redundant" yet or are sticking with it for the money.
Personally, I love working in IT. There are shitty people in it and there are shitty situations that I encounter. Projects that I've worked on have run into trouble but my teams have always been successful in pulling them off.
Retrospect almost always proves that "misakes" in the projects that ran into trouble almost always initiated with people who think that IT is a crap industry. The attitude leads to poor project analysis, poor customer relations, inadequate resources, etc. All this then means that the programmers and project managers -- usually people who are enthusiastic about the work (at least they start out that way) end up lumped with something that should be rethought from the start and sometimes end up disillusioned with the industry.
Seperate the wheat from the chaff (MBAs) from IT and you'll be left with a lot of people much happier about what they do.
But ranking jobs in the IT sector with monkey arse wipers... that's just absurd.
I've been using mine for about 4 years too. That's included a lot of train and airport travel... when I say a lot I mean ~ 30 trips a year plus daily commutes when I'm home.
The bag is black so the dirt doesn't show up. The outside and inside are free of rips or scratches. The zips all work. It's a fine, fine bag.
I work in Italy. A company that produces an accounting package was interested in bundling their solution with our Debian-based server product.
Their solution uses DB2 for its database. It was important to them and their clients that IBM supported the DB2 installs back-ending their software. IBM only certifies DB2 installs (at least in Italy) on RedHat 7.X and a flavour of SUSE I don't recall now... Yes, in 2004 they will insist upon RedHat 7.X if you want IBM's support. Yes, I pointed out that RedHat doesn't support 7.X any more so essentially they were asking their clients to choose a lack of support for their DB or lack of support for their OS.
I'm sure there are countless examples where heavy-hitting software vendors have been able to cajole support from IBM for other distros but small software companies haven't got a hope.
In a last-gasp effort, I adapted the IBM installation and update scripts to use alien and dpkg and demonstrated that they worked flawlessly. The accounting package developers were happy, we were happy... IBM refused to budge.
I used to carry all those devices too. Then I decided I needed a GPS unit for my car (I'm on the road, a lot, in Italy and if you have experience of driving in this country you would be painfully aware of how poorly sign-posted roads can be).
It was while trying to decide on a GPS solution that I came across Route 66's bluetooth GPS for symbian phones.
I'm now the happy owner of a Nokia 6600 which gives me ssh over GPRS for emergencies:
http://s2putty.sourceforge.net/
The early stages of Nethack:
http://www.nicolaas.net/erebus/item.php?key=NetH ac k6
and Frozen Bubble:
http://handhelds.freshmeat.net/projects/fb-s60/
I'm really happy with my choice. If I need to do anything serious while I'm on the road, I connect over the phone with my laptop. The GPS can be a bit slow updating but I've been quite impressed with it so far. And, not forgetting its phone functionality, it's a very good phone for talking. My batteries last about 2 days under heavy usage.
This article has nothing to do with "conquering windows"!
"I just don't think this project is filling the gap just quite yet."
It's not intended to. It's got nothing to do with this perceived gap.
It's really a shame you lead with a fallacy because it highlights your bias and obstinance.
By its very definition, "Open Source" must remain free. Perhaps you mean you that will cease to exist? Well, perhaps. But if it does then it's because it's unable to keep pace with the innovations from the non-Open Source development programmes. That's possible, but not likely.
Yes, I think they are shackled to the bottom line. They don't appear to be able to grok that the very thing which is now stimulating the economic revolutions and microsoft squeeze in the corporate space is a community project and that it's available "free".
It seems to me that IBM and Sun have pegged exactly how to "use" Linux. You feed the project and feed off others feeding the project. You then wrap Linux up with non-code-related extras which you sell for a bundle. Any monkey can install Linux on a piece of hardware, but it takes a very skilled monkey to plan and successfully migrate a company from old software / hardware to the newly installed Linux box[es] with minimal disruption to that company's work-flow. The bigger the company is, the more that kind of expertise is valued.
What the Forbes writers seem to have confused is a paradigm, but perhaps not the one you mean. They're still looking at the number of units Microsoft pushes and the price tag attached to these and then try to compare that ratio to the ratio of units shifted by IBM and the price tag on those.
I think where they need to be looking is at the services companies who rely on Microsoft and comparing them to services companies like IBM. What's the profit margin for a Microsoft consultancy that comes in to migrate a company from NT to Server 2003? What's the profit margin for IBM to migrate a company from NT to Suse (or, more lately, Redhat)? How many of these migrations are taking place? How long to they take? How much do they cost? What are the support contracts like?
As long as "analysts" try to compare the "cost" of a Redhat Enterprise license with Server 2003 license, they're comparing fish to rugby boots. The license is not where the game is at.
Contrary to most opinions here, I do think it matters as to which platform the candidates are running for one simple reason:
Fiscal responsibility
The choice of platform may not show that a candidate has a superior knowledge of technology than another, but it does show that some are more prudent with how they spend the funds available to them for a project than others.
While it is highly unlikely that any of the candidates campaign managers rejected bids because of the proposed webserver, it is very likely that they did so because of cost and the potential results.
We all focus on the opinions of financial analysts who study the minutia of company reports and strategies. Indeed, many on/. will slate companies whose web services rely on IIS and.NET
Why not apply the same logic to a potential president (or an acting one, for that matter). If s/he is going to fritter away money on license fees, what's s/he going to do with my tax dollar when it comes to "homeland defense" or medicare?
I'm not an american, but I care. I think as geeks we can use these results introspectively and consider what it says about the business decisions these men and women are making.
"It's frightening to any business minded person that there is a large wealth of talented developers who are making an amazing product and not only distributing it free of charge, but giving away the source as well."
Are you suggesting that there aren't any business minded people at IBM? How about Redhat? Suse? Transgaming? etc.
I think your comment is pretty accurate, or would be if you added a "some" before "business minded". Remember, *some* at IBM never believed there'd be a need for anything more than a handful of computers in the world. I'm sure that view wasn't shared by *all* "business minds" at IBM.
I was about to moderate a comment in this thread but this pissed me off:
Having said that, I found this statement humorous: "but given the limits of what you can compress onto a single CD, separate projects makes sense to me.". Given the limits??? A CD has, what, 740MB? Yeah, they really had to push to fit into the tiny confines of a CD. I find it intriguing how the same community that endlessly used the term "bloat" to describe Microsoft software now can keep a straight face when describing the space on a CD as "limited".
Fella, if you think you can fit Windows, IIS, Office (twice over, Knoppix comes with OpenOffice as well as Koffice and several components from the Gnome office suite), MSSQL, several web browsers, email clients, development tools, network and security analysis tools, photoshop plus several graphics viewers, several multimedia suites, an advanced audio editor / mixer, games, etc. etc. etc onto one CD, you're smoking a more refined blend of crack cocaine than Darl.
Knoppix/Gnoppix showcase what you can get with Linux. I think it's astonishing what Klaus and the other developers have managed to fit on to this disk. The only "bloat" in Linux is in the choice department.
Yeah, and as Longdong gets pushed back and delayed and delayed and pushed back and postponed and delayed, it'll be last to market but microsoft will still have been the first to announce it. I guess that's more innovative than they've been in the past when they'd simply wait for someone to do something interesting before buying them out.
It's not enough to say. One has to do. Microsoft has proved many times over that it often makes grand announcements only to provide something far more watered down by the time they get to market.
We'll see what they're DB-based file system really is when (and if) it gets here.
What I find discouraging is that the lemmings are falling for it despite this being The Week of Teh Worm.
All the hopeful articles that have sited users claiming a new awareness of the risk of worms and virii seem to be pipe dreams.
Dumb users are dumb users and the more infectuous and persistant the virus, the more networks are going to get hammered. Why oh why aren't all pif, scr, exe, com, and vbs attachments just blocked by the MDA. There is no good reason for allowing an end user the huge complexity of choosing whether or not to click on the latest attachment that's come to them from "the internet".
If the lemmings are getting suckered this week... when every news medium is blathering on about viruses worming their way through nuclear reactors and motor vehicle registration offices, what hope is there for when the attention has settled?
Do you have some sort of involuntary reflex that makes you click on every story? Skip the SCO stories if they bore you.
This is "Stuff that matters" and will continue to dominate the/. stories page until it's resolved because it matters very much to most readers here. Why? Because many of us rely on Linux on daily basis, personally and professionally. We've contributed to its development and we use it in our businesses.
But now SCO has broadened the scope of its attack. It's taking on the GPL in particular and open source movement in general. It matters. It matters in particular because the foundlessness of SCO's claims has been pointed out in articles linked to from these stories.
It matters that they can do this unchecked as much as it would matter to you if someone were allowed to slander your name, character or reputation. There's a reason there are laws in place to protect you from that. We're now seeing a gaping hole in the American legal system that's hurting a lot of businesses and inviduals (note that in countries like Germany, the same laws that protect you from slander have prevented SCO from doing what they're doing elsewhere) while allowing SCO's executives and share holders to play a stock market shell game.
Much as I'm also getting slightly bored by these stories, it really is the biggest thing going on for years in the Linux (and maybe the whole Open Source) community.
How can you say this? It's an insult to the developers. The biggest thing going on for years in the Linux and OSS community is the fact that one can drop in a CD into almost any piece of consumer hardware and get a beautiful shiny functioning OS... that one can go from opening the box a laptop shipped in, to *working* (as in productivity) within an hour (that includes wiping the preinstalled Microsoft OS).
*These* are big things. SCO's nonsense is nonsense. Even *if* what SCO claims turns out to be true, then the long term impact on Linux will be minimal.
I bought a new Toshiba Satellite Pro 6100 last week while abroad. I knew I was going to be buying a laptop while in North America (NA keyboards are better from programming than Euro keyboards. I live in Italy (no tilda, no backtick on Italian keyboards) and though I could remap the keyboard, in brain-dead moments it's nice to have a visual queue. And with the Euro being so much stronger than the Ameripeso and Canpeso, I was in for a (relative) bargain.
Within 35 minutes of getting my new laptop home, I had knoppix installed. "No fuss, no mess". A beautiful, functioning debian installation. Naturally, there were (and still are) tweaks to be done but try getting *anything* installed that fast.
Knoppix is *not* a flavour of the month. I've been using it to teach Linux courses to newbies. They take the cds home, they use them. They install them. I've been using Knoppix for over a year and it is better than the hype.
I've also bought two Libranet subscriptions. I like what Libranet does. But for sheer speed and flexibility, Knoppix can't be touched. From the easy installation, to demoing purposes, to rescuing borked winblows installations, to resolving hardware problems... don't knock something just because it's not *your* prefered distro.
Um...I know you said you're in Europe, but you have heard of the DMCA, haven't you?:).
Heh. Yeah. and I've protested infront of the US Embassy in London over it and the incarceration of Dmitry Skylarov. However, the DMCA has a certain logic to it (though it's faulty and corrupt as hell). This particular law has none that I can find... as previous posters noted, anyone using a phone card is in violation of this law... likewise, I think anyone working in an office with a central phone line would be violating the law if they dial out from an extension...
Perhaps another subtle protest would be for people to queue up at reception to use the phone for outbound calls... that'd create a nice snarl and would certainly get media attention.
This is easy for me to write, I'm in Europe so can't participate; however, there have been calls for geeks to politicise, to make their voices heard...
If every university and college student turned him/her self into the police on Monday morning for being in violation of this new law, the system would choke. It'd get a hell of a lot of media attention too. Something has to be done... these laws, largely unenforceable, continue to be passed... each one errodes the rights of ordinary people...
I simply can't fathom how a law this monomentally stupid has been passed... but it's got to be challenged. A mass protest would certainly expedite it and might prevent similar laws from being passed in other states where they're being considered.
Slashdot Mirror
actually, after counting the provisional ballots that margin shrunk to about 30,000 votes. I'm not sure of this erroneous 4000 is in that margin or not but the State was far from a blow out.
If the situation were reversed you can be certain that the "republicans" would be crawling up the orrifice of anyone who ever got near to anyone who ever touched one of those voting machines and contesting every single vote in a last ditch effort to get their man in power.
I hate Bush. I really, really hate what he has done to America and what he is doing to the world.
However, given the way the Dems gave up this fight, one has to question whether they'd have the bottle for the battles they'd be facing on a national and international level. I'm doubting they would.
I think a lot of this thinking may be a result of the number of people who got into the business when it was booming and either haven't been "made redundant" yet or are sticking with it for the money.
Personally, I love working in IT. There are shitty people in it and there are shitty situations that I encounter. Projects that I've worked on have run into trouble but my teams have always been successful in pulling them off.
Retrospect almost always proves that "misakes" in the projects that ran into trouble almost always initiated with people who think that IT is a crap industry. The attitude leads to poor project analysis, poor customer relations, inadequate resources, etc. All this then means that the programmers and project managers -- usually people who are enthusiastic about the work (at least they start out that way) end up lumped with something that should be rethought from the start and sometimes end up disillusioned with the industry.
Seperate the wheat from the chaff (MBAs) from IT and you'll be left with a lot of people much happier about what they do.
But ranking jobs in the IT sector with monkey arse wipers... that's just absurd.
ditto on that.
I've been using mine for about 4 years too. That's included a lot of train and airport travel... when I say a lot I mean ~ 30 trips a year plus daily commutes when I'm home.
The bag is black so the dirt doesn't show up. The outside and inside are free of rips or scratches. The zips all work. It's a fine, fine bag.
I've had this problem with IBM.
I work in Italy. A company that produces an accounting package was interested in bundling their solution with our Debian-based server product.
Their solution uses DB2 for its database. It was important to them and their clients that IBM supported the DB2 installs back-ending their software. IBM only certifies DB2 installs (at least in Italy) on RedHat 7.X and a flavour of SUSE I don't recall now... Yes, in 2004 they will insist upon RedHat 7.X if you want IBM's support. Yes, I pointed out that RedHat doesn't support 7.X any more so essentially they were asking their clients to choose a lack of support for their DB or lack of support for their OS.
I'm sure there are countless examples where heavy-hitting software vendors have been able to cajole support from IBM for other distros but small software companies haven't got a hope.
In a last-gasp effort, I adapted the IBM installation and update scripts to use alien and dpkg and demonstrated that they worked flawlessly. The accounting package developers were happy, we were happy... IBM refused to budge.
I used to carry all those devices too. Then I decided I needed a GPS unit for my car (I'm on the road, a lot, in Italy and if you have experience of driving in this country you would be painfully aware of how poorly sign-posted roads can be).
H ac k6
It was while trying to decide on a GPS solution that I came across Route 66's bluetooth GPS for symbian phones.
I'm now the happy owner of a Nokia 6600 which gives me ssh over GPRS for emergencies:
http://s2putty.sourceforge.net/
The early stages of Nethack:
http://www.nicolaas.net/erebus/item.php?key=Net
and Frozen Bubble:
http://handhelds.freshmeat.net/projects/fb-s60/
I'm really happy with my choice. If I need to do anything serious while I'm on the road, I connect over the phone with my laptop. The GPS can be a bit slow updating but I've been quite impressed with it so far. And, not forgetting its phone functionality, it's a very good phone for talking. My batteries last about 2 days under heavy usage.
I think you were thinking of Yahoo.
h
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-963937.html?tag=l
This article has nothing to do with "conquering windows"! "I just don't think this project is filling the gap just quite yet." It's not intended to. It's got nothing to do with this perceived gap.
cocaine.
http://www.datanation.com/fallacies/falsean.htm
It's really a shame you lead with a fallacy because it highlights your bias and obstinance.
By its very definition, "Open Source" must remain free. Perhaps you mean you that will cease to exist? Well, perhaps. But if it does then it's because it's unable to keep pace with the innovations from the non-Open Source development programmes. That's possible, but not likely.
Yes, I think they are shackled to the bottom line. They don't appear to be able to grok that the very thing which is now stimulating the economic revolutions and microsoft squeeze in the corporate space is a community project and that it's available "free".
It seems to me that IBM and Sun have pegged exactly how to "use" Linux. You feed the project and feed off others feeding the project. You then wrap Linux up with non-code-related extras which you sell for a bundle. Any monkey can install Linux on a piece of hardware, but it takes a very skilled monkey to plan and successfully migrate a company from old software / hardware to the newly installed Linux box[es] with minimal disruption to that company's work-flow. The bigger the company is, the more that kind of expertise is valued.
What the Forbes writers seem to have confused is a paradigm, but perhaps not the one you mean. They're still looking at the number of units Microsoft pushes and the price tag attached to these and then try to compare that ratio to the ratio of units shifted by IBM and the price tag on those.
I think where they need to be looking is at the services companies who rely on Microsoft and comparing them to services companies like IBM. What's the profit margin for a Microsoft consultancy that comes in to migrate a company from NT to Server 2003? What's the profit margin for IBM to migrate a company from NT to Suse (or, more lately, Redhat)? How many of these migrations are taking place? How long to they take? How much do they cost? What are the support contracts like?
As long as "analysts" try to compare the "cost" of a Redhat Enterprise license with Server 2003 license, they're comparing fish to rugby boots. The license is not where the game is at.
Contrary to most opinions here, I do think it matters as to which platform the candidates are running for one simple reason:
/. will slate companies whose web services rely on IIS and .NET
Fiscal responsibility
The choice of platform may not show that a candidate has a superior knowledge of technology than another, but it does show that some are more prudent with how they spend the funds available to them for a project than others.
While it is highly unlikely that any of the candidates campaign managers rejected bids because of the proposed webserver, it is very likely that they did so because of cost and the potential results.
We all focus on the opinions of financial analysts who study the minutia of company reports and strategies. Indeed, many on
Why not apply the same logic to a potential president (or an acting one, for that matter). If s/he is going to fritter away money on license fees, what's s/he going to do with my tax dollar when it comes to "homeland defense" or medicare?
I'm not an american, but I care. I think as geeks we can use these results introspectively and consider what it says about the business decisions these men and women are making.
"It's frightening to any business minded person that there is a large wealth of talented developers who are making an amazing product and not only distributing it free of charge, but giving away the source as well."
Are you suggesting that there aren't any business minded people at IBM? How about Redhat? Suse? Transgaming? etc.
I think your comment is pretty accurate, or would be if you added a "some" before "business minded". Remember, *some* at IBM never believed there'd be a need for anything more than a handful of computers in the world. I'm sure that view wasn't shared by *all* "business minds" at IBM.
I was about to moderate a comment in this thread but this pissed me off:
Having said that, I found this statement humorous: "but given the limits of what you can compress onto a single CD, separate projects makes sense to me.". Given the limits??? A CD has, what, 740MB? Yeah, they really had to push to fit into the tiny confines of a CD. I find it intriguing how the same community that endlessly used the term "bloat" to describe Microsoft software now can keep a straight face when describing the space on a CD as "limited".
Fella, if you think you can fit Windows, IIS, Office (twice over, Knoppix comes with OpenOffice as well as Koffice and several components from the Gnome office suite), MSSQL, several web browsers, email clients, development tools, network and security analysis tools, photoshop plus several graphics viewers, several multimedia suites, an advanced audio editor / mixer, games, etc. etc. etc onto one CD, you're smoking a more refined blend of crack cocaine than Darl.
Knoppix/Gnoppix showcase what you can get with Linux. I think it's astonishing what Klaus and the other developers have managed to fit on to this disk. The only "bloat" in Linux is in the choice department.
Yeah, and as Longdong gets pushed back and delayed and delayed and pushed back and postponed and delayed, it'll be last to market but microsoft will still have been the first to announce it. I guess that's more innovative than they've been in the past when they'd simply wait for someone to do something interesting before buying them out.
It's not enough to say. One has to do. Microsoft has proved many times over that it often makes grand announcements only to provide something far more watered down by the time they get to market.
We'll see what they're DB-based file system really is when (and if) it gets here.
Sigh.
xine
MPlayer
Both run quicktime, yes even with the Sorenson codec, perfectly.
no, $699 is for the 2.4 kernel.
I don't think the SCOmbags have set a price for 2.6 yet.
This is where your analogy falls apart. Why should I run a 2.0 kernel when I've got a far more refined and efficient 2.6 kernel to use?
I used both to make sure I pissed off all parties. ;)
Anyway, thanks for the anal retentiveness. you made me go look it up and here's the definition:
http://www.cknow.com/vtutor/vtplural.htmWhat I find discouraging is that the lemmings are falling for it despite this being The Week of Teh Worm.
All the hopeful articles that have sited users claiming a new awareness of the risk of worms and virii seem to be pipe dreams.
Dumb users are dumb users and the more infectuous and persistant the virus, the more networks are going to get hammered. Why oh why aren't all pif, scr, exe, com, and vbs attachments just blocked by the MDA. There is no good reason for allowing an end user the huge complexity of choosing whether or not to click on the latest attachment that's come to them from "the internet".
If the lemmings are getting suckered this week... when every news medium is blathering on about viruses worming their way through nuclear reactors and motor vehicle registration offices, what hope is there for when the attention has settled?
Do you have some sort of involuntary reflex that makes you click on every story? Skip the SCO stories if they bore you.
/. stories page until it's resolved because it matters very much to most readers here. Why? Because many of us rely on Linux on daily basis, personally and professionally. We've contributed to its development and we use it in our businesses.
This is "Stuff that matters" and will continue to dominate the
But now SCO has broadened the scope of its attack. It's taking on the GPL in particular and open source movement in general. It matters. It matters in particular because the foundlessness of SCO's claims has been pointed out in articles linked to from these stories.
It matters that they can do this unchecked as much as it would matter to you if someone were allowed to slander your name, character or reputation. There's a reason there are laws in place to protect you from that. We're now seeing a gaping hole in the American legal system that's hurting a lot of businesses and inviduals (note that in countries like Germany, the same laws that protect you from slander have prevented SCO from doing what they're doing elsewhere) while allowing SCO's executives and share holders to play a stock market shell game.
I've bought five Toshiba laptops over the years and never booted into Windows with any of them.
I'm tired of paying the tax to Mirosoft for something I've never used, can't sell on, or otherwise find a purpose for.
In all five cases, the Linux I installed worked straight out of the "box".
Much as I'm also getting slightly bored by these stories, it really is the biggest thing going on for years in the Linux (and maybe the whole Open Source) community.
How can you say this? It's an insult to the developers. The biggest thing going on for years in the Linux and OSS community is the fact that one can drop in a CD into almost any piece of consumer hardware and get a beautiful shiny functioning OS... that one can go from opening the box a laptop shipped in, to *working* (as in productivity) within an hour (that includes wiping the preinstalled Microsoft OS).
*These* are big things. SCO's nonsense is nonsense. Even *if* what SCO claims turns out to be true, then the long term impact on Linux will be minimal.
I was with you until you started to bash knoppix
I bought a new Toshiba Satellite Pro 6100 last week while abroad. I knew I was going to be buying a laptop while in North America (NA keyboards are better from programming than Euro keyboards. I live in Italy (no tilda, no backtick on Italian keyboards) and though I could remap the keyboard, in brain-dead moments it's nice to have a visual queue. And with the Euro being so much stronger than the Ameripeso and Canpeso, I was in for a (relative) bargain.
Within 35 minutes of getting my new laptop home, I had knoppix installed. "No fuss, no mess". A beautiful, functioning debian installation. Naturally, there were (and still are) tweaks to be done but try getting *anything* installed that fast.
Knoppix is *not* a flavour of the month. I've been using it to teach Linux courses to newbies. They take the cds home, they use them. They install them. I've been using Knoppix for over a year and it is better than the hype.
I've also bought two Libranet subscriptions. I like what Libranet does. But for sheer speed and flexibility, Knoppix can't be touched. From the easy installation, to demoing purposes, to rescuing borked winblows installations, to resolving hardware problems... don't knock something just because it's not *your* prefered distro.
Um...I know you said you're in Europe, but you have heard of the DMCA, haven't you? :).
Heh. Yeah. and I've protested infront of the US Embassy in London over it and the incarceration of Dmitry Skylarov. However, the DMCA has a certain logic to it (though it's faulty and corrupt as hell). This particular law has none that I can find... as previous posters noted, anyone using a phone card is in violation of this law... likewise, I think anyone working in an office with a central phone line would be violating the law if they dial out from an extension...
Perhaps another subtle protest would be for people to queue up at reception to use the phone for outbound calls... that'd create a nice snarl and would certainly get media attention.
This is easy for me to write, I'm in Europe so can't participate; however, there have been calls for geeks to politicise, to make their voices heard...
If every university and college student turned him/her self into the police on Monday morning for being in violation of this new law, the system would choke. It'd get a hell of a lot of media attention too. Something has to be done... these laws, largely unenforceable, continue to be passed... each one errodes the rights of ordinary people...
I simply can't fathom how a law this monomentally stupid has been passed... but it's got to be challenged. A mass protest would certainly expedite it and might prevent similar laws from being passed in other states where they're being considered.