After many years, Intel finally has some challenge. And for those of you who doubt what ARM chips are able to do, I'll tell that I've been surfing the web and chatting through MSN Messenger on an Acorn A7000+, which runs on a 48 Mhz ARM 7500FE. Now, if they can raise that to 2ghz, I see very nice performance while still retaining a fairly low power consumption.

Please re-read all the replies before that post. The problem wasn't the refusal of providing a password, but the refusal of providing ANY access at all. Combine that with the attempt to leave the state and it looks likely that he was going for a Denial Of Service in the most literal sense of the word. That's what got him convicted, not a refusal to hand over a password.

To rephase the issue, the city accused him of Denial of Service. His actions support that accusation. There are penalties for DOS-attacks and he got hit with 'em. Now, the DOS-attack would never have taken place if the city management had not been completely incompetent - that is very clear. But if I had been a juror on this, and with the explanations given above, I would have considered him guilty too.

That said, I might still have hesitated to actually vote that way, given the circumstances. But it looks like he did a Denial of Service on the city and yes, that carries a stiff penalty.

I started with the Atari 800XL/ Amstrad CPC basic and I think visual basic it's way too complicated because it uses many things of windows that can obscure the learning process. That said, if we learned with older machines, why not give a try at some emulators and let him start doing things in pretty plain old basic? You can find most basic manuals for old computers quite easily and he won't be frustrated if a dll is not found or if he cannot guess why a weird event does not happen.