I'd look to see if you can find the webpage of the LUG that's probably on campus and e-mail them. Haven't been at school for a while, but in my experience the LUG always knew the details of what could be done and what couldn't.

Civil law does loosen the restrictions on ex post facto, but it doesn't eliminate it completely. If applied retroactively, this would clearly be a law aimed at punishing a specific individual who had no reasonable expectation at the time he got the patent that the law would be changed to invalidate it. Regardless of whether this is a legitimate patent (it's not 100% clear from the article that it isn't), the people who own the patent have clearly spent a lot of money getting and defending it. I don't think the courts would look fondly on Congress suddenly yanking it out from under them with no compensation (nor, frankly, should they).

Honestly, I'm not sure. I originally tried to set up the client, but I ran into some of the same problems that wildjim is having. Basically that I couldn't get enough space. My home directory is about 40GB, so I'd need to have atleast that much cached. It is just a guess that the solution would be putting a server on the laptop -- I'm not sure how'd it work out.