If any college-aged folks are interested in collaborating with someone as inexperienced as they are, I'd love for you to shoot me an email at mattferrell2@gmail.com.
I'm working on a crowdfunding-esque site if that's something you're interested in, and I'm always down to work on reverse engineering/vulnerability research type stuff.
The only thing that's really preventing me from fully opposing the bill is just how clearly it's made that SOPA would apply only to sites "dedicated to the theft of U.S. property". I might just be naive, but it seems like the use of SOPA to take down benign sites, as has been suggested, would be blatantly illegal.
Like the takedown of Dajaz1 that was blatantly illegal? It was only down for a YEAR, and finally released back to the owners with no apology after they discovered that the site actually didn't infringe at ALL. [1]
Note that the US government has already illegally seized domains like Dajaz1.com, and hasn't given the owners a chance to defend themselves in court. Source: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/12/expert-domai... . Note the Dajaz1.com example; the government used an emergency seizure which is supposed to be used to prevent people from destroying evidence (though there's no way to prevent destruction of evidence merely by seizing a domain name), and then dragged the forfeiture process out for a year with secret court hearings that the owner could not defend themselves, before finally just giving up and giving the domain back because they had no case against it.
SOPA and PIPA are just ways to make this process easier, and easier to apply to domains owned by foreign entities. They don't particularly care about due process or whether or not they hit benign sites in the process.
Those are my feelings as well. I do understand the concern of a precedent being established, but I really do tire of all the hyperbole surrounding this bill. I can't tell how many times I've seen people make the claim that if someone where to post infringing material on to a site like whitehouse.gov, the authorities would have no choice to take it down. Bogus claims are bogus claims regardless of their intentions.
I think the most damage brought by this bill would not be manifested in legal cases, but rather a climate in which people are far more hesitant to take risks on the web, etc.
I'm lucky enough to attend a high school where freshman are required to take the equivalent of AP Computer Science, and those who wish to can go on to take CS classes taught by teachers with PhDs from MIT and Yale - you'd be hard pressed to find a better curriculum.
Despite the environment, there are very few students with a "hacker" mentality- maybe ten or so, a number not drastically higher than what you'd expect to find anywhere else. Plenty of kids choose to take the upper level (from a high school perspective) classes, and have no trouble understanding recursion, pointers, or any of the traditional hangups, but it's a much smaller number who would ever consider working on a project that wasn't assigned by a teacher. For everyone else, even among these incredibly bright students, programming is seen as the work you have to sludge through in order to guarantee a cushy $120k job.
For this small percentage of self-motivated students, the free time proposed in the original post would be a godsend, used more productively than any sort of schoolwork. For most everyone else, however, regardless of intelligence, CS education, or resources available, this time would be thrown away to TV or video games, with a net productivity less than an hour spent doing the most menial busywork under the dullest of teachers. I think many of us on Hacker News, surrounded by peers who are the sort of people that start businesses, tend to forget that while students might spend lectures wishing they were elsewhere, that elsewhere is rarely 80x24.
Admittedly, I don't have a solution. Increased STEM funding helps, no doubt, but not in the exponential way many of us envision. Resources in the form of state of the art equipment or funding for student projects only serves to empower those who are already driven, and this drive seems to be something determined long before students enter high school.
