By: Richard S. On: Thu Apr 17, 2008 4:18 pm
I'd suggest its just lip service from MS, they probably had contingency plans to knock the deadline back if there was lot of negative feedback before they even announced this. MS makes announcements all the time and half the time it never happens, for example the announcement for the next OS with a date is pretty much a joke if you look how longhorn went. That was delayed years from the expected arrival date... My point is they probably through this out there to see what kind of reaction they'd get, they are probably looking more at tech circles and the general reaction of the public as opposed to online petttion.
The problem with those online petitions is they can easily be hijacked with many bogus "signatures". For example the way they verify is by your email address, I could set up a catcall then create script to hit the sign up form numerous times...The people running the petition may or may not have put in preventative measures for that, in that case you'd have to do it manually. Get yourself a AOL account or any other ISP that assigns IP's dynamically when you login and you become pretty untraceable. A single person with access to mail server could really create hundreds of signatures if not thousands.
It's just too easy to corrupt it.