If you discount the pure techie stuff, the top five policies being discussed right now are publication of all government documents; removal of CCTV from public places; exempting small businesses from EU VAT rules; scaling all fines against a convicted person's wealth; and – as with the Greens – paying everybody a basic income from taxation.
A "white hat" hacker in techie jargon, Mr Whitaker leads a team of security specialists at Knowledge Consulting Group who spend their days trying to worm their way into clients' computer systems to see how vulnerable they are to cyber-criminals, spies and other nefarious "black hats".
Those who fail to become knowledge workers often end up shunted into the growing service sector, doing the kind of jobs (serve coffee, fix up houses) that techie types are too busy to do for themselves.
He notes with approval that Georgia, Kentucky and North Carolina give technology firms vouchers to spend at local universities.Several of the blessings that attract low-tech firms to the South also attract high-tech ones: the weather, business-friendly state governments and the fact that a techie moving to Raleigh can buy four houses for what one cost him in San Francisco.
In the first phase, it was geeks who led the resistance, using techie weapons such as e-mail filters with fancy Bayesian mathematics.
AT SXSW, a techie festival that took place in Texas earlier this month, some lucky attenders were able briefly to immerse themselves in HBO's fantasy television series, "Game of Thrones".
Ms. Stark is one of the Postal Service's data conversion operators, a techie title for someone who deciphers unreadable addresses, and she is one of the last of a breed.
Convened by Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, its supporters are a who's who of tech, including Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn; Marissa Mayer, the boss of Yahoo; Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google; and the most successful techie of them all, Bill Gates.
In contrast, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, is a longtime Democrat who once worked in the Clinton Treasury Department; she is now being tipped, albeit as a long-shot, as the first techie president in the White House.
The conventions themselves are more "techie" than ever before.
"Setting the proper investment level for security, redundancy, and recovery is a management issue, not a techie one," he says.In this section The leaky corporation The CrackBerry backlash Hand rocks cradle On the skids Off to jail A wise move?
