Yep. Not sure what GP was on about, but I'd trust a Google Car over a teen driver any day of the week.

I'd trust a 16 year old on a cellphone over a self driving car and roads that look like a battlefield here in Massachusetts.

Have another look. Self-driving car tech is a lot more advanced than people realize.

For many years, Gnome was the most popular desktop environment. Many of the people who got into Linux on the desktop moved into a Gnome environment. It provided a familiar UI with standard metaphors. While the Linux desktop has moved on for better or worse, the fact remains that it was Gnome that provided the soft landing for many when they jumped ship.

Pay some respect to those who went before and the work they did.

It knows what it's done.

The open source movement owes much to the Gnome foundation. Yes, they have alienated their core support base, and perhaps this situation is a result of those cows coming home to roost. Nonetheless, a gutted or even dead Gnome foundation hurts the whole community, if only because it highlights the fragility of open source focused organizations as going concerns.

(Yes, yes I know it's supposed to be chickens.)

I cannot reply to that without Godwining the thread.

Boiling down free speech to nothing more than a constitutional guarantee is to denude it of all meaning.

Free speech is a principle which society bakes into its core values as expressed by the unwritten social contract. It manifests itself in legislation because that is where it needs to be formally documented. However, it is a mistake to think that the written law is the beginning and end of the values that we uphold.

Actually, the thinking that the law as written is the sum total of all values is one of the main problems of today. Because the black letter of the law is taken as the only gospel, then finding loopholes and ways to manipulate the wording to your advantage is just fine. I think a short look around the state of the world today will reveal that that is not fine.

They hate us for our freedom. Underhanded manipulation of their local political system for our own agenda has nothing to do with it.

Well, it's a fairly major project. There are a lot of very skilled developers, and it has commercial backing. If you're really, really paranoid and want to use it for something mission critical and highly sensitive, then don't expose it to the internet and access it via VPN only.

All problems have a solution :)

OwnCloud is open source software. You download it and install it on your server. What are you talking about?

enormous problems caused by prohibition

And...

smaller problems caused by whatever marginal increase in usage repealing prohibition causes

See, the problem is that there is no evidence to support the proposition that the increase will be marginal, and that the harm will be less. All of the arguments rest on the retelling of the 1920s experience with prohibition and essentially say "well we had all these problems with gangsterism in that period, but look, we made alcohol legal again and all the alcohol related problems went away".

There is a *lot* of research suggesting that the overall social problems caused by alcohol are vastly understated, itis just hidden because it happens at the family and individual level. The social symptoms of alcohol just don't make for interesting reading or spectacular Hollywood movies the way prohibition rackets do.

Finally, comparing the ability to enforce a law in the 1920s to today, a century later, is just folly. The circumstances are wholly different. The real problem underlying the ineffectiveness of today's drug "prohibition" is a lack of political will, conflicts of interest and outright corruption.

Sounds like a free and just society to me.

The rationale amongst many who lack historical perspective is hopelessly simplistic. The "prohibition didn't work, so let's solve the problem of drugs the same way we solved the problem of alcohol" argument completely ignores the fact that we DIDN'T solve the problem of alcohol. Alcohol has become a massively abused drug that causes all kinds of harm. It destroys families, is highly addictive, results in self-destructive behaviour and is responsible for a surprisingly large number of hospital trauma cases. Yet we hand-wave away this as part of what it means to have freedom because it has become socially acceptable, and the harms associated natural part of human behaviour. I don't want to live in a world where we get so used to other drugs' deleterious effects that we consider heroin addiction, crack habits and meth death to be a natural part of human behaviour.

Making something legal just because our politicians lack the will to engage in a sincere effort to enforce laws regulating it is a poor, shortsighted and ultimately disastrous attitude to take.

It's fast, stable, mature and provides a boatload of the functionality you get from Dropbox and Google on a server that you host yourself. Get it, use it, love it.

I cannot understand why there is such scant mention of OwnCloud in this thread. It is THE solution to the problem of needing Dropbox like functionality on a self-hosted server.