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.

OwnCloud. It's The Solution to this problem.

Given the fact that a normal desktop PC cannot generate bitcoins in a reasonable amount of time, isn't it a given fact that we need another party to create or transfer those bitcoins?

No and no. "Creating" bitcoins is not economically practical for individual users any more, however you do NOT need a third party to hold your bitcoins. You can run wallet software on your PC and send and receive bitcoins without the need for any third party.

When another party creates those bitcoins for me, how can I be sure that they won't keep a copy for later use?

Sending you the bitcoins is not just a matter of sending you a copy of the bitcoin "file". For your wallet (which is an application running on your PC) to receive the bitcoins, it must not only get the "file" from the sender, but also verify with the blockchain (the public record of transactions) that they have sent the BTC to you. Once the transaction has been logged on the blockchain, they cannot spend the bitcoins, as the blockchain will reject any attempt to do so.

You're clearly a liar. A Google Maps search revealed that there is no lane or indeed roadway of any kind named "Literal Interpretation".

Buying junk like that is probably why they failed.

Smartphones have cameras, accelerometers magnetometers and s bunch of other sensors. Collate data from these sensors and you have a pretty good random seed at any given time.

5Ah batteries in tablets would take approx 12 hours to charge on a 500mAh USB link.

We've got this thing called True Coat...