The legal definition of gambling in the United States depends on wagering some item 'of value'. I don't believe that the fact SD doesn't do the exchange matters - for a similar situation, exceptions to the law such as what you're talking about exist elsewhere in the world - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachinko. The fact that we don't have similar establishments in the United States would seem to indicate to me that something that can readily be exchanged for currency would count as having a value.

Wasn't there a news story about some guy who got caught running a miner on his company's server farm a couple months ago? He got in pretty big trouble as soon as they realized what was going on - this seems like the sort of thing you could get away with on a small scale, but eventually someone would catch on - and the last thing you need is to get kicked out of school halfway after spending thousands on an education. Just not worth it.

To summarize the summary of the summary, people are a problem.

Any system that people think they can use to gain some advantage over other people is going to have some issues to work out. Bitcoin just doesn't have much of a legal precedent that people can use to deal with scammers/etc as easily.

Computers don't actually generate random numbers - they don't have the hardware for that. Instead, they use a function that has been shown to produce an evenly distributed, unpredictable result, as long as you don't know the number they start with, also known as the 'seed' - many generators use various information from your computer's memory as the seed. Since a Live CD / USB tends to boot up nearly the same each time (since you don't have a lot of user installed programs starting up every time you do), the actual variation of the seed is lowered, meaning that someone with a sufficiently complicated algorithm and some knowledge has a higher chance of generating the same keys.

Just do some stuff to change the state of your memory before you start generating keys - play some solitaire, pop open a text editor and mash on your keyboard for a while, save that file somewhere... whatever. Of course, you only need to generate keys occasionally, so you mainly want to be careful when generating your original wallet file.

I'm watching the IPO with great interest, but I'm not going anywhere near it personally - seems like a good way to get on the wrong list.

I'm Oswald. Not terribly new to bitcoin (been mining since last year) - I just don't post on forums much. Just now creating an account.