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...

No, it's not.

There's a lot of hate against this idea, variants of "but you don't understand you naieve fool" are being thrown around. Sure, this is a simplistic idea, but it's not doomed like you and the other contrarians claim. Consider:

Assuming you *did* manage to buy up 25% of the coal mines and take their produce off the market. A coal power buyout would raise the price of remaining coal, as coal supply would now be too low to meet demand from the fixed number of coal fired plants. Plants would need to bid up prices on the coal, or shut down permanently as too much demand for coal chases too little supply. Conveniently, the least efficient (i.e., the plants that emit the most unburned carbon) plants will most likely be the ones to shut down as they are the ones providing the lowest yield per unit of coal input.

Reduced total output from coal plants would reduce overall electricity generation, increasing prices overall. Increased energy prices would stimulate consumers to engage in power saving behaviour and lower the threshold of profitability on green power projects. Once equilibrium was reached again, the mix of green power gneration to dirty power generation would have improved dramatically in the economy. Part of the problem we face is that green power prices relative to dirty power prices are too high, and an initiative like this would be a shot in the arm to the green industry that desperately needs just a kick start to reach scale.

Stop hating the idea just because it wasn't presented in a 20 page brief complete with executive summary and contingency analysis. The idea holds water and the sentiment certainly is meritorious.

Some cheap android device + sat phone. Duct tape those two devices anywhere on the plane where you can feed then 5V.

Problem solved. I understand the safety precautions etc, but streaming critical data would not be a huge data stream, and we solved that problem with very small devices a long time ago. Building a device with a GPS module, accelerometer and satphone chipset would be enough to give basic positional and attitudinal data and would be completely isolated from the rest of the plane's systems except for the 5V feed.

You do NOT need a $100k contractor sourced device to add "tracking of last resort" functionality t a plane.

If you want native, wxWidgets.
Cross platform. Open source. Sane licensing. True native drawn widgets.

God forbid someone make an on-topic reply to a joke. Noooo we can't have that, anything on topic after a joke *must* be whooshed.

+1 on this.
ZFS/RAIDZ is THE solution to this problem.

It implies nothing of the sort. I implies that they *pretend* to not have the key.

I'm not saying anything about Crashplan, I'm just pointing out the logical fallacy in saying "They don't help you, therefore they can't help you."

The solution I'd use is a large RAIDZ array, with snapshots. That way you get the redundancy of RAID, with the ability to rollback to past points in the filesystem, if you accidentally delete something. When you run out of space, simply expunge the snapshots until the last known good state, However given how cheap HDDs are these days, I'd plan to have enough space space to keep snapshots going back at least a few weeks. Get one of those old 24 bay 2RU IBM servers from eBay, 6x 4TB drives and set the whole thing up with FreeNAS+RAIDZ. Add drives to the bays as you need extra space, as RAIDZ can be dynamically expanded.

Problem solved.

So this is the way that Snowden should have done it? I guess now we know that those who say "well, some good came from what he did, but he should have gone about it the right way".

We now know that there is no "right way" to deal with government, other than kick them in the ass.

It's only been around a few years and it's reaching acceptance. Look at the trajectory, and evaluate where it's headed. Do you have any evidence to support the proposition that it has come this far, but that it will go no further?