I forgot to mention in the original post, but this did have a time limit -- I was going to drop the reward once it cycled out of the topic in the #xkcd IRC room (which would happen in about 2-7 days).  It's cycled out now so I'm going to post the original sentence and withdraw the reward.

The sentence was "When all else fails, a new person can always bring more guns."

The associated hash (for verification) was "c612c2961c582be831486251188f3e86e7d979d865f01ea5e3e9e910a5a7874fad4b5c3e067097d 0a6d7da2bd1c60a5fca0e1e925ea8c95b14bd757c53bb515d".

If you want, and just as a "for kicks" project, I can make another hash but I think I should probably put this topic to rest.

also in case I forgot to mention in the rest of the post, I'm officially withdrawing the 10 BTC bounty.

(not particularly bitcoin-related)

I have some questions about EVE online that I'd like to find answers to by means of some capitalist professionals:

1) How long would it take for a miner, for example, to get the skills and gear necessary to generate enough ISK during playtime to buy a PLEX (from what I can tell, 30-day in-game subscription extension) at cost, with no haggling? (this site says it should take about 382M ISK)

1.a) How long would other types of players such as manufacturers and combat people ("whores", as we like to call them in Allegience) take to generate that much ISK?

2) Would you recommend that I, a student about to go to college, get a subscription to EVE online again?  I have an old character but I think his gear may have been taken by the corp I joined.

3) How fun is combat, in your (collective) opinion?  I tried once but decided to work entirely on my mining character.

That raises an interesting question.  Is there any number of BTC that would make this legitimately worth it to attempt to break?

I'm interested in finding out whether there's a CS solution -- getting a sorted list of the most common words and making valid 12-word sentences.

I suspect (and this is me being optimistic because I hope to use this for memorable, secure passwords) that even knowing this much about the password, it'll still be easier to crack SHA-512 first-preimage style than to crack the password.

That, or beat me over the head with a wrench until I hand over the password.

Can someone please help me figure out how much entropy is in the sentence from the original post?

I'd break it down into words to start, maybe 2 bits for the ending punctuation...  I'd need more space to do a more comprehensive analysis

Step three tells me to download the tails signing key:

Then to download the signature:

Then to check it with Gpg4Win

Which resulted in a rejection of the signature

It doesn't have to work -- it rejected the iso as broken.

I'm wondering whether TAILS is broken or my download is broken, or gpg4win is broken, or any number of other scenarios.

Is it that I'm using GPA and not Kleopatra?

I have a sha-512 hash of a special sentence at http://pastebin.com/Use8Cuem (contest details there as well).
The sentence is 12 words long and makes grammatical sense.  It starts with an uppercase letter and uses at least one punctuation symbol.
I need to get the 10btc squared away but I intend to keep the reward up for at least a day.

I'm doing this because of a combination of today's xkcd and something I misinterpreted in the xkcd IRC room today.
Specifically, I want to make sure that my concept of "passwords with a very specific structure are not significantly less secure than randomly-generated passwords" is true before I decide one way or the other.

The sentence will look something like "I didn't know you liked to have egg and bread for breakfast." (although clearly this isn't the sentence.)

edit: No reward anymore, but I'd still like to examine this as a theoretical and/or philosophical question.

Also, question to the mods: Is it ok to cross-post this to the /economy/services/ board once my newbie period is up?

Hi.  I downloaded the TAILS liveCD (tails-i386-0.7.2.iso) and the associated signature (tails-i386-0.7.2.iso.pgp) but I couldn't get it to verify.  Opening the signature with GNU Privacy Assistant (under windows 7) and the correct key (tails-signing.key) gives me an error: "Bad", as in the signature or the iso was modified.

Is anyone else getting this error?  Is this a known thing?
Alternatively, am I doing something wrong?  Checking the ISO has GPA tell me that there's no PGP data in it.
I really want to start getting TAILS running so I can play around with the whole 'privacy' thing.

Try as I might, I can't see that as anything other than this: