Nothing impressed on me the fact that I had no interest in joining the army more than this game. Crawling through a thicket thinking I'm totally sneaking along undetected to without warning get a round through my skull did not have me going, "man I want to do this in real life!".

Nope that only works if you are provided an ISO and a detached PGP signature. That's why I'm saying supplying a detached signature of the original file is my preferred method (if the original file needs to remain usable without PGP).

Yes, that's much more convenient and intuitive than:

gpg -v some.iso.asc

I usually invest some energy finding a copy of their key from a source not directly on the same site/servers but still under their control. In the end though, you're right that a PGP key can't be trusted unless your web of trust validates it.

'Also, I don't see how it could be "redundant". Redundant would be doing both.'

A PGP signature is essentially a hash of the file signed by a private key.

Distrubuting a file containing a hash and then PGP signing that file is hashing the file, then hashing the hash of the file, then signing the second hash. Redundant.

As to the speed difference, I just ran a 4GB ISO file through sha256sum which took 25 seconds. Using gpg to generate a detached signature the same file took 42 seconds. That's a DVD sized file. That's a few seconds of extra time the signer only has to deal with once.

The receiver then only has 2 files to download, and integrity and authenticity are assured with a single command operation.

Meanwhile, with the file + hash file + signature file the receiver now has to manually retrieve the file, then the hash file, then the signature file, then run a command to verify the hash file using the signature file, then run an entirely different command to verify the integrity of the target file. Then they have to VISUALLY (and prone to error) compare 2 long and complicated numbers.

The above wasted extra time and effort is multiplied by the number of people who receive the files. All of which could be avoided if the signer just signed the file directly using PGP.

I'd prefer just a PGP signature for the file. Next would be a PGP signed file containing MD5 or SHA values, but that seems redundant to me when you could just sign the original file.

Unauthenticated checksums are useless for establishing trust.

For anyone else who may happen across this post, swap space is intended to be used mainly as somewhere the kernel can swap out inactive memory pages in favor of active pages. In a system with adequate memory you should see either no swap usage, or some usage. Even without memory pressure the kernel will sometimes swap out pages which have been inactive awhile in favor of using ram for caching, etc. This isn't a problem, it's the kernel doing *smart stuff*.

On a system which may hibernate, swap space can be used to store the contents of memory during the hibernation.

Having swap space on an SSD isn't a problem. In general usage you won't be writing to it much, if at all. If you are thrashing it, you need to re-evaluate your memory constraints.

FYI, I use an SSD for the ZFS L2ARC on my server. It's a 120GB drive and has seen 8TB of writes. No problems and the firmware shows it's used 4% of it's life. The hysteria over SSD write life is somewhat overblown. It's something to be aware of and plan for, but it's not worth freaking out about. I can buy a replacement drive for less money than I'd lose in time obsessing over the config trying to minimize writes.

"a RAM disk for the swap file"

Did I read this correctly?

I use it on every computer I have.

Add to the list of things a local client is better at, secure communications. I don't trust any "cloud" company enough to place my PGP private keys in their hands, which makes secure webmail a virtual non-starter for me.

Enigmail under thunderbird makes the whole PGP process virtually seamless.

Not true. As I said I played with only a keyboard. I used to go to LAN cafe's (that dates me a bit) and would challenge people who brought in flight sticks and throttle controllers to a kill limit in Descent. With them using their hundreds of dollars worth of controllers and me with a $10 keyboard, I'd usually win. One time the guy running one local cafe didn't believe I could beat him with just a keyboard. He bet me my entire night for free if I won and I'd have to pay double the rate if he won. I got the entire night for free

Back when I used to play Descent 2 daily, I played exclusively with my old AT keyboard (which I still use with adapters) because it would reliably allow me to press more keys simultaneously than any ps2 or usb keyboard I've ever found.

Moving forward, rolling, pitching, strafing, firing primary, firing secondary, and running afterburners all at the same time was something I did more often than you would expect. That's 7 simultaneous keys. Most keyboards limit to 3 to 6, and often they are zoned so that only 2 or 3 in a local area of the board at a time can be pressed.

My wife still wants to start throwing things at the TV when that horrible abortion of an intro plays.

I gave up when the VERY FIRST EPISODE hinged on genetically engineered aliens from the future. They literally jumped the shark on a rocket powered jet-ski with disco balls and laser beams mounted on it, in the very first episode.

I turned it off, never looked back, and chuckled when I heard it ended up cancelled short of the obligatory 7 season mark.

You know your show sucks when the final episode ends up set on the holodeck from a preceding show that outclassed yours in every way. It's about the only way they got anyone to actually watch it. It's the only reason I ever watched it at least.

Well, since Lex Gigeroff is dead you shouldn't hold your breath. Besides, Lexx died in the last episode. Maybe they planned to do something with his baby bug but we'll never see anything else from it.

I pretty much only buy my music on CD's. I refuse to pay money for lossy copies of music. If I'm going to spend my hard earned money on it I want the real, all the sonic bits there, deal. This isn't because I can hear a difference between a lossless copy and a 256k mp3 (I can't), but because I usually CAN hear a difference if I transcode that mp3 to another lossy format.

I typically use OGG Vorbis around 96kbps on my portal devices because it's pretty much transparant. I rip my original CD to FLAC in my library. I play the FLAC files at home and I can transcode them to Vorbis, AAC, or whatever I want to for mobile or streaming use without worrying about multigenerational loss. This allows me to store anywhere from 3-4 times the amount of music in a given amount of mobile storage with generally no audible loss of quality.

Most online stores which sell lossless copies of music charge a premium for it. I see no reason to pay more to download lossless versions than I would pay to buy and ship a CD to me. With the CD I get the added bonus of a hard backup as well. When available, I have bought FLAC downloads from some indie bands who offer them at reasonable prices.

Wow, How is it I'm running my 1920x1200 monitor with 32 bit color at 60Hz over my $5 Monoprice DisplayPort cable? And how is it I'm running another machine connected to that same monitor with the same resolution, refresh, and color depth over another $3 Monoprice VGA cable? And how is it the image quality through both of these very cheap cables is absolutely spectacular? It's pretty obvious you have to spend a ton of money on the cables to get good quality.