So maybe Snowdon should run for office in absentia. How does "congressman Snowdon" sound?

When the services go down, you can't log in to the relying sites. Luckily, core infrastructure like the account systems is a very high priority for the engineers, and the big providers have plenty of resources to keep them up -- and they do. My bank's site is down far, far more often than Google's auth servers, for example. How much more often? I don't know... I've never seen Google's auth servers down.

Pick the top several and you'll cover nearly everyone. For the tiny percentage of users that remains, you have to either offer password auth (which means all of the work and risks of maintaining a password system, but at least when you screw it up only a tiny percentage of your users will be affected) or push them to get an account with one of the providers you support.

How quaint. Somebody who thinks that their internet use is anonymous.

If you act as if everything you post can eventually be traced to you and you're wrong, no harm done. If you act as though stuff will never be traced back to you and you're wrong, that's a different story.

Really? I thought getting rid of that "free trade" stuff would magically make Brazil an electronics powerhouse??? I guess those dang economists are right.

You're promoting perpetuating a long-standing, widespread and hugely-damaging user security error in order to avoid a relatively obscure problem which can actually be fixed through purely technical means. Not a win.

What you describe as a problem is actually part of the solution. The problem with classic OpenID was that it was virtually impossible to get, say 1st Bank of MyButt, to use it, because absolutely anyone could be an identity provider. I personally agree with you that classic OpenID was better in that respect, but 1st Bank of MyButt doesn't. They're hemming and hawing about letting Google manage their user's identities, but they will at least consider it.

Heh. Your snark falls rather flat, given how egregiously wrong the parent was.

Putting them in password managers is the right thing to do.

You're wrong. Hilariously so.

The entropy of "thatswhatshesaid" is far lower than 43,608,742,899,428,874,059,776. Randall Munroe calculated correctly in the XKCD comic, of course. He didn't assume that each letter was random, he assumed he was choosing four words at random from a dictionary of a specific size (about 2048 entries == ~11 bits of entropy per word). Your password is clearly not a selection of randomly-chosen words, and even if it were, it would likely have been from a much smaller dictionary.

This highlights the danger of asking users to pick passwords... even those who think they know what they're doing are likely to screw it up. Munroe's advice in 936 was good... but I think it has mislead more people than it has enlightened.

No, it's much better to use a password manager and let a computer pick large random passwords for you.

Parent was modded funny, but this is what your passwords should look like -- long and random, and typing them is a PITA. Any web site that disables pasting or prevents your browser or extensions from auto-filling passwords is broken. The sad thing is that most sites that do this (other than those that do it by accident because the devs are clueless) do it because they think they're increasing the security of their users' accounts. They're not.

Solutions like LastPass et al are the best, but honestly just using your browser's password database is better than reusing passwords everywhere. And Chrome and Firefox (at least, perhaps others) offer the option of keeping your passwords synced to all of the devices you use, optionally protected with a master password. Browsers need to offer password generation as well. I think some are working on it.

Of course, the real solution is to get rid of passwords. Web sites should switch to using OpenID authentication. Yes this means that most users will use their Facebook or Google logins, which means that, essentially, the site has outsourced its account security to those other entities. So what? If the developers of random web sites think they can do a better job of account security than Google or Facebook -- they're wrong . I work for Google and previously spent a decade as a security consultant in the financial industry and after seeing how they all work from the inside, I would feel much more secure about my bank account if I could use my Google account (with 2FA, plus all of the analytics and monitoring Google does) to log into it rather than trusting the bank to do a decent job with password-based security. I haven't seen Facebook's infrastructure, but I know people who work there, and they're good. Far better than you'll find at a typical bank, much less J. Random Web Developer.

FWIW, I'm not a member of the community. I play Wesnoth off and on for a few weeks every couple of years. I also like the random element and don't much care about characterization, world-building, lore or storytelling. Not that I don't like those things, just that Wesnoth is more of an occasional light diversion for me, so those things don't mean much.

Sure, it does, which is why managers convert such things into spot bonuses -- which are generally several thousand dollars.

The downside of rewarding primarily with peer bonuses is that it might create a culture of doing good stuff for peers in order to collect peer bonuses rather than doing good stuff for peers because it's abstractly good to do good stuff for peers. I don't know how real it was or was not, but I have heard that some obnoxious Googlers with special skills or access or knowledge made a habit of demanding multiple peer bonuses before being willing to do some task for some other team that needed it. The "one bonus per" rule pretty much eliminates that because -- to people as well-compensated as Googlers -- a single $125 bonus isn't worth the overhead of negotiating; it's much more effective to just be "nice" and do stuff for people who need it, gathering the occasional peer bonus and lots of kudos, as well as building the network of people who will offer support at promotion time and/or help you out when you need it.

The effect is the same: it incents employees with special skills or access or knowledge to help their peers, but makes it more of a "gift economy" where everyone tries to be helpful to others in expectation of eventual good karma coming back to them, rather than one of barter and bargaining in which people jealously protect their advantages.

"One front-line manager" != "management". The latter implies higher levels of company leadership.

Easy way to short circuit this - it's possible to follow their dress code and still look slutty. They want tops with collars? Fine - just don't button thrm up. Curve-accentuating jeans, shoes with clear acrylic heels (the ones worn b Trisha Heffer in Battlestar Galactica were originally obtained for $20 from Walmart). Purple or pink hair, etc. And guys, sporting bed hair all day, every day, should get your ball caps back. And get your kilts - and stay authentic - no tidy-whities.

Some rules are just begging to be broken in specific circumstances.

I wish there was a preview button on the mobile site ... But what the heck, this is Dice.