i'm not sure i completely agree with that. for one thing, he calculates entropy wrong. according to wikipedia, the set of all ascci characters has an entropy of 6.5446 bits per character. given an 11 character password, thats ~72 bits. a 26 letter character set has an entropy of 4.7004 bits per character with 24 letters, that gives the password 112 bits. that doesn't make my case for why i disagree, just showing that he calculated entropy wrong. i actually don't even know how he came up with those numbers.
People understanding things in this way is exactly why everyone chooses bad passwords. His point is that if everyone has passwords like Tr0ub4dor&3, password guessers won't guess random printable ASCII characters, they'll guess a word and then try some substitutions on it.
So 'Troubador' can be guessed with a dictionary attack, which is why the word only gets about 16 bits of entropy (that puts it in the top 64000 most common words in English). There is additional entropy added by the substitutions but substituting '0' for 'o' is much easier to guess than changing the 'o' to a random character.
i'm not going to try to calculate the possible number of permutations of a 24 character english word password but its definitely significantly less than the 112 bits of entropy we calculated earlier. is it less than the 72 bits for the ascii character set? i don't know. but maybe someone smarter than me can go tell us that one.
And again, since an attacker would be using a dictionary attack, the correct way to calculate entropy is per word, not per character. The xkcd calculates 11 bits of entropy per common word which suggests these words are in the top 2^11=2048 most common words which seems reasonable (a quick glance at wikipedia suggests around 80% of the words in written texts are built from the most common 2000 words). So we get 44 bits of entropy. Obviously less than 72 bits but how many people are really going to create a completely random alpha-numeric-punctutation string of 11 characters (not built from a word or pattern)?
The quickest path towards resolving this is genuinely for all non-criminal young Middle Easterners to start ejecting the radical element from within their ranks.
Just like when the IRA was having their campaigns, I should have told them to shut the hell up so I could go about my business? I'm an Australian, although I look Irish due to my ancestors around 4 generations ago emigrating from there. Racism is not the answer.
Spain is actually a long way from, say, Germany. The middle of Spain is only about 10% closer to Berlin than Tunisia.
Usually stuff like this isn't researched on very big groups and over and over again.
I think sporting bodies have researched this thoroughly. For example, in Australian football (the most popular sport in the country) caffeine was legalised a few years ago. The clubs spent big bucks testing their usefulness, but as far as I know none use them any more.
When it is thousands and thousands of kilometers to get out of your own country in every direction if you don't can't the USA as a destination it is a bit more difficult to travel to many countries.
I live in Australia, you insensitive clod. I can drive for 25,000km on one highway without leaving the country. Apart from a few pacific islands, New Zealand is the only country within 6 hours flight of me (Melbourne).
And yet, most of my friends have travelled to several other countries. In the time it takes to drive 2000km, you can fly pretty much anywhere it the world.
Obviously,
Evidence here: http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1693641
Example: I doubt anyone's been married on waterskis before. Or while submerged and in Scuba gear.
You could at least have come up with some better examples: Wedding on waterskis, Underwater wedding
(Maybe I shouldn't be too loud about this but I'm sure the Post Office would love to get money from stamp collectors buying and selling their stamps. Or the Treasure Department and coins...)
They already do. Stamp collectors buy stamps and never use them for postage - but they still pay the full price. Same with coins - they are bought from the Treasury.
Math is like love -- a simple idea but it can get complicated. -- R. Drabek
