+1.

I use spotify for almost all my music listening. I don't even bother with offline playlists, I generally just stream music on my mobile when I'm on the go. It's great being able to access such a vast library on the go - when someone is talking about a new track I can bring it up immediately, even if it's an artist I've never heard of.

I haven't paid for music for years, and now I'm spending $10 every month.

A lot of research has been done on the second step of this algorithm in bioinformatics. When sequencing a genome, generally all you get are millions of short sequences that need to be stuck together. The algorithms work by calculating probability scores for various pieces to be adjacent and then doing some funky statistics. It's a non-trivial problem to calculate those probabilities for the document reconstruction problem, and then the reconstruction is in 2d instead of 1d, but the bioinformatics algorithms could provide some interesting approaches.

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.

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)?

Most of the big banks in Sweden allow you to create a temporary (virtual) credit card with a specified limit and expiry date. You type the credit limit and expiry in, push a button and it spits out a new mastercard number. At least one bank (Swedbank, one of the largest in Scandinavia) requires this kind of card for all online transactions.

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.

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.

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.

Evidence here: http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1693641

Obligatory: Real Life Twitter