Question for computer security experts

In his interview with John Oliver, Edward Snowden said something that many computer-savvy people are aware of and that is that modern computers can sweep through the entire set of possibilities of eight-character passwords in less than a second and that is how hackers break into systems. He suggested that rather than using complicated and hard to remember combinations of characters, we need to think in terms of long phrases that are easy for each user to remember but are unlikely to be found in any written form anywhere.
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And we’re off!

Hillary Clinton officially announced her candidacy for the presidency yesterday by releasing a two-minute video. This marks the beginning of the third phase of media coverage. The first dealt with mindless speculations about whether she would run, the second dealt with mindless speculations about when she would announce, and now there will mindless speculation about how good her candidacy will be, focusing on her age, her clothes, her looks, her gender, her laugh, her husband, Benghazi, and all the other things that have absolutely no relevance as to how she will be as a president, not to mention polls about those same things.
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Hoping for my home team to lose

Last Friday, the baseball team of my home town Cleveland lost their home opening game for the sixth time in seven years. Good. I am glad. Although there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth among local fans, I was delighted because this is exactly what I wanted. I hope that they continue to lose all their remaining games or, failing that, that they end up with the worst record of all the teams, or failing that, they do not make it into the playoffs. I also hope that their games experience torrential downpours. In other words, I place upon the team the curse of all the atheist gods.
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Why so many in Latin America still don’t trust the US

For the first time in twenty years, Cuba attended the Summit of the Americas currently underway in Panama. The US had long opposed their participation but increasingly other nations in the region had said that they would not attend if Cuba were still barred. Rather than the Cuba being isolated, as the US intended, US policy against Cuba had resulted in the US becoming isolated.
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Explaining science and public policy using interpretive dance

John Bohannon, a microbiologist and science writer, and Black Label Movement (a Minneapolis dance company), argue that using interpretive dance would be much more effective than using PowerPoint in communicating things to the public. In this demonstration, they use dance to give the viewer a pretty good sense of how photons can be used to cool atoms down to almost absolute zero and transform it into a superfluid.
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The voices we never hear

Our so-called objective media has been giving a lot of coverage to the framework of the deal agreed upon by the P5+1 nations and Iran. But as Glenn Greenwald points out, the people they get to explain and discuss the topics all share the same anti-Iran bias and seem to take their cues from Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and they almost never have people who can provide a counterpoint.
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When ‘failure’ may really be a sign of success

We see that yet another Middle Eastern country that the US has been meddling in is slipping into anarchy and chaos. Yemen, where the US has been doing it drone bombing in pursuit of the al Qaeda affiliate group AQAP (al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) is now on the verge of becoming a failed state like Libya. In Yemen we see that what was a local power struggle turning into a major regional conflict.
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