As of December, the Reader had sold 300,000 units in the US alone, while the Kindle was trailing behind at 240,000. I believe you meant to say "â¦the newer, less established Kindle."
So, the Reader sold about less than 150,000 units per year, while the Kindle sold 240,000 units in a year? I guess that's why one is easily led to believe that Kindle is "more established".
iPod wasn't the first MP3 player and iPhone isn't the first smartphone: it's just the most popular and that's what matters to most people.
I'll consider getting another eBook device when they make it possible to lend an eBook the way I can lend a physical book.
This was actually what won me over: Amazon's DRMs are strippable (search for "mobidedrm"; of course, it's "illegal", but who's going to prosecute me for keeping personal backups?), and once DRMs are gone, it's just one of the common Mobipocket book format. There are softwares that'll do conversion, e.g. from that book format to HTML.
I guess this may not be good enough for the, er, legally scrupulous, but well, that's the best you can get until we get DMCA repealed—I don't think any publisher will agree to publish its golden eggs in a format that doesn't have DRM, at least not without the kind of pushback we have seen with music.
If your book isn't page-size agnostic, you're going to get crappy results from PDF support on ANY reader. Nobody has a screen size that's 8.5x11 (maybe your PDF is smaller? paperback sized?). Sony does offer a full-page zoomed-out view (I believe), but that's almost impossible to read. As soon as you start to zoom in and reflow text, you worry about things like charts breaking.
I guess that's why Amazon's supporting PDF natively only on DX (its screen size is almost equivalent of letter page, if you remove the margins... not that Amazon's PDF reader is doing that).
But then, when the ebook reader is that large, I think it gets a bit too unwieldy and inconvenient, at least until they come up with a display that can be rolled up or folded up to fit in smaller places (like printed pages), maybe.
I'm waiting for something with a reasonably decent screen, a decent flash drive, a few buttons. No subscription services, no wireless, no connectivity at all, no note taking or annotation features, no voice or recording... Just a thumbdrive hooked to a screen. That hardware should be WELL under $100. The extra features turn me off more than incentivize me.
That's funny. I wouldn't have bought the Kindle at any price, if it didn't have wireless. Without wireless, using Kindle would've been relatively inconvenient, not to mention that wherever I carried it, I would need to have my computer with me, unless I was absolutely sure whatever was on Kindle was all that I would want to read while I don't have the computer with me.
'Kinda defeats (some of) the purpose of a small, light ebook reader, does it not?
And that's why a bicycle is no easier to balance while moving? Bicycles balance because the wheels spin, anyone who doesn't think a spinning wheel is a gyroscope needs to go to elementary school "magic" show.
I refer you to the Wikipedia link in my original post. Also, I refer you to the "bicycle physics" website of one of my physics professors. Yes, spinning bicycle wheels do have angular momentum and hence there is some gyroscopic force on the wheels when you turn, but it's ultimately a matter of magnitudes—other forces are much greater and experiments have shown that the gyroscopic properties of bicycle wheel has little to do with ability or ease of steering a bike.
Physics is an experimental science, not a dogma based on maxims and rules of thumb. The only dogma we have is that experiment always right—after the consideration of experimental errors.
Well, for that matter the Segway isn't gyroscopically balanced either - it's dynamically balanced by motors.
But it does use a gyroscope to detect when it is out of balance. If it actually used a gyroscope for keeping balance, as well as detecting, not only would it gain respect/fear, it would also be fiercely difficult to turn, or otherwise make the vehicle do anything but stand still (or precess around some point), since that's the whole point of large, heavy spinning wheels.
On the other hand, a bicycle doesn't use a gyroscope in any meaningful sense. It uses humans for balance, and the inner ear, which doesn't use any part that can be considered to be a "gyroscope", is our "organ of balance".
My objection to the Segway is that we already HAVE a two wheeled, gyroscopicly balanced transport device: It is called a bicycle. Works much better, and is better for you. In the event that the distances you are covering are too far for that, but you still want an efficient two wheeled transport, there's scooters and motorcycles. Even smallish ones can usually reach highway speeds.
Actually, a bicycle is not gyroscopically balanced. The angular momentum in the bicycle wheel is tiny compared to the overall mass and moment of inertia of bicycle and the rider. It's actually the rider's own sense of balance (whether the hands are on the handle or not) that keeps the bicycle standing, and which is why you have to learn to ride one.
This isn't to say, of course, that Segways are superior just because they use a gyroscope.
In high school and college, of course, no one cared. I could write suitably fast, taking notes for myself that did, rather quickly, cramp my hand. (Timed essays such as AP tests in high school or some of my physics exams in college were very painful.)
Actually, for these essays in AP tests, they recommend that you write in block letters, to promote the best readability for graders. I use small caps style as that seemed to be the most readable handwriting you could do.
But then, this was years ago. Maybe these days they let those poor chaps use computers or some sort of typing device, like they do with GRE general exams.
Because nothing says dignity and respect like working in a sweatshop and being paid pennies an hour...
I don't know. Maybe it's just me, but the iPhone girl seemed happy enough (at least until we Westerners uploaded her pictures to the Net). Would you be able to take a picture with a smiling face working in a sweatshop and being paid pennies an hour?
Also, I disagree with the notion that sweatshops are bad. Sweatshops may seem bad from our point of view, but the presence of the sweatshop improves the local living standards, by presumably offering better wage than any other local employers—why would anyone work there voluntarily otherwise? Do you really think all those people will be in a better situation if all those shops just packed up and left?
Here, if it was Zelaya doing it (so far, we don't have any concrete evidence to point to who's responsible), he needed an overwhelming support. Remember he keeps repeating that this was nonbinding, i.e. for gathering the opinion of the people. If even a significant minority was opposed to the repeal of term limit, then he couldn't push through the constitution change. He needed an overwhelming support to argue for another referendum which would be binding at that point.
If the Civilization series has taught me anything, it is that even a Warrior or Militia unit is sometimes a match for a Stealth Bomber.
Only if it's grounded. Non-artillery ground-units (or air units with air superiority) cannot attack a plane in flight. And unless the Stealth Bomber is seriously damaged, there's no chance in hell of a Warrior unit defending its attack.
I'm not going to defend Chavez or his cronies, but that doesn't mean we in the west, for want of a better word, haven't been up to our usual dirty tricks.
And I'm not going to accuse an innocent man of murder, but it doesn't mean you in your home, for want of a better word, have no skeletons in your closet.
So far, we have no direct evidence pointing to anyone in the West. Heck, not even indirect evidence, save for the word of a man who is decided anti-West and anti-US. In the absence of any evidence, only a truther would go out to accuse U.S. of wrongdoing.
Of course, this won't help you if there's a house fire. The fireproof hard drives are still darned expensive. Internet-based remote backup is great, if your broadband can handle it.
If your workplace allows it, you can put the second drive at work (presumably some of the files are important for work as well so you can justify it). If not, unless you are a hermit you can find a friend who might be willing to host the drive. If not that, then there are always places which will give you storage for some nominal fee (and unless you start backing up your music collection and DVD collection to it, it won't be so much).
Also, your backups should be snapshot style, going back months or years at least. At least under *nix, this is very easily done with cp -al && rsync method, and I am fairly sure you can use tar-based incremental backup methods under almost any operating system (although this is more pain than snapshot, since you should re-do a full backup every now and then).
BTW, as a sibling post noted, mirroring in real time (or even in delayed time; it just gives you more time to act, not an option to go back) doesn't count as backup. That's what the old adage about RAID not being backup is about.
The US has a crazy system where they have "embraced" democracy beyond that which is practical. They vote for far to much. They vote for the local sheriff and the local dog catcher. There are pages and pages of things to vote on the US voting system. It is beyond ridiculous to expect any significant percentage of voters to become aware of all the positions that are voted on.
Er, what's so wrong about voters voting for local sheriff? Do you want a police force that do not answer to the public at all? Do you want no recourse at all when an innocent man gets beaten up by the police? (Yes, you can demand for an investigation, but guess who does the investigation? Your ultimate power lies in the power to vote the sheriff out and get someone else who can reform the system in, in such cases.)
I do agree that we have far too many things to vote for, especially with things like propositions and measures (at least in California), especially on matters we shouldn't have been bothered with, if we had a few legislators with backbones. But as far as public positions go, I don't think I've seen any position on a ballot that I went and thought "Hey, why do I vote for this position? Couldn't this be some unelected, appointed position instead?"
Which is also why we shouldn't develop remote-/self-controlled bomber/fighters that can be massively controlled from a single command center. Machines don't have conscience and will obey any order, even evil ones.
The moment we give up our weapons (either one held by civilians or the military) to centralized control (usually by automation), we are giving up our freedom, and not necessarily via the Skynet scenario.
I'm more worried about when they will appoint themselves as the overseer of RedHat because they represent "systematic risks" that need to be managed—i.e. you are getting too big to fail, so we are going to make sure... that you fail before that happens.
Of course, for individual consumer the debate is academic, since there is no way they can try to prosecute a user copying music from one device to another (how are they going to find out?), but regardless of the precedents, the attitude of those in power are not friendly towards activities like that. Their first inclination is to claim as much "right" as possible, and our first inclination is to err on the side of caution.
You: "Your honor I didn't do it. My line was open anyone could have done it." Them: "Fine, provide us with evidence that it wasn't you."
Fixed that. Assume that you say someone else vandilized your house. You keep your doors locked. There are no signs of forced entry. It seems likely then that you or someone else with access to the house did it. See the problem? Your statement still doesn't exclude you.
I hope we never come to that day. At least for now, most civilized countries have doctrines such as "innocent until proven guilty". It should be up to the prosecutor to provide the evidence which connects you (and not the IP address; some courts already recognized that an IP address cannot be mapped to a single person) to some misdeed, not the other way around.
Also, your analogy misses one crucial feature. Parent said "line was open", which would be like a house with unlocked, wide-open (given that most wireless APs broadcast their SSID) door. Anyone could have gotten in and done something, and it's up to the cops to prove that "anyone" was you.
To reword: our fair use law is very restrictive and doesn't allow for commonly considered fair use cases, such as the right to transfer songs to your ipod from CD. The "fair use" laws we have in the UK are designed for the press and for educational use, not the common people.
The situation in U.S. isn't any better. For one, you are assuming that the "right to transfer songs to your iPod from CD" is fair use under U.S. law. It may well be, but until a lawsuit is brought and litigated, we will never know for sure if it is (and in fact, in a lawsuit some time ago, in a sworn testimony, some music label executive claimed that copying music from CD to your computer is "stealing").
That's the main drawback of fair use in U.S. The law only gives four criteria by which fair use may be determined. But because of the lack of specificity, we only know that a particular use is non-infringing after a precedent-setting lawsuit has been litigated. Most people would rather avoid those costly lawsuits than establish fair use, so they err on the side of caution and in the end, our fair use rights are as weak as yours.
If the person/group trying to crack your system know about these requirements (which isn't hard to find out if you plaster it on the logon screen) it greatly reduces the number of permutations they even have to try. You have basically handed them a filter and said Don't bother looking for anything that doesn't contain the following.....
Er, not really. Breaking 10-char password is takes so much longer time than breaking 6-char through 9-char passwords combined, so for computing the brute force time, you might as well assume that you have 10-char passwords (a sibling post assumes that one has 6-char password but that's just wishful thinking; I think most people have the ability to come up with at least 8-char passwords; at least people who do online banking should).
By having at least one upper case, you essentially require potential crackers to need to look for 52 possible letters for each position (remember: the requirement isn't that you need upper case letter in the first position; it's any position, so you can't really use that to generally rule out bunch of passwords), and by requiring at least one number, you essentially require potential crackers to look for 62 possible alphanumeric choice for each letter (again, the requirement isn't that you should have numbers at the end of passwords or the beginning; even if you assume exact 2 numbers, you don't know where they are), with that, the possible combination, in the optimal case is 62^10, and if it takes 1 second to try one password (which might be true, unless the hacker has access to the password hash), it would take the cracker 27 billion years.
Now, you complained about this specific requirement ruling out certain combinations. How many combinations do you think are ruled out? I haven't actually done the math, statistics, or Monte Carlo, but I'm willing to bet it's fewer than 50%, so the crakcer will now take somewhere around 13 billion years to crack the system instead of 27 billion years.
I think I still feel relatively safe, as long as the hash remains secret.
Do you have to enter your credit card number every time you want to access your computer? No? Well that's why it's in your wallet and not more easily accessible.
If my experience is any indication, it's only the first week or so that's going to be difficult. If you really do have to type that password so often, you would remember it in about one week.
At least I do, but then, I touch-type and apparently an appalling percentage of people around me (less than 50%) do, so perhaps people who don't touch-type won't have as easy time developing finger memory... but then, if you are an office worker dealing with computer every day who can't touch type... you are probably not a good worker (I work with scientists with whom typing skill doesn't really rank high in the list of priorities).
Slashdot Mirror
As of December, the Reader had sold 300,000 units in the US alone, while the Kindle was trailing behind at 240,000. I believe you meant to say "â¦the newer, less established Kindle."
So, the Reader sold about less than 150,000 units per year, while the Kindle sold 240,000 units in a year? I guess that's why one is easily led to believe that Kindle is "more established".
iPod wasn't the first MP3 player and iPhone isn't the first smartphone: it's just the most popular and that's what matters to most people.
I'll consider getting another eBook device when they make it possible to lend an eBook the way I can lend a physical book.
This was actually what won me over: Amazon's DRMs are strippable (search for "mobidedrm"; of course, it's "illegal", but who's going to prosecute me for keeping personal backups?), and once DRMs are gone, it's just one of the common Mobipocket book format. There are softwares that'll do conversion, e.g. from that book format to HTML.
I guess this may not be good enough for the, er, legally scrupulous, but well, that's the best you can get until we get DMCA repealed—I don't think any publisher will agree to publish its golden eggs in a format that doesn't have DRM, at least not without the kind of pushback we have seen with music.
If your book isn't page-size agnostic, you're going to get crappy results from PDF support on ANY reader. Nobody has a screen size that's 8.5x11 (maybe your PDF is smaller? paperback sized?). Sony does offer a full-page zoomed-out view (I believe), but that's almost impossible to read. As soon as you start to zoom in and reflow text, you worry about things like charts breaking.
I guess that's why Amazon's supporting PDF natively only on DX (its screen size is almost equivalent of letter page, if you remove the margins ... not that Amazon's PDF reader is doing that).
But then, when the ebook reader is that large, I think it gets a bit too unwieldy and inconvenient, at least until they come up with a display that can be rolled up or folded up to fit in smaller places (like printed pages), maybe.
I'm waiting for something with a reasonably decent screen, a decent flash drive, a few buttons. No subscription services, no wireless, no connectivity at all, no note taking or annotation features, no voice or recording... Just a thumbdrive hooked to a screen. That hardware should be WELL under $100. The extra features turn me off more than incentivize me.
That's funny. I wouldn't have bought the Kindle at any price, if it didn't have wireless. Without wireless, using Kindle would've been relatively inconvenient, not to mention that wherever I carried it, I would need to have my computer with me, unless I was absolutely sure whatever was on Kindle was all that I would want to read while I don't have the computer with me.
'Kinda defeats (some of) the purpose of a small, light ebook reader, does it not?
And that's why a bicycle is no easier to balance while moving? Bicycles balance because the wheels spin, anyone who doesn't think a spinning wheel is a gyroscope needs to go to elementary school "magic" show.
I refer you to the Wikipedia link in my original post. Also, I refer you to the "bicycle physics" website of one of my physics professors. Yes, spinning bicycle wheels do have angular momentum and hence there is some gyroscopic force on the wheels when you turn, but it's ultimately a matter of magnitudes—other forces are much greater and experiments have shown that the gyroscopic properties of bicycle wheel has little to do with ability or ease of steering a bike.
Physics is an experimental science, not a dogma based on maxims and rules of thumb. The only dogma we have is that experiment always right—after the consideration of experimental errors.
Well, for that matter the Segway isn't gyroscopically balanced either - it's dynamically balanced by motors.
But it does use a gyroscope to detect when it is out of balance. If it actually used a gyroscope for keeping balance, as well as detecting, not only would it gain respect/fear, it would also be fiercely difficult to turn, or otherwise make the vehicle do anything but stand still (or precess around some point), since that's the whole point of large, heavy spinning wheels.
On the other hand, a bicycle doesn't use a gyroscope in any meaningful sense. It uses humans for balance, and the inner ear, which doesn't use any part that can be considered to be a "gyroscope", is our "organ of balance".
Actually, a bicycle is not gyroscopically balanced. The angular momentum in the bicycle wheel is tiny compared to the overall mass and moment of inertia of bicycle and the rider. It's actually the rider's own sense of balance (whether the hands are on the handle or not) that keeps the bicycle standing, and which is why you have to learn to ride one.
This isn't to say, of course, that Segways are superior just because they use a gyroscope.
CmdrTaco was probably worried about being sued for libel by ... the Harvard law school!
Does he have anything to worry about, though?
Actually, for these essays in AP tests, they recommend that you write in block letters, to promote the best readability for graders. I use small caps style as that seemed to be the most readable handwriting you could do.
But then, this was years ago. Maybe these days they let those poor chaps use computers or some sort of typing device, like they do with GRE general exams.
Because nothing says dignity and respect like working in a sweatshop and being paid pennies an hour...
I don't know. Maybe it's just me, but the iPhone girl seemed happy enough (at least until we Westerners uploaded her pictures to the Net). Would you be able to take a picture with a smiling face working in a sweatshop and being paid pennies an hour?
Also, I disagree with the notion that sweatshops are bad. Sweatshops may seem bad from our point of view, but the presence of the sweatshop improves the local living standards, by presumably offering better wage than any other local employers—why would anyone work there voluntarily otherwise? Do you really think all those people will be in a better situation if all those shops just packed up and left?
Here, if it was Zelaya doing it (so far, we don't have any concrete evidence to point to who's responsible), he needed an overwhelming support. Remember he keeps repeating that this was nonbinding, i.e. for gathering the opinion of the people. If even a significant minority was opposed to the repeal of term limit, then he couldn't push through the constitution change. He needed an overwhelming support to argue for another referendum which would be binding at that point.
If the Civilization series has taught me anything, it is that even a Warrior or Militia unit is sometimes a match for a Stealth Bomber.
Only if it's grounded. Non-artillery ground-units (or air units with air superiority) cannot attack a plane in flight. And unless the Stealth Bomber is seriously damaged, there's no chance in hell of a Warrior unit defending its attack.
I'm not going to defend Chavez or his cronies, but that doesn't mean we in the west, for want of a better word, haven't been up to our usual dirty tricks.
And I'm not going to accuse an innocent man of murder, but it doesn't mean you in your home, for want of a better word, have no skeletons in your closet.
So far, we have no direct evidence pointing to anyone in the West. Heck, not even indirect evidence, save for the word of a man who is decided anti-West and anti-US. In the absence of any evidence, only a truther would go out to accuse U.S. of wrongdoing.
Of course, this won't help you if there's a house fire. The fireproof hard drives are still darned expensive. Internet-based remote backup is great, if your broadband can handle it.
If your workplace allows it, you can put the second drive at work (presumably some of the files are important for work as well so you can justify it). If not, unless you are a hermit you can find a friend who might be willing to host the drive. If not that, then there are always places which will give you storage for some nominal fee (and unless you start backing up your music collection and DVD collection to it, it won't be so much).
Also, your backups should be snapshot style, going back months or years at least. At least under *nix, this is very easily done with cp -al && rsync method, and I am fairly sure you can use tar-based incremental backup methods under almost any operating system (although this is more pain than snapshot, since you should re-do a full backup every now and then).
BTW, as a sibling post noted, mirroring in real time (or even in delayed time; it just gives you more time to act, not an option to go back) doesn't count as backup. That's what the old adage about RAID not being backup is about.
Mozy is good - it's offsite backup with nice shell integration. Sadly it's Windows only though :(
Er, how could it have shell access if it's "Windows only"?
Oh, or you mean one of those "Windows shells", which is a mere shell of what *nix shells (bash, zsh, etc.) and SSH access are in terms of usability.
Have you considered a career in politics?, as your figures are totally unrealistic for home use.
Don't encourage him! We already have too many terrible politicians far, far removed from reality as it is.
That link to Babula Blog...really, we couldn't find a non-partisan site talking about this event? Instead, we have to read this kind of crap:
You are right.
And I hope you complain about the bias again when someone (inevitably) links to a lefty blog that bashes Bush or some other Republican.
If you are just complaining about right-wing biases, you are hiding your own bias behind a mask of "fairness".
The US has a crazy system where they have "embraced" democracy beyond that which is practical. They vote for far to much. They vote for the local sheriff and the local dog catcher. There are pages and pages of things to vote on the US voting system. It is beyond ridiculous to expect any significant percentage of voters to become aware of all the positions that are voted on.
Er, what's so wrong about voters voting for local sheriff? Do you want a police force that do not answer to the public at all? Do you want no recourse at all when an innocent man gets beaten up by the police? (Yes, you can demand for an investigation, but guess who does the investigation? Your ultimate power lies in the power to vote the sheriff out and get someone else who can reform the system in, in such cases.)
I do agree that we have far too many things to vote for, especially with things like propositions and measures (at least in California), especially on matters we shouldn't have been bothered with, if we had a few legislators with backbones. But as far as public positions go, I don't think I've seen any position on a ballot that I went and thought "Hey, why do I vote for this position? Couldn't this be some unelected, appointed position instead?"
Which is also why we shouldn't develop remote-/self-controlled bomber/fighters that can be massively controlled from a single command center. Machines don't have conscience and will obey any order, even evil ones.
The moment we give up our weapons (either one held by civilians or the military) to centralized control (usually by automation), we are giving up our freedom, and not necessarily via the Skynet scenario.
I'm more worried about when they will appoint themselves as the overseer of RedHat because they represent "systematic risks" that need to be managed—i.e. you are getting too big to fail, so we are going to make sure ... that you fail before that happens.
Well, I mean the prevailing attitudes like this.
Of course, for individual consumer the debate is academic, since there is no way they can try to prosecute a user copying music from one device to another (how are they going to find out?), but regardless of the precedents, the attitude of those in power are not friendly towards activities like that. Their first inclination is to claim as much "right" as possible, and our first inclination is to err on the side of caution.
You: "Your honor I didn't do it. My line was open anyone could have done it."
Them: "Fine, provide us with evidence that it wasn't you."
Fixed that. Assume that you say someone else vandilized your house. You keep your doors locked. There are no signs of forced entry. It seems likely then that you or someone else with access to the house did it. See the problem? Your statement still doesn't exclude you.
I hope we never come to that day. At least for now, most civilized countries have doctrines such as "innocent until proven guilty". It should be up to the prosecutor to provide the evidence which connects you (and not the IP address; some courts already recognized that an IP address cannot be mapped to a single person) to some misdeed, not the other way around.
Also, your analogy misses one crucial feature. Parent said "line was open", which would be like a house with unlocked, wide-open (given that most wireless APs broadcast their SSID) door. Anyone could have gotten in and done something, and it's up to the cops to prove that "anyone" was you.
To reword: our fair use law is very restrictive and doesn't allow for commonly considered fair use cases, such as the right to transfer songs to your ipod from CD. The "fair use" laws we have in the UK are designed for the press and for educational use, not the common people.
The situation in U.S. isn't any better. For one, you are assuming that the "right to transfer songs to your iPod from CD" is fair use under U.S. law. It may well be, but until a lawsuit is brought and litigated, we will never know for sure if it is (and in fact, in a lawsuit some time ago, in a sworn testimony, some music label executive claimed that copying music from CD to your computer is "stealing").
That's the main drawback of fair use in U.S. The law only gives four criteria by which fair use may be determined. But because of the lack of specificity, we only know that a particular use is non-infringing after a precedent-setting lawsuit has been litigated. Most people would rather avoid those costly lawsuits than establish fair use, so they err on the side of caution and in the end, our fair use rights are as weak as yours.
If the person/group trying to crack your system know about these requirements (which isn't hard to find out if you plaster it on the logon screen) it greatly reduces the number of permutations they even have to try. You have basically handed them a filter and said Don't bother looking for anything that doesn't contain the following.....
Er, not really. Breaking 10-char password is takes so much longer time than breaking 6-char through 9-char passwords combined, so for computing the brute force time, you might as well assume that you have 10-char passwords (a sibling post assumes that one has 6-char password but that's just wishful thinking; I think most people have the ability to come up with at least 8-char passwords; at least people who do online banking should).
By having at least one upper case, you essentially require potential crackers to need to look for 52 possible letters for each position (remember: the requirement isn't that you need upper case letter in the first position; it's any position, so you can't really use that to generally rule out bunch of passwords), and by requiring at least one number, you essentially require potential crackers to look for 62 possible alphanumeric choice for each letter (again, the requirement isn't that you should have numbers at the end of passwords or the beginning; even if you assume exact 2 numbers, you don't know where they are), with that, the possible combination, in the optimal case is 62^10, and if it takes 1 second to try one password (which might be true, unless the hacker has access to the password hash), it would take the cracker 27 billion years.
Now, you complained about this specific requirement ruling out certain combinations. How many combinations do you think are ruled out? I haven't actually done the math, statistics, or Monte Carlo, but I'm willing to bet it's fewer than 50%, so the crakcer will now take somewhere around 13 billion years to crack the system instead of 27 billion years.
I think I still feel relatively safe, as long as the hash remains secret.
Do you have to enter your credit card number every time you want to access your computer? No? Well that's why it's in your wallet and not more easily accessible.
If my experience is any indication, it's only the first week or so that's going to be difficult. If you really do have to type that password so often, you would remember it in about one week.
At least I do, but then, I touch-type and apparently an appalling percentage of people around me (less than 50%) do, so perhaps people who don't touch-type won't have as easy time developing finger memory ... but then, if you are an office worker dealing with computer every day who can't touch type ... you are probably not a good worker (I work with scientists with whom typing skill doesn't really rank high in the list of priorities).