Actually, since you normally can't use anything but characters in the 0x20-0x7E range, the 8 char password has much less entropy: 95^8 ~= 6.63E15.

I love the backtick in my passwords. If a website accepts it and doesn't give me any issues, it's a decent indicator of basic security.

Yep, and that's assuming 8 random bytes from extended ASCII. The other point of the article was that nobody actually makes a password from random characters because words are easier to remember. And I think it's disingenuous to suppose people will enter alt-codes and that nonprintable characters would be allowed, so assuming MENSA-quality users with internal random number generators, we get 95^8 ~= 6.6E15, a clear loss of entropy.

yeah thats correct