No password rules...please. (opens in new tab)

This is horrible advice given the threat model for either normal home users (at risk due to mass attacks/brute force, or MAYBE losing a wallet/unlocked phone/laptop with keys saved locally) or most corporate environments.

The solution in both cases is a move toward single sign on, using a password manager or a key or 2fa or federated login system (Kerberos, FB connect).

Enforcing minimum complexity requirements (and policies like no username as password, etc) protects the user and site. If a site has 10% of users with trivial passwords, even if it is just a commenting section on a blog, the site itself is at risk. Combine this with the propensity of users to globally reuse passwords, and everyone is kind of doomed. Passwords must die, but requiring a minimum level of passwords, and encouraging people to use passwords as safely as possible as an interim measure, is the only reasonable course of action.

One must think who the most likely person would be that would a) want access and b) try to break in... is it an anonymous hacker across the internet or a co-worker trying to sabotage? This is why "post-it noting passwords" is bad. Most computers/systems don't really have information that hackers want, other than to zombie a machine. This isn't to say we shouldn't worry about exposing our computers with quickly cracked passwords, we should protect all vectors into our systems but realize forcing strong need to "post-it note passwords" drastically increases the likelihood of an internal rat/mole.

For home use, I'm not sure what's wrong with a post-it...

(Not talking about a bank password here).

Right, the use of numbers is not necessary. For example, I could publicly advertise that my password for a particular site consisted of exactly six words chosen randomly from the word list at http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html .

People would be free to attack it at will, but it wouldn't do much good because that password contains approximately 78 bits of entropy. The attack would be slow enough offline (for example if they somehow possessed a bcrypt hash of my passphrase), but far slower online (if they had to send each guess across the internet one by one).

I could of course cleverly substitute some digits here and there, which would make my public declaration a lie. I suppose some "security through obscurity" can help, though I could have accomplished just as much if not more by simply using seven words instead of six.