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I often use the same password for sites I don't really care about. This does not mean I use the same password on my work / banking / eBay / paypal accounts.

This might explain why so many people used the same password for Gawker and SonyPictures.

I think this should be the main point. The sites you care about (email, facebook) should have a unique password. The sites that don't matter can have a login with your common password.

This is much more reasonable than asking everybody to remember 50 unique passwords.

Not quite - it's actually TWO THIRDS that used identical passwords. Nasty.

Correct, thank you!

And you have to take into account that (as he also mentions) these dbs came out in a different time. Which might skew results quite a bit. They could have been changed in the meantime. When you get a password database you want to know how many passwords are the same at that precise moment...