Password Mandates

OK so I just had to completely revamp my password for some inane mandate that it had to have letters, numbers, and a Capital letter. So I'm pissed off because I couldn't give a fuck if someone figures out my YouTube password, it's a pointless account I only have so I can make comments once in a great while.

My question is simple. Is this shit actually useful? Does it actually stop people from figuring out passwords or is just a hopeless waste of time and brainpower for everyone involved? I can tell you right now that a good 40% of the people I know, when confronted with this mandate, just add a couple symbols to the end of their password rather then making it hard to guess. Does this really stop anyone? If you have a dynamic IP you can just keep adding characters and eventually stumble across the right combo in about 5-10 minutes, and if you have a brain cell left you can probably guess which symbol or number they used by the kind of person they tend towards.

Personally, I have easy, medium, and hard passwords to guess, none of them use this fucking mandate of a letter, a Capital letter, a number, and a symbol(which btw most don't even accept half the ones in your number bar), but I've never had any of my medium or hard passwords cracked. You know why? Because I can randomize better when I don't have to comply to some stupid mandate. You know what else? I've had a password cracked when I had to make one up using this mandate.

So your thoughts?

My youtube password doesnt have this mandate. It is connected to my Gmail, so that's that.

normally if i need a symbol i just put a * in somewhere

I sorta hate these things...



I do find the bar fun though. The one the shows your security.

I despise those.

I have seven different passwords, two of which I'm actively using.

All but one were recieved from sites that automatically randomize you a password. I have yet to be cracked.

The one that was not recieved is fifteen characters long.

hmmm, guys, i have a program, its freeware, dont worry....

http://www.roboform.com/download.html

its the best thing i have in mozilla. i just get in it, go on some site, click a button, log in, go on another site, click a button, log in. its really cool program for these things. basically it manages passwords, adresses, name, job, all those fields that you find tthru out the web. at the click of a button on your top horizontal bar, it fills the fields automatically for you. all you have to do is just edit once and it saves evth. really handy.

Meh, I use Chrome. Although I could probably find it on there.