Or you could just go with ditching the use of passwords all together, they have always been one of the weakest links in security, a much better option would be to make use of biometrics and there are some decent devices now available which can actually make this practical. Smartcrards/ tokens are also useful. Get away from just going with what someone knows and make use of something they have or something they are.

In practice the majority of users will choose a simple to remeber password or think that they have increased the security greatly by subsitiuting a letter for a number, e.g. password becomes passw0rd, its still easy to crack and actually creates a false sense of security that does more bad then good.

Single sign on systems can help get around the need to remeber lots of username/password combinations, but if you use a password for those you still have a very weak protection mechanism in place.