slightly OT: preventing user stupidity

[Bill Vermillion]

Shakespeare wrote plays and sonnets that will last an eternity, 
but on Tue, Feb 08 09:00 , Nancy Palmquist wrote:" 

[mucho deletia]

> You can not protect the user from all the stupidity.

My problem has often been protecting the computers/application
from stupid users.

...

> I used to have an idiot that would print checks for payables
> and select the wrong dates, he would pay too much stuff, so I
> added date checks to make sure everything was so many days old,
> and that the date he typed to be the check date was within 7
> days of the computer date.

And do you do anything to make sure the 'computer date' is
the correct real-world date?   I would suggest that perhaps
on startup the application perfrom a check against real-world
time servers.  

I've had more than one instance of having to painfully fix things
when someone had a wrong date in a computer.  I NEVER want to have
to go through that again.

I've also missed email when someone has rebooted their access
machine [not the server] and had the wrong date.  I found their
mail a few weeks later at the bottom of my saved-to-read-later
list of email.

Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com