I'm glad that they are showing "Plato's Stepchildren". That episode made American (and perhaps world) television history with the first inter-racial kiss shown on television(Kirk and Uhura). Shatner was one _lucky_ man. Nichelle Nichols was seriously cute back then.
Exactly. I would mod you up but you are already at 5.
In Chess (also Xiangqi and Weiqi/Go), and I suspect even in warfare, there is an old bit of advice "always assume that your opponent is _at_least_as_ good as you are."
validating a Canadian SIN the process is as follows:
take the SIN (e.g. the one given by Hop: 226-922-896)
Take every other digit and put them into two groups and hold the last digit by itself
group 1 is 2 6 2 8 group 2 is 2 9 2 9 checksum 6
Now add the digits in group 1 ( 2 + 6 + 2 + 8 = 18) and hold this value
Take the digits in group 2 and form a number (2929) and double it ( -> 5858) Add the digits in this sum ( 5 + 8 + 5 + 8 = 26)
Add this sum to the sum of the digits from group 1 ( 26 + 18 = 44)
Add the check digit to the last digit of this value and you should get 10 (6 + 4 = 10) Note that if you get a 0 for the last digit then your check digit is also 0.
Ah, you have also felt that disturbance in the Force.
You too, my friend, saw the original R rated version (violence). The original verison in which my uncle went with me to the theatre during the day so I, as a 10 year old, could go see it.
They stripped out a few scenes (including some slightly nastier scenes in the cantina) to bring it down to PG.
Somehow, I doubt the DVDs will be the original, R rated version.
Granted, this is Slashdot and making comments on the lack of mental capacity of spammers, etc. is normally fair game here, but I strongly suspect that even spammers are not dumb enough to send spam to a.gov address. I know many other forms of malware specifically filter out.gov addresses.
I think that, if anything, it would be more amusing to send emails to OTHER spammer sites... for example, if you receive an email that sends you to v1agr4.com to order the little blue pills, sign up a bunch of email addresses at cial4s.com, for the other pills, etc. Let them spam each other.
In South Carolina it is illegal to talk on a cell phone in a public library. Granted, I've never actually seen anyone arrested for it, but it is very clearly posted on all of the doors and in numerous places throughout the libraries.
Just as in English, where it is common to use "misspellings" to write things quickly, such as "u", "luv", etc, it is also common in Chinese to use homonyms that are easier to write as a "shorthand" for more complex characters. I have seen people do this when writing quick notes, especially waitresses.
Imagine, if you will, the reverse process. I have noticed that others can't get Chinese characters to display properly here, so I won't try. However, the characters for Tiananmen are all relatively simple characters. Perhaps people, for the benefit of our Chinese fellow net-users, could use more complex homonyms (keeping the tones the same for maximum effect / ease to remember) tian1 (1st tone) has two homonyms listed in my dictionary, one meaning light-yellow and the other meaning oppose.
an1 has twelve, two of which are simpler and ten of which are more complex than the "correct" character in this case.
men2 has 5.
If you add syllables with different tones you significantly increase the possibilities.
When I was an undergrad I did my student teaching in the Deaf-Blind unit at Perkins School for the blind, and the normal interface is a multi-line Braille "display" made of small "pins" that would pop up to form the Braille characters. Of those students that would use these devices, they read quite well and normal English would not be a difficulty for them.
We normally communicated with the students using "tactile" sign language, which is essentially American Sign Language with the "listener's" hands resting lightly on the "speaker's" hands. With one partially sighted individual we used "small space" signing, which is basically signing in a very confined space in order not to leave her visual field.
I must agree with several other posters who have suggested carefully worded questions such that they would increase the difficulty for automated systems but still be accessible to human beings. However, we must be careful to consider a few factors:
I hate categorising people, but when dealing with the deaf-blind there is one very important categorisation that plays a role here: when the person became deaf and blind. The important distinction is if the person became deaf and blind BEFORE acquiring language or after. Those who are born deaf and blind tend to have much more difficulty with more complex English language usage than those who became deaf and blind after.
For those who are born deaf and blind, there is a much steeper learning curve for acquiring the language skills needed to handle more complex English sentences. These individuals tend not to be able to function as independently as those who acquired other language skills before becoming deaf and blind. These individuals are more likely to have assistance with them most of the time.
Therefore, I suspect that the previous suggestions to use complex sentences that require responses (such as math problems all in words) would work for about 80% of the individuals in the target population. The other 20% are highly likely to have assistance anyway.
We cannot hope to reach 100% of these individuals. I am sorry, but there is only so much that can be done. Also, they are sure to know someone who can help. These individuals cannot do much in the outside world on their own if they are completely blind and deaf, so they are likely to have someone who is sighted and can hear available to help.
I had a similar experience myself... imagine trying to respond to a CAPTCHA in CHINESE. I had to do this to sign up for a QQ account (the Chinese IM service). I finally had one of my Chinese friends do that part for me because I simply could not figure out some of the characters in the CAPTCHA format.
Another poster put it very clearly, and I paraphrase: We do not always need to look for a high-tech solution. What we need is a solution that works.
As an Amateur Radio Operator I think I may be able to answer this question.
Firstly, there are a fairly large number of licensed operators. Not everyone is active in the hobby, but it is the number of licensed operators that the ARRL (American Radio Relay League -- Amateur Radio's main 'club', so to speak) uses when confronting the FCC and other regulatory bodies (including Congress) about issues that are a concern to Amateur Radio.
Secondly, as previously reported on Slashdot (no, I cannot find the article at the moment) the BPL companies' attempts to "notch out" the part of the BPL signal that interferes with Amateur Radio transmissions have not been very effective.
Thirdly, while BPL is certainly a good idea in theory, and I for one would welcome our new BPL overlords if they can dispose with the interference on the Amateur Radio bands, there are still technical details to work out before it can be used harmoniously in conjunction with existing services, including Amateur Radio.
Remember, Amateur Radio serves a critical role during emergencies to provide communication when other means are not available. If those power lines go down there will be no interference, but what if they are still up and there is a major emergency? Also, many Amateur bands are close to other public service bands. Yes, I know that the police are using cell phones now, but unless there is something that allows the cell towers to give priority to the police phones over my phone they police may be unable to communicate in an emergency.
I know our local ambulance service uses radio. So does our fire service. BPL will interfere with them as well, though not to the same extent because they are shorter range.
A little interference is not such a big deal with shorter range communications like the local fire and ambulance, but when you are trying to push a signal across the country, that small amount of interference is a major issue.
I'm sure I'm going to get flamed for this, but such is life. These are the main issues to the best of my understanding. Again, I would love to see BPL work. I live out in the boonies and I can't even get cable, never mind DSL.
I agree with everything you have in the parent except for your last sentence. Democracy is exactly about majority rule; what you have described (reaching a compromise that maximizes societal welfare) is a Republic, which the United States is supposed to be according to our Constitution.
There has been some very interesting research on this exact topic. Essentially they are utilizing a frequency (as in packets over time) analysis to differentiate DDOS from reflected DOS vs single-source DOS even in light of forged packet headers.
Hussain, A., Heidemann, J., and Papadopoulos, C. (2003). A Framework for Classifying Denial of Service Attakcs. In Proceedings of the 2003 Conference on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communications (p. 99-110) ACM Press.
I arranged it through my 7th grade pre-algebra teacher. She negotiated with the HS Computer instructor to allow us to use the computer, supervised by her, on Tuesday afternoons. Several
of the HS students hung around to tutor us little
Jr.High kids. All in all it was a wonderful experience. I am working full time in the industry now and also pursuing a PhD in CIS. My brother is also working full-time in the industry. All in all I think it worked quite well.
Math teachers are usually supportive of such efforts, especially if you can link the programming back to the math class.
I wish you well in your efforts. I certainly benefitted from starting the club at my Jr.High back in the 70's.
A little history for the curious
Back in the late 1970's my high school had
a DEC PDP-8e on which students were being taught FORTRAN-69, BASIC, and FOCAL (A DEC proprietary language that was actually pretty cool for the 1970's). We had punch card readers and paper tape punches.
This was the beginning of the Melrose (MA) Jr High School Computer Club. Within a month we had a waiting list of students wanting to join (there were limited teletype terminals available).
Few if any colleges will allow one to enter an PhD program without adequate background, but many are willing to entertain allowing a student into a Master's program if you can demonstrate sufficient background or enough that they will let you in under a "provisional" status and then have you take some remedial courses.
It worked for me.:-) I entered an MSc program in CS that way, graduated with a 4.0 and have been accepted into the PhD program.
I have recently purchased a laptop that had XP and the latest MS Works (Works 2000 or something like that) and it does not include Word. The word processor with this version of Works appears to be more closely related to WordPad and does not produce proper word documents.
java exp() and pow() bug
on
Pet Bugs?
·
· Score: 3, Funny
About a year ago I was using the then "Technology Preview" version of Corel Linux while in grad school (I went back to school for a MSc in CIS). While working on my AI project, a neural networking toolkit in Java, I could not get the nets to learn. After over two weeks, and within days of the end of the semester, I was desperate and copied my code onto a floppy and tried it during lunch at the office, and it worked!
I tried it again at home and it failed. Then I tried it on another machine at home and it worked. The bug was in the Linux JVM. The pow() method, which is used by exp() apparently was not completed and returned garbage. I reported the bug to Sun and they indeed fixed the code.
I barely managed to get the project in on time, but still maintained my 4.0.
The moral of the story: if after checking your code and having someone else you trust check your code and neither of you can find anything wrong, it just may be the development or execution tool.
Unfortunately, everyone mentions the use of fingerprints and other biometrics in order to gain services. Some states require fingerprints to be stored for physicians. I honestly do not remember if it was South Carolina or Minnesota since I was licensed in both states at one time (I let my MN license lapse because I never go there). Biometric data are being required to even allow you to obtain certain licenses under the guise of protecting the public by providing a means to identify the license holder. Fingerprints are required for concealed weapons permits as well How much longer do you think it will be before you need to be fingerprinted or submit to a retina scan to get a drivers' license or a marriage license (don't even get me started on the idea of a 'marriage license')?
The back quotes are used in TeX and LaTex to allow you to get the pretty quotes that turn the proper way just like professional printers use (or like you get in most modern word processors).
Research has been done on using lojban as an intermediate language because of its structure that actually makes it more difficult to be ambiguous than to be precise.
Esperanto has also been suggested as an intermediate language for such projects and I suspect that it could be used fairly easily.
The main advantage to this is that we could rely on translation into the neutral intermediate language and then it may facilitate a greater probability of getting a translation into the target language.
The disadvantage is that neither of these languages are ubiquitous. lojban has a few hundred speakers (best guess) while Esperanto has thousands.
From strictly linguistic and technical reasons I would recommend lojban for this task even though I am personally more proficient in Esperanto.
I would like to tap into the collective knowledge of my fellow slashdotters and congratulate the happy couple in as many languages as possible.
In this case I mean spoken languages, though I strongly suspect someone is going to submit something in Perl or Python anyway.:-)
I shall start with Welsh:
Llongyfarchiadau atoch! (Congratulations to y'all)
This is actually fairly simple to a large extent.
It all depends on how many of these numbers we
need at one time.
US SSNs cannot begin with 000, 666, 729-749, or
764-999. (I had to learn this to write a SSN
validator for a personnel project.) That gives
257 prefixes.. let's say 256 and keep 000 invalid
for testing purposes. Now, the remaining six
digits give us 999,999 suffixes (keeping the one
with all zeros invalid for additional tests).
That gives us just under 256 million numbers
(actually 255,999,744). That may do it, especially
if we can find a way to recycle the numbers.
Now unfortunately we cannot use this to give
EVERYONE a number, as the US population according
to the US Census bureau's census clock is somewhere around 285 million, but how many of those have drivers licenses?
In South Carolina our drivers license numbers
look like SSNs and my number very well could be a valid SSN since it begins with 004, but it is
specifically NOT your SSN. In fact, they used to be only seven digits (which is why the first two digits on mine are zeros) but they added the extra to to make it able to conform to the pattern of a SSN.
As much as I do not like the idea of a national ID or national drivers licence, it seems fairly simple to implement the number assignments. Preventing forgeries, however, is another story.
First, I would echo that any completed degree is better than no degree.
Next, I would like to thank the professor for his/her input into the discussion. However, I would like to respectfully suggest that either CIS programmes are not as uniform in scope as CS programmes are or that his/her understanding of a CIS degree is somewhat in error.
A MIS degree is a management degree with some programming and technical information added to allow the graduate to have an understanding of the technology and personnel to be managed.
A CIS degree is a technical degree that emphasises applications of technology to business problems. In other words, a CS degree with an emphasis on business problems as opposed to things like compiler design or OS design.
The CS degree is a technical degree that is more concerned with "pure" computer science and has less emphasis on business applications.
Most of the courses for the CIS and CS degrees are the same, taught by the same professors and often with mixed classes of students. In my AI class we had both CS and CIS students in the same class. The CS students were given different problem sets. I did both problem sets anyway and "complained" to the professor that the CS students were getting all of the fun exercises.
The moral of the story: While MIS and CS seem fairly well defined, CIS appears to be a grey area and can vary widely between essentially an MIS degree with more programming to a CS degree with an emphasis on business-type problems (as is the case at NSU). Check your university literature to be sure.
Also, in my case my employer would not pay for a CS degree but would pay for a CIS degree because of the direct application to my job.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm glad that they are showing "Plato's Stepchildren". That episode made American (and perhaps world) television history with the first inter-racial kiss shown on television(Kirk and Uhura). Shatner was one _lucky_ man. Nichelle Nichols was seriously cute back then.
Exactly. I would mod you up but you are already at 5.
In Chess (also Xiangqi and Weiqi/Go), and I suspect even in warfare, there is an old bit of advice "always assume that your opponent is _at_least_as_ good as you are."
This should apply here, as well.
US SSN's can't begin with
000
666
729-749
764-999
validating a Canadian SIN
the process is as follows:
take the SIN (e.g. the one given by Hop: 226-922-896)
Take every other digit and put them into two groups and hold the last digit by itself
group 1 is 2 6 2 8
group 2 is 2 9 2 9
checksum 6
Now add the digits in group 1 ( 2 + 6 + 2 + 8 = 18) and hold this value
Take the digits in group 2 and form a number (2929) and double it ( -> 5858)
Add the digits in this sum ( 5 + 8 + 5 + 8 = 26)
Add this sum to the sum of the digits from group 1 ( 26 + 18 = 44)
Add the check digit to the last digit of this value and you should get 10 (6 + 4 = 10)
Note that if you get a 0 for the last digit then your check digit is also 0.
Ah, you have also felt that disturbance in the Force.
You too, my friend, saw the original R rated version (violence). The original verison in which my uncle went with me to the theatre during the day so I, as a 10 year old, could go see it.
They stripped out a few scenes (including some slightly nastier scenes in the cantina) to bring it down to PG.
Somehow, I doubt the DVDs will be the original, R rated version.
Granted, this is Slashdot and making comments on the lack of mental capacity of spammers, etc. is normally fair game here, but I strongly suspect that even spammers are not dumb enough to send spam to a .gov address. I know many other forms of malware specifically filter out .gov addresses.
I think that, if anything, it would be more amusing to send emails to OTHER spammer sites... for example, if you receive an email that sends you to v1agr4.com to order the little blue pills, sign up a bunch of email addresses at cial4s.com, for the other pills, etc. Let them spam each other.
Sir Winston Churchill.
In South Carolina it is illegal to talk on a cell phone in a public library. Granted, I've never actually seen anyone arrested for it, but it is very clearly posted on all of the doors and in numerous places throughout the libraries.
Just as in English, where it is common to use "misspellings" to write things quickly, such as "u", "luv", etc, it is also common in Chinese to use homonyms that are easier to write as a "shorthand" for more complex characters. I have seen people do this when writing quick notes, especially waitresses.
Imagine, if you will, the reverse process. I have noticed that others can't get Chinese characters to display properly here, so I won't try. However, the characters for Tiananmen are all relatively simple characters. Perhaps people, for the benefit of our Chinese fellow net-users, could use more complex homonyms (keeping the tones the same for maximum effect / ease to remember) tian1 (1st tone) has two homonyms listed in my dictionary, one meaning light-yellow and the other meaning oppose.
an1 has twelve, two of which are simpler and ten of which are more complex than the "correct" character in this case.
men2 has 5.
If you add syllables with different tones you significantly increase the possibilities.
When I was an undergrad I did my student teaching in the Deaf-Blind unit at Perkins School for the blind, and the normal interface is a multi-line Braille "display" made of small "pins" that would pop up to form the Braille characters. Of those students that would use these devices, they read quite well and normal English would not be a difficulty for them.
We normally communicated with the students using "tactile" sign language, which is essentially American Sign Language with the "listener's" hands resting lightly on the "speaker's" hands. With one partially sighted individual we used "small space" signing, which is basically signing in a very confined space in order not to leave her visual field.
I must agree with several other posters who have suggested carefully worded questions such that they would increase the difficulty for automated systems but still be accessible to human beings. However, we must be careful to consider a few factors:
I hate categorising people, but when dealing with the deaf-blind there is one very important categorisation that plays a role here: when the person became deaf and blind. The important distinction is if the person became deaf and blind BEFORE acquiring language or after. Those who are born deaf and blind tend to have much more difficulty with more complex English language usage than those who became deaf and blind after.
For those who are born deaf and blind, there is a much steeper learning curve for acquiring the language skills needed to handle more complex English sentences. These individuals tend not to be able to function as independently as those who acquired other language skills before becoming deaf and blind. These individuals are more likely to have assistance with them most of the time.
Therefore, I suspect that the previous suggestions to use complex sentences that require responses (such as math problems all in words) would work for about 80% of the individuals in the target population. The other 20% are highly likely to have assistance anyway.
We cannot hope to reach 100% of these individuals. I am sorry, but there is only so much that can be done. Also, they are sure to know someone who can help. These individuals cannot do much in the outside world on their own if they are completely blind and deaf, so they are likely to have someone who is sighted and can hear available to help.
I had a similar experience myself... imagine trying to respond to a CAPTCHA in CHINESE. I had to do this to sign up for a QQ account (the Chinese IM service). I finally had one of my Chinese friends do that part for me because I simply could not figure out some of the characters in the CAPTCHA format.
Another poster put it very clearly, and I paraphrase: We do not always need to look for a high-tech solution. What we need is a solution that works.
As an Amateur Radio Operator I think I may be able to answer this question.
Firstly, there are a fairly large number of licensed operators. Not everyone is active in the hobby, but it is the number of licensed operators that the ARRL (American Radio Relay League -- Amateur Radio's main 'club', so to speak) uses when confronting the FCC and other regulatory bodies (including Congress) about issues that are a concern to Amateur Radio.
Secondly, as previously reported on Slashdot (no, I cannot find the article at the moment) the BPL companies' attempts to "notch out" the part of the BPL signal that interferes with Amateur Radio transmissions have not been very effective.
Thirdly, while BPL is certainly a good idea in theory, and I for one would welcome our new BPL overlords if they can dispose with the interference on the Amateur Radio bands, there are still technical details to work out before it can be used harmoniously in conjunction with existing services, including Amateur Radio.
Remember, Amateur Radio serves a critical role during emergencies to provide communication when other means are not available. If those power lines go down there will be no interference, but what if they are still up and there is a major emergency? Also, many Amateur bands are close to other public service bands. Yes, I know that the police are using cell phones now, but unless there is something that allows the cell towers to give priority to the police phones over my phone they police may be unable to communicate in an emergency.
I know our local ambulance service uses radio. So does our fire service. BPL will interfere with them as well, though not to the same extent because they are shorter range.
A little interference is not such a big deal with shorter range communications like the local fire and ambulance, but when you are trying to push a signal across the country, that small amount of interference is a major issue.
I'm sure I'm going to get flamed for this, but such is life. These are the main issues to the best of my understanding. Again, I would love to see BPL work. I live out in the boonies and I can't even get cable, never mind DSL.
I agree with everything you have in the parent except for your last sentence. Democracy is exactly about majority rule; what you have described (reaching a compromise that maximizes societal welfare) is a Republic, which the United States is supposed to be according to our Constitution.
Hussain, A., Heidemann, J., and Papadopoulos, C. (2003). A Framework for Classifying Denial of Service Attakcs. In Proceedings of the 2003 Conference on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communications (p. 99-110) ACM Press.
I arranged it through my 7th grade pre-algebra teacher. She negotiated with the HS Computer instructor to allow us to use the computer, supervised by her, on Tuesday afternoons. Several of the HS students hung around to tutor us little Jr.High kids. All in all it was a wonderful experience. I am working full time in the industry now and also pursuing a PhD in CIS. My brother is also working full-time in the industry. All in all I think it worked quite well.
Math teachers are usually supportive of such efforts, especially if you can link the programming back to the math class.
I wish you well in your efforts. I certainly benefitted from starting the club at my Jr.High back in the 70's.
A little history for the curious
Back in the late 1970's my high school had a DEC PDP-8e on which students were being taught FORTRAN-69, BASIC, and FOCAL (A DEC proprietary language that was actually pretty cool for the 1970's). We had punch card readers and paper tape punches.
This was the beginning of the Melrose (MA) Jr High School Computer Club. Within a month we had a waiting list of students wanting to join (there were limited teletype terminals available).
It worked for me.
Yes, I have.
:-(
It is available under a rather restrictive NDA.
I signed the NDA before I knew much about OpenSource or Linux.
Fortunately it only applies to OS-level (in the more traditional sense) related code so I can at least continue my research.
Cheers.
I have recently purchased a laptop that had XP and the latest MS Works (Works 2000 or something like that) and it does not include Word. The word processor with this version of Works appears to be more closely related to WordPad and does not produce proper word documents.
I tried it again at home and it failed. Then I tried it on another machine at home and it worked. The bug was in the Linux JVM. The pow() method, which is used by exp() apparently was not completed and returned garbage. I reported the bug to Sun and they indeed fixed the code.
I barely managed to get the project in on time, but still maintained my 4.0.
The moral of the story: if after checking your code and having someone else you trust check your code and neither of you can find anything wrong, it just may be the development or execution tool.
Unfortunately, everyone mentions the use of fingerprints and other biometrics in order to gain services. Some states require fingerprints to be stored for physicians. I honestly do not remember if it was South Carolina or Minnesota since I was licensed in both states at one time (I let my MN license lapse because I never go there). Biometric data are being required to even allow you to obtain certain licenses under the guise of protecting the public by providing a means to identify the license holder. Fingerprints are required for concealed weapons permits as well How much longer do you think it will be before you need to be fingerprinted or submit to a retina scan to get a drivers' license or a marriage license (don't even get me started on the idea of a 'marriage license')?
The back quotes are used in TeX and LaTex to allow you to get the pretty quotes that turn the proper way just like professional printers use (or like you get in most modern word processors).
I still find myself doing it from time to time.
Thus, the lower frequencies in the voice help insure that the robot's voice will be more likely to be heard by more people.
Research has been done on using lojban as an
intermediate language because of its structure that actually makes it more difficult to be ambiguous than to be precise.
Esperanto has also been suggested as an intermediate language for such projects and I suspect that it could be used fairly easily.
The main advantage to this is that we could rely on translation into the neutral intermediate language and then it may facilitate a greater probability of getting a translation into the target language.
The disadvantage is that neither of these languages are ubiquitous. lojban has a few hundred speakers (best guess) while Esperanto has thousands.
From strictly linguistic and technical reasons I would recommend lojban for this task even though I am personally more proficient in Esperanto.
Congratulations, Rob and Kathleen!
:-)
I would like to tap into the collective knowledge of my fellow slashdotters and congratulate the happy couple in as many languages as possible.
In this case I mean spoken languages, though I strongly suspect someone is going to submit something in Perl or Python anyway.
I shall start with Welsh:
Llongyfarchiadau atoch! (Congratulations to y'all)
Cheers,
-Q
On a minor note, you sig should read:
Cogito cogitare, ergo cogito esse.
I think that I think, therefore I think that I am.
You need to use the subjunctive there. :-)
This may also be the first post in Slashdot history where somone's Latin grammar was corrected :-)
US SSNs cannot begin with 000, 666, 729-749, or 764-999. (I had to learn this to write a SSN validator for a personnel project.) That gives 257 prefixes.. let's say 256 and keep 000 invalid for testing purposes. Now, the remaining six digits give us 999,999 suffixes (keeping the one with all zeros invalid for additional tests). That gives us just under 256 million numbers (actually 255,999,744). That may do it, especially if we can find a way to recycle the numbers.
Now unfortunately we cannot use this to give EVERYONE a number, as the US population according to the US Census bureau's census clock is somewhere around 285 million, but how many of those have drivers licenses?
In South Carolina our drivers license numbers look like SSNs and my number very well could be a valid SSN since it begins with 004, but it is specifically NOT your SSN. In fact, they used to be only seven digits (which is why the first two digits on mine are zeros) but they added the extra to to make it able to conform to the pattern of a SSN.
As much as I do not like the idea of a national ID or national drivers licence, it seems fairly simple to implement the number assignments. Preventing forgeries, however, is another story.
Next, I would like to thank the professor for his/her input into the discussion. However, I would like to respectfully suggest that either CIS programmes are not as uniform in scope as CS programmes are or that his/her understanding of a CIS degree is somewhat in error.
At Nova Southeastern University's Graduate School of Computer and Information Sciences, where I am about to complete my MSc in CIS, the differences are explained as follows (and I paraphrase):
A MIS degree is a management degree with some programming and technical information added to allow the graduate to have an understanding of the technology and personnel to be managed.
A CIS degree is a technical degree that emphasises applications of technology to business problems. In other words, a CS degree with an emphasis on business problems as opposed to things like compiler design or OS design.
The CS degree is a technical degree that is more concerned with "pure" computer science and has less emphasis on business applications.
Most of the courses for the CIS and CS degrees are the same, taught by the same professors and often with mixed classes of students. In my AI class we had both CS and CIS students in the same class. The CS students were given different problem sets. I did both problem sets anyway and "complained" to the professor that the CS students were getting all of the fun exercises.
The moral of the story: While MIS and CS seem fairly well defined, CIS appears to be a grey area and can vary widely between essentially an MIS degree with more programming to a CS degree with an emphasis on business-type problems (as is the case at NSU). Check your university literature to be sure.
Also, in my case my employer would not pay for a CS degree but would pay for a CIS degree because of the direct application to my job.