We has a similar problem with student ids at the local school public
district. Each student was assigned the next 4 character string starting
with AAAA and ending with ZZZZ (AAAA, AAAB, AAAC,...). While I was
there, we actually "rolled over" back to AAAA. Over the years, the
exclusion list had been built by printing off the next group (when they
were needed) and letting all the programmers mark any words they thought
was 'offensive'. Of course, many were missed, but parents let us know.
:-) There were about 60,000 students each year, but each kid kept his id
'forever'. It took many years to 'roll over', but when it did, everybody
thought we did not need to review the id's anymore since we had caught
all the bad ones. Not ture! The language had changed and there were a
lot of "new" bad 4 letter words.
As a side note, our cafeteria used 3 digit numbers unique to each
school. One of my children was "666" as long as she was in grades k-5. I
always wondered if any of the cafeteria workers ever called her the
'devil girl'? :-)
Tony Thigpen
-----Original Message -----
From: Rob van der Heij
Sent: 07/13/2011 04:15 AM
On Wed, Jul 13, 2011 at 9:34 AM, Gregg<reed.gr...@gmail.com> wrote:
entries which would generate 'cute' 6 character responses..
I recall someone telling at SHARE that the list of "forbidden" 6-char
PNRs was extended on a regular basis, and that these changes made good
conversation at lunch to determine who would find them offensive for
what reason... ;-)
In NL there were similar concerns when our car license plate scheme
went to 00-XXX-0 (for the curious foreigners, some English 4-letter
words take just 3 in Dutch). For starters, we dropped the vowels. Then
dropped the offensive words that look like someone just dropped the
vowels out of it. And dropped the abbreviations for offensive sayings,
and company names, etc... No surprise we run out of this name space
pretty quick.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_registration_plates_of_the_Netherlands
Rob
