51–60 of 288 posts
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For what it's worth, programmers do not have the tools to perfectly handle the complexity of human language. It's a hard problem.
A free text entry field would cover almost everyone.
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A family member of mine shares a name with a fairly notorious con artist in the SoCal area, who has been convicted multiple times for a series of increasingly big, elaborate, and bizarre frauds. Their names are just unique enough that many people assume my family member is the criminal. Fortunately, the felon was put away for 30+ years recently, so we hope he won't continue to make local headlines.
Let's just hope that nobody comes to try and "return" your family member to prison.
Breaking computers can be useful. Isaac Asimov had a series of short stories written in the form of conversations between the writer and a friend named George. George claims to have discovered how to summon a demon, and the conversations are about that demon. The demon is not allowed to directly help George, but he will do favors for George's friends. These favors invariably do not turn out good for the friend. Each…
https://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2008/06/data-in-garbage-out....
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And if you are naming kids and want to save them a lot of bureaucracy in their lives, give them short names. I think it depends. Sometimes it's helpful to give them names that are just long enough to make their identities unique, so when they apply for police clearances, for example, they are not mistaken for similarly-named people with criminal records, or even nasty reputations.
I suspect the worst case is when you have a name that is neither common nor unique that you share with someone who is notorious in some manner. I used to know someone who lived in the same city and shared a name with someone who was in the news for some unsavory activity related to a local sports team. He literally had death threat voicemails left on his phone.
My favourite "real world fails to fit the model we've come up with" is Carmel-by-the-Sea, which has many streets that have no addresses: " To this day, there are still no addresses, parking meters or street lights, and no sidewalks outside of Carmel's downtown commercial area. Those seeking directions receive hints such as “fifth house on the east side of Torres Street, green trim, driftwood fence” or by the legendar…
You might be surprised to learn that in India, all addresses are more or less like this. This is due to the fact that we never ended up with the standardised street numbers and names that a lot of other countries have, and road naming is a highly political thing in India, so a lot of people call roads by colloquial names.
A typical address in India goes
- House / Building Name (a lot of bungalows in India have names)
- Locality
- Near [Landmark]
- Possibly another Landmark
- Road Name
- City Name
- Post Code
- State Name
- IndiaEarlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect the worst case is when you have a name that is neither common nor unique that you share with someone who is notorious in some manner. I used to know someone who lived in the same city and shared a name with someone who was in the news for some unsavory activity related to a local sports team. He literally had death threat voicemails left on his phone.
Steve Bartman?
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A free text entry field would cover almost everyone.
Websites that insist on forcing me to enter a first and last name always get abuse in the latter. What I call myself on websites is my business, not yours.
Personally, I don't see why any company is asking for a name if they aren't billing you for something or they aren't a social network.
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For what it's worth, programmers do not have the tools to perfectly handle the complexity of human language. It's a hard problem.
A free text entry field would cover almost everyone.
What language is processing the text? Java? C? JavaScript?
Where is the data going, what is the transmit format, what is the data store?
Answering these questions for ascii text is easier. Answering it for utf-8 is harder. Cobbling something together for a character encoding format that can handle the median human name is challenging.
Breaking computers can be useful. Isaac Asimov had a series of short stories written in the form of conversations between the writer and a friend named George. George claims to have discovered how to summon a demon, and the conversations are about that demon. The demon is not allowed to directly help George, but he will do favors for George's friends. These favors invariably do not turn out good for the friend. Each…
This story is great, I want to checkout the author now! The demon seems less of an actual evil being and more as a person who gets excited about awesome stories, uses ying yang guide the vine of destiny. Maybe half expecting a smile only to see horror. I know this is now the best place for poetry, but this story was very fun to read