81–90 of 120 posts
What is an American Native Indian? That's a new one to me.
Google's stupid name policy is probably their worst idea ever. Interestingly, it's somewhat undone by one of their other bad ideas: merging Youtube and Google+ accounts. Because nobody had a real name for their Youtube account, and suddenly Google creates a bunch of Google+ accounts that nobody asked for and are obviously pseudonyms.
The actual implementation may have been bad but the intent (improve the quality and civility of comments) was not a bad idea and has arguably worked.
> Google, pick up your act. It's getting really old. Frankly, the fact that Elaine Yellow Horse appealed your policy three times and it was only once the media got involved that you did the right thing shows that your staff are either incompetent, or racist. ... My guess is neither. They're probably very smart people, and they may just arrogantly assume that their specification of their algorithms are correct, are co…
It doesn't help that Google simply refuses to let people talk to humans, and anything that doesn't meet with their algorithms is simply banned with no recourse other than to create bad publicity for them.
So, they supposedly know the problem they are creating for Native Americans, so can we assume further occurrences are racist or just more incompetence? Will someone with the last name "Afraid Of Ravens"[3] get their account suspended or not even able to create it in the future?
1) http://www.att.com/Common/about_us/public_policy/ATTLetter_F...
2) http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/10/google-voice-were...
3) it's an actual name if you switch the bird.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's satire. 12. People’s names are case sensitive. 13. People’s names are case insensitive. Edit: Let me explain ... I was responding to the parent post, and that it wasn't meant to be a logic list of rules. Individual points may be true, but the overall tone of the list and post uses humor to explain the complexity of names. 32. People’s names are assigned at birth. 33. OK, maybe not at birth, but at least pretty c…
"It's satire" Absolutely not! Case sensitivity varies amongst countries. One very simple occidental example: in France names are usually written LASTNAME Firstname So if you type Lastname and your DB doesn't normalize the capitalization of names you won't match So for the last name the search is case insensitive but for the first name not so much. Another example is Turkish, where there are two capital I's, one with…
It's even more complicated: they have two letter Is, one with a dot in both lower and uppercase (İ/i) and one dotless (I/ı) in both cases. So any automatic case change needs to take this into account or the letter will get switched. This also make using fonts with fi ligatures problematic.
Try having an apostrophe in your last name. O'Brien, O'Keefe, O'Dell and my fave O'Charley's. It is really simple to accommodate this in software and databases, but the problem is getting worse and worse. The pharmacy can't find my prescription, the cleaners can't find my clothes, my doctor's office can't find my appointment. My passport doesn't match my drivers license. Some of my credit cards have the apostrophe an…
They are neither racist nor incompetent programmers. They simply are a company with little to no customer care culture. I suspect this will bite them in the rear in the future.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I will explain it. Google wants personal identity attached to posts on Google+ people Google thinks that people will value what they say when they are not posting anonymously. Some engineer wrote a thing to try to catch obviously fake names, and some kinds of real names, which actually are attached to real identity, get caught in the filter. They didn't target specific groups of people because they hate them ffs. I a…
It sounds like your understanding of racism is not very nuanced. Explicit statements of racial hatred are the most obvious kind of racism. But that's not where it ends. For example, consider the study "Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal?" [1] They found that resumes with black-sounding names were less employable than the same resumes with white-sounding names. Is that because a large number of…
I've forgotten the multiple names academia has come up with for this situation. But in a nutshell, Google, you are conflating two "problems" you are trying to solve: "True" and "Names".
We could and do debate the merits of these separately. E.g., I think your "true" initiative is kind of full of shit -- based upon my and others' experience on the Web.
But even if you want to and decide to pursue "true", that doesn't give you any authority to judge and decide what is, or isn't, a "name".
Perhaps your overwhelming mountain of data and analysis capabilities might enable you to establish a leading position in some de facto opinions on the matter. But, as the OP example demonstrates, even there you are most obviously failing -- it appears to us, the general public, to be in good part due to a lack of real effort to analytically and functionally back up your "initiative".
So... as a result, once again your "initiative" and "policy" looks to be full of shit.
Just drop it. Treat names like the name qualifier in email -- or I guess that is now, for Google, a field within Contacts: People enter a string, and that's the name. Maybe some subsequent processes try -- more or less successfully -- to parse it into components. But at the base level, it's an arbitrary string.
There, that was simple, wasn't it?
(Now, focus some effort on keeping that name from unintentionally bleeding across properties via Google+, etc.)
They are neither racist nor incompetent programmers. They simply are a company with little to no customer care culture. I suspect this will bite them in the rear in the future.