
Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names - philwelch
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
======
Vivtek
This is almost as bad as the address question.

I go by my middle name (my parents thoughtfully gave me my father's first name
and even _middle initial_ , which has caused no end of confusion for many a
credit bureau over the years). Unfortunately, the State of Indiana's birth
certificate system assumes beyond any possibility of override that (1)
everybody with children has a first name, (2) that first name has no spaces in
it, and (3) the middle name is insignificant. So my kids' birth certificates
have my dad's names on them as the father.

But hey, who am I, a mere parent, to say what my name is?

The real world is full of organic detail that is difficult or perhaps
impossible to capture in full in a software system. A name should be just a
string. If there are business requirements for sorting or name-of-address
(e.g. "Dear Mr. Jones") they should be done with heuristics, with human
intervention invoked in sticky situations if necessary. Sure, it's difficult,
but you know, a hundred years ago that stuff was _all_ done on an individual
case-by-case basis by human beings; if your business assumption is that it
can't be done cheaply enough without eliminating human intervention, perhaps
you should rethink your assumptions.

Otherwise, _let me assure you_ you're irritating every customer whose name
doesn't meet your arbitrary rules - in exactly the same way that Google pisses
off everybody who needs human support. Everybody thinks _that_ sucks. So at
least you should get people's names right, using human intervention if you
have to. (And addresses, too, but we just had an extended thread about that,
like last month.)

~~~
gisenberg
On the topic of address questions, I went through a form on Fidelity that
disallowed post office boxes from being supplied as an address. At the time, I
lived on Newport Way, and the "po" in Newport qualified as a PO box.

So, for a while, I lived on Newp0rt Way.

~~~
rmc
In many countries in Africa, the postal service doesn't do delieveries to
people's houses. Every address is a "PO BOX ...."

------
njharman
Falsehoods users believe about my programs/service.

1) A simple, ascii A-Za-z0-9_ identifier unique to program/service is not
required to use my program/service.

1a) My program/service cares deeply about your real world name and all it's
nuances and variations. It requires full and complete understanding of your
name rather than just a simple authentication mechanism.

2) My program/service will correctly handle the worlds naming conventions
past, present, and future to the exclusion of other features / actually
shipping some day.

3) Instead of following 80/20 "rule", my program/service will names 100%
perfect!

4) My program/service will cater to all languages/cultures/subcultures/niches
past, present, and future rather than any sort of target audience.

~~~
pyre
What about when your program/service is something where identity matters, like
for a credit bureau, a government agency or even a retailer?

Just read the complaints here about airliners screwing up people's names by
assuming that everything is ASCII/LATIN1/MISC_CHARSET. That makes a difference
when you get to the airport and they won't let you on the plane because your
ticket and your id don't match.

It's also an easily solvable problem. Just include a 'name' field. Make sure
that it's sanitized correctly and supports UTF-8 (make sure that your database
is properly set up to use UTF-8 as well, or else all manner of problems can
happen, least of all queries will get bogged down as the database does charset
conversions for string comparisons). If you care so little about the user's
name, then why bother to have separate firstname/lastname fields?

{edit} With respect to the 'other complaints,' I was referring to the comments
on this story: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1438355> (The story which
is what Patrick's post was in response to).

~~~
MichaelSalib
_Just read the complaints here about airliners screwing up people's names by
assuming that everything is ASCII/LATIN1/MISC_CHARSET._

Having worked in the airline industry, I can tell you, this is not a case of
airlines making a poor assumption. Airline systems are generally incapable of
dealing with ASCII, let alone Unicode text. They typically use EBCDIC. That's
why you never see lower case characters in your name on a boarding pass.

 _That makes a difference when you get to the airport and they won't let you
on the plane because your ticket and your id don't match._

Does this actually happen? Because given the fact that airlines have been
incapable of printing names that don't can't be described by EBCDIC since,
well, forever, I'd assume that they're willing to ignore cases where the name
on your ID contains characters that their computer system literally cannot
represent.

~~~
pyre
> _Does this actually happen? Because given the fact that airlines have been
> incapable of printing names that don't can't be described by EBCDIC since,
> well, forever, I'd assume that they're willing to ignore cases where the
> name on your ID contains characters that their computer system literally
> cannot represent._

Do the screeners know to this? I'm willing to bet that a screener would deny
you based on a name mis-match. What do the screeners know of EBCDIC?

~~~
MichaelSalib
There are two classes of people who can deny you access to aircraft: (1)
airline employees (gate agents, check in agents) and (2) TSA inspectors. No
one at an airport will know anything about EBCDIC, but every single airline
employee will know about the fact that they're crappy mainframe system isn't
smart enough to handle uppercase characters, let alone spaces, hyphens,
umlauts, accents, etc.

As for TSA staff, it is important to realize that this EBCDIC issue is not a
problem that only affects one airline: it affects almost every single airline,
including all flag carriers that I know of. The airlines have a pretty tight
working relationship with TSA; note that they send electronic messages to the
TSA describing their customers when people book tickets and just before
departure so as to give the TSA the opportunity to prevent them from flying.
Given that tight relationship, I'm pretty sure that the TSA knows a great deal
about the limitations of EBCDIC and has informed their staff about the limits
of what a boarding pass name field can possibly represent.

Keep in mind that screeners will let you fly even if you have no ID on you.

~~~
mrduncan
Well said.

Anecdotally, I've never had issues with tickets that had my partial name on
them in the past either ("Matt" vs. "Matthew") although this may have changed
now that TSA requires full names and birthdays (I always use my full name
now).

------
edw519
Oh Patrick, as usual you got me to thinking. Then it hit me: the "Name" issue
isn't that much different from the "SKU" issue. (SKU is short for Stock
Keeping Unit, aka Part Number or Product Number). I have had to deal with this
everywhere that has SKUs. No one does it well, but by slowing down and
thinking about it, there's almost always a decent solution.

There are 2 ways to assign SKUs, sequentially (start with "1" and increment 1
for every new SKU) or not sequentially. I have never seen anyone do it
sequentially. (Although some excellent systems keep 2 SKUs, one of which _is_
sequential and is used as the primary key and for all indexing. This is the
best way I've ever seen to handle SKUs that change, but that's another story.)

Almost everyone wants a smart or semi-smart SKU. So that by simply looking at
the SKU, anyone can tell what it is without reading the description. You know,
the first digit is Commodity Code, 1 for shoes, 2 for pants, etc. Then another
digit for color, another for size, etc. This works well until you have ten
colors; then you need 2 digits or alphas.

But wait, there's more. Let's put hyphens (or some other delimitter) between
the product descriptors and the vendor data, manufacturer data, and customer
data.

So now you've covered any possible product with your super slick smart SKU
naming system.

Until something comes along that isn't covered. (Now we have military items
with 14 other considerations.) So we come up we a second totally different
scheme. Then a third. Then a 4th, etc. So now you can tell anything about an
item _if you know which scheme_ it falls under.

But wait, there's more. You should be able to enter any SKU into a form field
_regardless of Smart SKU scheme_. (If the first digit is "9", then use Smart
Scheme 3. If there's a hyphen in position 3, then use Smart Scheme 8, etc.)
Your form logic should be able to intelligently guide the user based on the
rules of the template or scheme.

I have built apps where users can design and build their own Smart SKU
templates, which are then used to enforce compliance and guide operators.
These have generally worked pretty well.

Is there some way to do the same thing for human names? I dunno, but now you
got me to thinking about it. A combination of standard templates and custom
templates oughta cover most possibilities. Some basic logic with optional pop-
up forms which uses the templates as parameters should work. Something to
think about...

~~~
bruceboughton
Actually, this sounds like more of a problem. It's a name... Just give the
user a free text field.

~~~
coderdude
Which does you no good if you need the specific components of that person's
name. That is the issue with using a free text field for addresses.

~~~
bruceboughton
The whole point of the article is that there is no such thing as the specific
components of the person's name... that is the assumption that is wrong. A
person's name is whatever they or their parents chose. You cannot reliably
derive meaning from any part of it.

------
Nekojoe
A question mark can be part of your name -

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8206280.stm>

Certain characters like the defunct yogh have had issues in Unicode -

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogh>

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4595228.stm>

Some names can be changed if they're cruel or too unconventional -

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7522952.stm>

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6939112.stm>

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/6937327.stm>

~~~
kroger
For those confused what an article about zombies (first link) has to do with
questions marks in one's name, here's the relevant quote:

"Professor Robert Smith? (the question mark is part of his surname and not a
typographical mistake)"

~~~
kroger
And, of course, his name looks funny when someone is asking a question:

"Is that you Professor Robert Smith??"

And I wonder if he introduces himself as "Robert Smith Question Mark" ;-)

~~~
mattm
I wonder how you pronounce ?. Is it a click like Zulu or do you just have a
rising intonation?

~~~
epochwolf
Rising intonation gets my vote. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTbrIo1p-So>
(Tim? the Enchanter)

------
vidarh
I have an uncle that has one name on his birth certificate, one on his
passport and uses a third - all different spellings of his first name.

Particularly confusing to people when his passport has the name spelled one
way and signed another.

Nobody has been able to get a straight story from him about _why_.

~~~
wisty
Then there's William Shakespeare, who spelled his name about 8 (IIRC)
different ways. I guess it was a mark of pride for a literary man to be able
to write his name however he wanted to, while less educated folk would have to
write their names from memory.

------
danh
For a good illustration of the possible weirdness of names, see
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso>

~~~
mseebach
A contemporary example: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl-
Theodor_zu_Guttenberg>

~~~
danh
Even more contemporary is young Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116
(pronounced Albin): <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_law_in_Sweden>

------
pmjordan
This is all very interesting (and even humorous), but I'd appreciate something
more constructive. How do we implement a name field on a website in spite of
all this weirdness?

~~~
jpr
Huh, isn't it obvious? Accept anything as a name.

~~~
smackfu
And then when you get a business requirement to sort by last name, tell them
"there is no such thing as last names."

Then when they finish laughing, hack up some system to split the single name
field that doesn't work very well.

(It gets even worse when you have unusual sorting rules that really only apply
to Western names, like treating Mc and Mac the same.)

~~~
patio11
True story: I once told a customer that their requirement to "sort by last
name" was likely impossible to satisfy without reworking the system, given
what I knew about their user base. It turned out that I was right: the
majority of their staff was Japanese, who expect Japanese lexicographic sort.
However, they also had visiting professors from overseas, who largely could
not understand Japanese lexicographic sort. (There are actually two common
lexicographic sorts in Japanese, based on two ways to order the sounds of
Japanese. We use the "table of fifty sounds" method, under which Tanaka comes
after Aki but before Sato.)

My customers said "Fine, alright, _two_ sort features. One for Japanese, one
for foreigners."

They were less than happy when I told them that foreigners haven't agreed on
lexicographic sort, either. (To use one example I'm familiar with, in Spanish,
"ch" is one letter, so Chisako comes after Consuela.)

Oh, there is a separate right way to order prefectures. (Which I learned about
in an email from a coworker saying "Patrick, come on, use some _common sense_
next time. Have you ever seen prefectures listed lexicographically before?!")

~~~
suninwinter
In Spanish, at least, the ch is no longer considered as a separate letter for
sorting. It is still a separate letter in lists.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch_(digraph)#Collation>

~~~
huherto
Yeah, that was an interesting adaptation from the Spanish language academy to
the use of computers. At the time there was some public debate similar to the
"pluto is no longer a planet".

------
JoeAltmaier
And the hated "Its ok to hash names into a 32-bit table, and then tell the
user "Stieg Eugene Janakowski is already in use"

------
olliesaunders
Can anyone explain some of the more esoteric points on this list? Like
"People’s names are all mapped in Unicode code points", for instance.

~~~
alextp
I think he meant the musician formerly known as Prince for this one.

~~~
LogicHoleFlaw
Well, once again known as Prince, anyways.

~~~
smallblacksun
The artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as Prince.

------
GFischer
Some countries, like mine (Uruguay), have a unique identifier for people - in
Uruguay it's called "Cédula de Identidad" which would translate to Identity
Card.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_document>

It even has a nice check digit.

But even that breaks in some cases :) so Patio's point applies.

Still, it makes building local-only apps easier.

~~~
techsupporter
Some case #46c: The person is a citizen of a country with a national identity
card, yet resides in another country wherein he or she has lost that identity
card, cannot return to the country of citizenship to replace said identity
card, and country of citizenship will not replace the identity card outside of
that country.

:)

(Hello, fellow Uruguayan)

------
brlewis
For the admiration of your peers, identify the subset of this set of
assumptions embodied in the "Leave a Reply" form at the bottom of the article.

~~~
patio11
Yeah, I concede, Wordpress has buggy name validation logic for the SQL
injection boxes.

------
JoeAltmaier
Miss Manners says "People's names are spelled and pronounced exactly as they
say they are"

~~~
tomjen3
Yeah, but if it can't be expressed as unicode you are not going to be able to
use it on my system.

And I am not even going to say sorry.

~~~
pyre
Does this mean that you view Unicode as perfect and encompassing of all the
characters currently in use in the world?

~~~
ars
Makes no difference. You have to work with what you have. It's not like the
programmer can do anything about it.

~~~
pyre
There's a difference between working with what you have, and blaming people
for using the 'wrong' characters in their name. From the post I was replying
to:

    
    
      > And I am not even going to say sorry.
    

With comments like this, one comes off as a douche, which isn't exactly going
to engender trust with potential customers/clients. Whether it's 'your' fault
or not, how you deal with your potential customers/clients is what really
matters.

------
wisty
++ People's last name is their "family name".

++ People's first name is their "family name".

++ People have first names and last names.

~~~
coderdude
>>People's first name is their "family name".

I may be mistaken but I believe this is true in Vietnam (and probably other
countries as well).

~~~
NickPollard
The point he is making is that people make one assumption or the other,
deepending on the culture in which they live, when actually it varies.

In the western world, we assume that someone's family name is their last name.
In countries such as Korea, people assume that someone's family name is their
first name.

Either assumption can be wrong if you're dealing with international customers.
Some people might not even _have_ a family name.

~~~
coderdude
Just so it's clear, I'm not refuting what he said but rather supporting it
with a tidbit from my memory, as you have done as well. :)

------
DrJokepu
No, these are falsehoods people who define the requirements believe about
names. That's very often not the same as the programmer, especially at large
organizations.

~~~
Deestan
If the programmers actually adding the constraint to their systems didn't also
believe the falsehoods, they would have written better error messages than, in
essence, "You typed your name wrong!".

~~~
derefr
User-facing error messages are frequently dictated by the requirements as
well.

------
LargeWu
I think the real lesson here is to to identify those assumptions that may be
incorrect _for the culture your app is targeted towards_ and make reasonable
accommodations for those cases.

The most common ones are probably the easiest to deal with...long names, only
one name, punctuation in names. Just relax your validation requirements. We
just took care of 99% of names not common to western culture. But I don't
think if you are designing an application for, say, the Olathe, KS youth rec
sports registration website that you need to be too concerned with folks who
have names that have characters not mapped in Unicode. If a person's name is
so unusual that it doesn't fit even culturally relaxed input requirements,
then they've probably already dealt with that problem before.

~~~
patio11
I heartily agree that "think what you're assuming" is a good take away here,
but can't support "think what culture your app is targeting", because I've
seen that virtually _invariably_ blow up straight in the teams' faces.

Many Japanese people think racial/cultural homogeneity is practically a
national trademark, and this issue has bitten nearly every Big Freaking
Enterprise system I've ever seen in Japan. Do you think your global-facing web
app or small American town is going to be less culturally diverse than Japan
is? That strikes me as _highly improbable_.

~~~
autarch
Japanese people living in the US are no doubt perfectly comfortable writing
their name out in Latin characters for the benefit of the barbarians they live
with.

~~~
patio11
Many Japanese professionals who have call to be in the United States -- but
not all of them! -- will write their name something like YAMASHITA Taro, which
is your clue that you should be calling him Mr. Yamashita rather than Mr.
Taro. Or Dr. Yamashita, in the case of my client who was not actually named
that.

Some of them, including at least one prominent politician and several people I
represented in a professional capacity, are adamant that reversing the order
is incorrect.

(Unsurprisingly, many Americans are unaware of this convention. Sadly, many of
them persist in being unaware of it even when it is written on the meeting
briefing and explained verbally right before the meeting starts. _sigh_ Twelve
corrections in 3 days -- my client was _not_ happy for that trip.)

Does your hotel, car rental service, university, etc, handle this case
correctly? We blazed a path of frustration through Chicago and Michigan last
time.

Further fun: a Taro Yamashita born and raised in the United States (or any
other Taro, for that matter), and present at the same university for the same
conference, might request the exact opposite treatment! And if you spell his
name as YAMASHITA Taro on the meeting agenda in defiance of his preference,
you're doing it wrong!

~~~
_delirium
But who's really doing it wrong? If someone expects another culture to conform
to _their own_ culture's preferences when a guest there, perhaps they're the
ones making the error. I actually attended a conference in Japan that wrote
all names, including mine, as "FAMILYNAME Givenname" on the program. I
personally write and prefer "Givenname Familyname", but I don't see it as a
cause for offense. As a guest in their country, I consider it their
prerogative to go by their local conventions.

I mean, wouldn't it be pretty chauvinist for me to get offended at it or
demand that they follow Western name ordering? It feels like it'd be in the
same category as complaining that they don't serve my favorite American food
at the conference, or that the cars are driving on the wrong side of the road.

~~~
rmc
> But who's really doing it wrong?

You are.

The canonical source for the correct way to spell/write someone's name is that
person. You should never tell someone "No, you're writing your name wrong".

~~~
_delirium
I disagree. People's preferences should get some deference, but not ultimate
deference. I don't have to accommodate Prince's claim that his name is
properly written as a graphical symbol, for example. It's perfectly fine to
tell him to pick a name that isn't a graphical symbol.

Between countries, I think generally the right approach is to use the
country's naming customs, and adapt foreign names to them, to the extent
reasonably possible. In Greece, for example, it's customary to transliterate
people's names into the Greek alphabet, especially if the source is going to
be read by Greeks (newspapers, etc.). The person known as "George Bush" in the
United States is more commonly referred to in Greece as "Τζωρτζ Μπους", for
example--- despite it being a rather ugly transliteration in this case, due to
a bunch of the consonants not existing in Greek.

Are you really arguing that this Dr. Yamashita (or Mr. Bush) can tell them
they can't use their own alphabet in their own country, because that's not how
he likes his name written?

------
GavinB
My first name is spelled with a $10 bill. It's pronounced "Gavin." My last
name is a picture of a flower. If you represent it at less than 1000x1000
pixels or with washed out colors, you are insulting my heritage.

My middle name is a musk ox.

How far does politeness dictate that you have to go to accommodate me?

~~~
pyre
I think that the bar should _at least_ be set higher than:

    
    
      "Your name does not fit into a Western firstname/lastname
      format with only ASCII characters, please choose another
      name."
    

This is on par with _expecting_ everyone to speak English just because you
speak English. By the very setup of the form, you are implying that your way
is the 'one true way' or at least that you don't care about people that don't
fit into your pre-defined set of expectations (i.e. "Don't have a
firstname/lastname? I don't care about your business! Your money is no good
here!").

How hard is it to just have a 'Name' field that supports UTF8? Sure it's not a
100% solution, but it's a _lot_ better than the 20% (or less) solutions that
we have out there right now.

------
spectre
Most of the items on that list are pretty realistic, but there are a few you
can safely ignore. For example image the response you'd get trying to sign up
for a bank account (in person), if you told them you didn't have a name.

~~~
patio11
Define "safely". If you write code for a hospital that handles this case
poorly, when a premature infant is found abandoned in a toilet, you might end
up debugging from the ER.

~~~
smallblacksun
John/Jane Doe

~~~
ars
No, they call them Baby Boy, and Baby Girl - it even goes on the birth
certificate.

------
joe_the_user
Calling a statement a "falsehood" implies there's some truth that can and
should replace it. The statements he lists aren't "falsehoods" or "truths",
they are approximations - operating assumptions.

If your operating assumptions are true enough for a given purpose, there's no
reason to change them. If they deviate enough from to generate problems, they
will need to be replaced ... with other approximations (not with "the truth").

\-- This is why apparently simple and "finished" programs alway need
"maintenance" - even the most seemingly simple assumption need tweaking as the
world's conditions change.

------
fforw
The puritans had "religious slogan names" like

Nicholas If-Jesus-Christ-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Barbon

( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Barbon> )

------
JulianMorrison
I'm sorry, but if your name doesn't fit into Unicode, you need a new name. You
do not have the right to your own character encoding and font (on someone
else's website).

~~~
nuxi
Is this supposed to be a modern version of "I'm sorry but if your name doesn't
fit into 7-bit ASCII, you need a new name"?

~~~
pjscott
Similar, except that there are a lot fewer people whose names can't be written
in Unicode. Hell, the vast majority of names fit in the Basic Multilingual
Plane; you could probably get away with using a fixed 16 bits per character.

If your name doesn't fit into Unicode, get a nickname. Bonus points if your
nickname fits into 7-bit ASCII.

~~~
nuxi
Right, but what's the point of Unicode then? What it's supposed to be:
"Unicode provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the
platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language." What it
is: The above, plus "Well, almost every character. Sorry we couldn't fit your
name there, perhaps you should consider a nickname."

Say you want to order a package from somewhere. How does getting a nickname
help? How do you explain it to the post office? I know it sounds like
nitpicking, and it probably is, until it affects you personally. I've had my
share of "name-mangling" and my name _does_ fit into Unicode (not into ASCII
though).

~~~
pjscott
You have a point, but what I'm most concerned with is balancing these two
things:

1\. I don't want to inconvenience people with "weird" names.

2\. I don't want to burden application programmers too much.

Requiring everybody to have a simple ASCII name would be convenient for
programmers, but would be a big hassle for people whose names don't meet those
requirements. "Be in the Basic Multilingual Plane or get a nickname" is a
policy that, I think, provides a reasonable balance. Of course, supporting all
of unicode isn't really that much harder, so I think that's a better balance.

------
RyanMcGreal
Obligatory: <http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/09/you-suck.html>

------
jheriko
This problem isn't handling names, its validating them and trying to do clever
things with them, which is rarely, truly, necessary - especially if its a
customer's name that they see on mail, bills etc and that they have the
ability to correct... they will validate it for you.

I think the real bad assumption is that validation is necessary or even
desirable - applying the technique brainlessly to names is the root cause of
this problem - you don't really need to make any assumptions.

------
colinprince
Also, FYI, place names contain all sorts of archaic spellings and characters,
for the same reason: they are identifiers, and identifiers cannot and should
not be normalized.

------
yellowbkpk
Incidentally my friend RJ just experienced a related problem on Facebook.
After he got married his name (which includes a hyphenated family name) has 4
capital letters on it. Facebook complains that his name has too many capital
letters and will not let him use it. He tried all-lowercase but Facebook
automatically capitalizes each word making it look even worse.

~~~
vsync
It gets annoying for handles too. I usually just use "vsync" but certain
systems smash the first character upcase and it looks ugly as "Vsync". So I
try "VSync" and it smashes all characters but the first downcase.

Not to mention systems that require usernames to have 6 characters or more,
sigh...

------
nradov
The HL7 V3 standard has a fairly good data model for dealing with names.
[http://www.hl7.org/v3ballot/html/infrastructure/datatypes_r2...](http://www.hl7.org/v3ballot/html/infrastructure/datatypes_r2/datatypes_r2.htm#dt-
EN) Combine that with Unicode and you can solve the majority of problems.

------
mmacaulay
Only somewhat related, but first thing that came to mind:

<http://xkcd.com/327/>

------
Goladus
It doesn't matter what programmers believe, it matters what programmers can do
with the computers available.

------
tudorw
what about a number, can't we all just be a number... I'll start things off,
call me 1

~~~
stcredzero
This is a reference to a short story? Or was it a New Yorker cartoon?

~~~
dagw
Or "The Prisoner" TV series.

------
KevBurnsJr
Lets just tattoo a bar code to everyone's forehead and be done.

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DannoHung
Wow, so recording people's names is an absolutely miserable affair with no
likelihood of success.

Okay, from now on, all humans will not have names, they will be numbered in
ascending order, starting from 1.

Boosh. If you want a 'handle' or 'username', you've gotta type it in whatever
the encoding system supports.

Glad that problem has been solved.

~~~
stralep
"We want information, information, information."

"Who are you?"

"The new number two."

"Who is number one?"

"You are number six."

"I am not a number, I am a free man."

"HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA."

Btw, why not use encoded pictures?

