Agreed. For those of you who are offended, do you provide a graphics tablet, AutoCAD, 3D printer, reference-quality microphone, synthesizer, full spectrum analyzer, and every instrument known to humanity every time someone needs to be identified by your software?
If we can't expect the name to be in a character set, why can we expect it to even be two dimensional? What if it's an object? What if it's a sound that Western voices can't make without years of training, ala Tuvan throat singing, with no written form? What if it's a sound that needs to be played on an instrument known only to the person's tribe/nation/whatever, and the only one in existence is a family heirloom halfway around the world? What if it's something like a particular pattern of brainwaves created by meditating a certain way? Maybe a little extreme. There's an African language which is primarily location-based. People are raised from birth with an extremely accurate innate sense of spatial position through dead reckoning. Greeting someone and identifying yourself requires specifying your location and the direction you're facing. Fascinating stuff. There's a great Radiolab segment about it: http://www.radiolab.org/2011/jan/25/birds-eye-view/ So is it racist to choose a column type for holding names that isn't designed for GIS? If you did, isn't it racist to use a system based on Cartesian coordinates instead of the native way of representing locations?
My point is that you cannot possibly cover all the edge cases for the ways people identify themselves, and calling that offensive is just silly. Giving people identifiers that you created is also offensive - that's prison/Nazi crap. So what do you expect us to do?
A blank box in the character set of the primary language(s) where the application is used with zero validation and zero transformations is a reasonable demand. Calling it racist and offensive to fail to cover every edge case is a bit of a stretch.
If we can't expect the name to be in a character set, why can we expect it to even be two dimensional? What if it's an object? What if it's a sound that Western voices can't make without years of training, ala Tuvan throat singing, with no written form? What if it's a sound that needs to be played on an instrument known only to the person's tribe/nation/whatever, and the only one in existence is a family heirloom halfway around the world? What if it's something like a particular pattern of brainwaves created by meditating a certain way? Maybe a little extreme. There's an African language which is primarily location-based. People are raised from birth with an extremely accurate innate sense of spatial position through dead reckoning. Greeting someone and identifying yourself requires specifying your location and the direction you're facing. Fascinating stuff. There's a great Radiolab segment about it: http://www.radiolab.org/2011/jan/25/birds-eye-view/ So is it racist to choose a column type for holding names that isn't designed for GIS? If you did, isn't it racist to use a system based on Cartesian coordinates instead of the native way of representing locations?
My point is that you cannot possibly cover all the edge cases for the ways people identify themselves, and calling that offensive is just silly. Giving people identifiers that you created is also offensive - that's prison/Nazi crap. So what do you expect us to do?
A blank box in the character set of the primary language(s) where the application is used with zero validation and zero transformations is a reasonable demand. Calling it racist and offensive to fail to cover every edge case is a bit of a stretch.