Things 21/22/23 in the original post apply.
]]>So we've had two Chinese-heritage women here, and even on that small sample, though they both have both name forms, you've got both strategies for name usage.
]]>My passport has Oevreboe in the machine-readable line, and that's what gets in airline bookings too. So there's three different "official" spellings of my last name.
My first name is easy. It's Roy Gunnar. Or Roy G. Or Roy. So what is my "real name" then?
Google needs a "don't be bloody stupid" policy.
]]>Maybe I'm not "popular" enough yet to get noticed? Maybe because my regional/locale settings are in French (practicing my second language, I'm Canadian) the name is setting off fewer alarms?
]]>What you don't get is that by publishing all those relationships you, and your close relationships, are leaving themselves open to abuse.
Now anybody can follow your G+ stream, figure out your relationships, and trying to exploit them to their advantage, all from the commodity of their armchair in Lagos,
Or the gay bashing boss may have discovered that the employee in front of him is gay.
Or the bureaucrat in front of you got a dislike of mixed race marriages and discovered that your partner is from a different race, and has decided to give you hell.
I could go on, the naivity of people willing to bare it all online is simply astounding.
]]>Nevertheless I may want to talk to you, or follow your posts, why should you or I care about our respective names?
I never ever give my real name online, nevertheless I have met literally hundreds of people IRL as a consequence of my online activities, I have to say they seem to cope fine (and viceversa if I may say so as well) with the contextualization of names and pseudonyms.
]]>So, how many of the systems that reject O'Keefe are OK with OʹKeefe instead? That is, with the version of the apostrophe that's officially classified as "Letter, modifier" in Unicode?
That's assuming that you're OK making this substitution, apologies if it's culturally inappropriate. It's probably the preferred character at least for the Klingons, though.
]]>So, are they, in fact, a common carrier?
Aaron:
There's no reason to isolate the two unless you intend to use Google+ (or any other Google service) for illegal purposes or to spam.
Or, of course, you are female, a child, a teacher, discussing clients, planning a revolution, whistle-blowing, ethnic or religious minority... the list goes on and on.
]]>See also @ 117 "Google needs a "don't be bloody stupid" policy." Too right, cobber!
@ 119 ü => Alt+0252
@ 135-138 et al "Your name is Yevaud!" "Yes" said a great husky, hissing voice. "My truename is Yevaud, and my true shape is this shape." - from: "The Rule of Names". Um.
]]>Nice pick... that would be discrimination based on ethnic origin, yes? There are laws against that in my country (and many others). For now, I'm posting on the Help Forum to see what they say :-)
]]>My nym is from "Blacque Jacques Shellacque," the French-Canadian lumberjack who occasionally went up against (and lost to) Bugs Bunny. It was 1990 and I was new to the BBSes, and I never thought of a better one. 21 years later, and "bjacques" is older than a few of my friends.
I can live with Facebook's cavalier attitude to my privacy, because I've never 1) explicitly admitted to illegal drug use or 2) talked about the place where I work, and never will. Other than that, I say what I like.
Google+ is good for filtering posts so relatives can't read them, but not enough reason to up stakes from FB. And Vic Gondutra's demand that Google+ be more suit-friendly is just too much.
This is the internet. One's reputation depends on one's behavior online, not how "serious" one's online name sounds. Very Serious Persons, stalwarts of Old Media like David Brooks or Fareed Zakaria will probably be all over Google+, where Gondutra hopes members will be duly impressed by famous names and show them deference. Back in the real internet, the arguments that both of the VSPs above have often pimped can easily be shredded by any melvin_potrzebie23 who can string two thought together.
(Very Serious Persons do not include Paul Krugman, let alone the DFHs--Dirty Fucking Hippies--who, over the years,cried foul on such VSP-friendly activities as the Iraq invasion and the no-strings-attached banker bailouts. Such people are "shrill.")
I actually do use my real name on FB, since I thought early on they were stricter about real names than they really are. Whatever. Just about every else, I'm bjacques or some variation thereof.
A raid by LulzSec or similar on the user base of Google+ is a disaster waiting to happen. In every "cloud" company like Google+, company secrets are locked securely, user personal data much less so. At least make them work a little to mine the latter.
]]>of course, that's not to say I'm not passionately opposed to their policy, and support anyone else's right to be as pseudo-nonymous as they want. I strongly suspect I got flagged because someone reported my profile out of spite, after I got very passionate arguing against the policy in a #nymwars debate on a thread started by a Prominent Personality.
Anyway. After almost two months of daily use on G+, my real name (Hugh Messenger) was deemed "unreal". I had the choice of adopting a pseudonym, or leaving. So I became Hugh Mercury, sent them a copy of my drivers license. And waited. And waited. After a week I started posting Dear Google+ missives, tagging more and more Google folk. Much to my surprise, a few days ago I got a response from the Senior Architect hisself, Yonatan Zunger, assuring me they had given the system a "swift kick", and I could have my name back. Only ... I can't. It still won't let me change my name back.
So I remain Hugh Mercury, going under a nym in order to comply with the Real Names policy, kicking and screaming for them to let me use my real name.
Through the looking glass ...
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