> it's quite literally mix and match

What's wrong with that?

> sounds like all the other names

I don't know if you noticed but the original article was about looking people up on the web - a domain where spelling is significant.

> Your point is lost on me.

No surprise there given the quality of your comment.

In Iceland there is a finite list of names you are a allowed to choose from and it takes an act of parliament to make a new name legal. That's even more stupid than 32 bit IP addresses.

...and I'll say it a million times more. The primary function of giving someone a name is to allow you to single out one person from a collection of people. If you call someone John or David or some other common name then you are failing in that one simple task.

Names should be unique identifiers. For some strange reason, the one segment of American society that understands this issue are vilified for using "black-sounding names". What's so hard for people to get? Stories like this are the inevitable consequence of selfish parents copying names from people around them. Frankly, I think anyone who calls their kid John should be guilty of child abuse.

The only thing I can suggest is suing your parents.

All the mistakess in this post are because I waz straining to take a crap at the same tyme.

The purpose of Wikipedia isn't to satisfy someone's vanity by calling them what they wish to be called. Millions of people might read an article about person X, but person X is at most just one of those people. What matters is picking a name that allows those millions of people to find the article they want. So the fact that there is a law in the UK allowing people to call themselves whatever they want is completely irrelevant (except if the article wishes to talk about the person's preferred name).

Put your money in a bank instead.

Studios want to keep control over where their TV shows are shown. In particular, they often have exclusive deals with different local distributors in each country (eg. I think Warner Brothers distribute BBC stuff in the US). These studios don't want Apple competing with their distributors. Not much Apple can do about it.

...scenarios like this. But it takes a science fiction writer of special talent to be able to get their fiction to be considered a 'paper'.

Their best coders didn't even make it into the top 10.

It's not just kids that play video games you know. And if you'd actually met a woman you'd know that they shave too. (They even have their own pink razors made especially for them.) And where I live, the men wear cosmetics too.

If the universe, to you, is no bigger than the links you can access with one click, then that's your problem.

...if someone publishes a paper saying that water isn't wet then there's a high probability of not being wet. It's completely obvious to anyone without a vested interest in some crackpot physical theory that the LHC is nowhere near powerful enough to produce black holes and that the whole black hole scare is nothing but a bit of creative writing. If someone publishes this fact, it doesn't suddenly become unreliable.

High energy cosmic rays dwarf what LHC can do. LHC was built, not because it produces higher energy particles than these cosmic rays, but because it produces high energy particles on demand.

Dumbies?

> Astronomically, it's kind of close.

That's correct, but for trivial semantic reaons: 'astronomically' means 'using a scale where we talk about really distant things as if they're a lot closer'. You know, like the way 'geologically' means 'using a scale where really long times are considered short'. So saying 'geologically speaking, a million years ago is just a blink of an eye' is tautological. :-)