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Comment Re:This has never been more obligatory (Score 1) 107

I am not sure what hospitals near you do, but the ones around here usually put "Baby Boy ", or something similar, for newborns.

And yet "Baby Boy something-or-other" is not usually considered a name (neither de facto nor de jure), it is a placeholder. That is one of the things missing from the list, "names are always names".

the overwhelming majority of people have names -- most of them include spaces, even

And that is exactly the point of the list, while any of those assumptions are true for some subset of people, you shouldn't assume they hold for all people (not to mention the fact that a space in a name can mean several things, e.g. a name field separator (between, say, first name and last name), a name part separator (between, say, multiple first or last name parts) -- another thing you could add to the list). You are free to ignore the list, but--especially if you design or implement information systems--you do so at your peril. My personal recommendation is that in information systems you avoid dealing with names where possible, always use IDs except for informational purposes, such as display names.

Comment Re:This has never been more obligatory (Score 2) 107

Anyone who says "people have names" is a wrong assumption can be safely dismissed as a crank.

A newborn baby needs to be entered into a hospital information system, obviously they are assigned a name at birth, right? There are further examples of why you shouldn't require people to have names, for instance a police information system should take into account the possibility that the person entered into it is unable or unwilling to give a name (note: entering "John Doe" is a *very* poor workaround). I work with Personal Identifiable Information from all over the world and not only do I agree with that list, I could probably add another 40 entries to it.

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