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Changing your name is really annoying, at least in the
UK, as you
generally have to go around every official body and tell
them all you've
done it, which depending on what you've changed it to
can take quite a
bit of bravado and brazenness. Presumably some
countries have
different systems
where there's a central registry, but
this arrangement,
inconvenient though it be, is still preferable to that.
SInce all your
qualifications, bank accounts, legal documents, loyalty
cards,
whatever, used the previous name, it's a bit of a faff.
Generally people change their names to escape
persecution, to lay
themselves open to persecution by a specific person (i.e.
marriage), to
adopt a stage name or because they dislike their
previous names.
They are less likely to form such attachments to a
number. They are in
fact allocated various such numbers in their lives, e.g.
by the NHS or
Nationall Insurance numbers, and these numbers do not
have the
annoyance factor that Issachar Necessary or Ben Dover
have
experienced (well, not Isaachar because he deliberately
chose that
name but apparently he's really annoying anyway), but
they could still
to some extent be chosen by parents if they really
wanted.
So the idea is, have no official names at all, just
numbers which, unlike
the names, are unchangeable and follow you around from
cradle to
grave, on your birth certificate, qualifications, title
deeds, bank cards,
whatever. Call yourself what you like, don't use the
number in everyday
life, just when you, say, write a cheque or file a tax
return, and nobody
will ever be saddled with a stupid or hateful name again.
Avoid
numbers which trigger weirdness in people like "666" or
"13", but other
than that, just allocate them randomly but let parents
choose numbers
if they want, provided they're unique. Clearly there
would be a risk of
identity theft and fraud, but probably less so than at
present because
they'd be less memorable to others than names.
I think you get a number when you go to jail.
http://www.youtube....watch?v=yjg6flu3zuc [xandram, Jan 27 2014]
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You mean something like a social security number?
Kinda baked in the 30's. |
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I think the Germans may have baked this idea in the
1940s... along with many of the so numbered people. |
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"Oh 2438764690J, please get Daddy a glass of water." |
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"Eat my shorts, 867-5309!" |
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Unless your name is Amanda. |
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Good idea. But start at 1000 so it looks like we've
been at it for a while. |
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Erm, we already do have the numerical values of the letters in people's names. |
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Only remains to to work out of if a=1 or are we going to the the ascii values to make it more exciting? |
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Clearly there are social security numbers, NI
numbers or whatever, but those are not used
across the board. Each one has a specific usage,
such as in dealings with taxation and social
security or with the NHS, and they don't have a
wider application, which is what bothers me. This
is definitely not the same thing unless NI numbers
or whatever have their use expanded. Also, you
don't get to choose those numbers on the whole. |
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[not], ASCII would be more exciting but when I
said "number" I was more envisaging a mixture of
numbers and letters, though obviously not loads of
letters or it'd just be a name anyway. More like a
number plate. |
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Erm, well, probably just first name and initial would be a start, so Aaron Brown would be 111815142 |
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Then where's the "serial" part? Wouldn't it be useful
to be able to tell how old someone was by looking
at their name? |
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So, if you're 45 this year you get the prefix 69- ? |
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//Changing your name is really annoying, at least in the UK, |
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Blummin' easy, write it on a piece " I blah blah etc" run it though the photocopier, post them out, if they really want the original, then say "this is the original, I want it back" or do multiple originals (as it were) and send them all out..that's what I did. |
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Out this neck of the woods you can't change your name at all...so that guy who came to my ex's office in Tokyo long time ago, Mr Toilet, and yes it was the correct kanji for toilet, so no possibility for just sounding like, is completely buggered. |
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Social security numbers used to be used almost
everywhere. |
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//Out this neck of the woods you can't change your
name at all.// |
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Say what? Which woods are you in the neck of? |
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Well, there is a linear park near me two bits of woodland, each about 50 foot wide and about half a mile long, so that might count as neck as it's skinny enough. There's another one about 25 miles away. |
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In more general terms in Japan and I think Korea, the locals don't get to change their names, except for women taking the surnames of their husbands and maybe in witness protection, but that's it. |
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This is exactly how companies in the UK operate: each has a unique and fixed identifying number and can change its name as often as it likes for a low low cost (£30 or £100 same day? I think. I have minions who do this). So the infrastructure is there already. Can it scale? |
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OK, the serial doesn't make sense, sorry about that. |
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That's quite concerning, [rm]. |
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It's not the same as a social security number
incidentally. I envisage something like an exam
certificate with a number at the top rather than a
name. That number can then be matched or not
with other documents. |
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Well, in fact with a bit of jiggery-pokery, the binary string could be
divided up into seven-digit segments, each representing an ASCII
character, and that could be your official name. |
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I would endorse this idea only if the numbers encoded genealogy. For instance, your number might be some mathematical derivative of your parents' numbers, in such a way that their numbers could be re-derived from it. If people had started doing this from the beginning, we'd all be able to trace our ancestry back to 1. |
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Sounds a little like Bitcoin to me. Yeah, okay. |
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