[Design-team] Use of flags (was Re: Wiki page for country)

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 09:29, Fabian A. Scherschel <fab at sixgun.org> wrote:
> OK, speaking as a student of political science here... Isn't there the exact
> same issue with country names? And yet we use those...
> Or am I missing something?
> Fab

Humans are 99%  irrational, illogical creatures of passions and 1% a
being convinced they aren't any of those things.Thus humans have a
tendency to die more for a flag than a country name. It is a highly
symbolic item that gets people very worked up even more than names
(even those do work people up.) You can label something Formosa,
Taiwan or even the Republic of China and get only some grief.. put the
flag on a list of possible keyboard types and you get complaints to
your national embassy (as more than one Linux distro has supposedly
found out).

Then you have things like former rebellion flags or flags of countries
not recognized by the rest of the world, etc etc. Again all of these
are corner cases but when they come up its a pretty much kernel halt
until dealt with.


-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
“The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance.”
Randy Nelson, President of Pixar University.
"We have a strategic plan. It's called doing things.""
— Herb Kelleher, founder Southwest Airlines