My brother also sent me an article about a Chinese couple who wanted to name their child "@" (to the consternation of the State Language Commission). Most interesting to me is the distinct likelihood that whether or not the authorities allow the unusual name, the record-keeping software they use probably won't.
More and more these days I've noticed that our choices, public and private, are limited by what our software allows us to do. Most software won't accept as input a name with strange characters, and none will accept arbitrary symbols like that formerly used by the Artist-Formerly-And-Now-Once-Again-Known-As-Prince. Using standards makes software development easier, but "simple to build into software" is not a requirement that human societies naturally conform to.
This phenomenon is especially noticeable when human interactions are mediated by software. For instance: wasting five minutes to get past an automated phone system to get a ten-second answer from a human; or ordering a computer from Dell and not being able to select certain components because they simply aren't on the list. Further examples abound, from data entry to transaction processing to borrowing a book from the library.
Once a computerized system is in place, human operators generally refuse to take any actions outside the boundaries prescribed by the software, giving the software's arbitrary constraints near-absolute power. No one wants to deal with software that's out of sync with reality because of some out-of-bounds activity, so no one breaks the rules and everyone endures their chains because at least their severely-curtained choices can be executed twice as efficiently.
To be honest, the limitations that software tends to impose on names, specifically, does not bother me one whit. I work in a job where I deal with student names all day, from students all across the country. I have seen some absolutely ridiculous names (one of which was "Unique"... too bad it wasn't, there were about seven other people in the system with "Unique" as their first name). Many of those names contain extraneous punctuation. However, to my secret glee (one might even say Schadenfreude), our computer system will simply not accept punctuation in a name. The students have to spell their names with just letters, just like everybody else.
The Chinese couple mentioned at the beginning, though, seems to indicate the ever-expanding view of children as mere accessories for their parents...perhaps sort of a substitute for dogs. I know it's normally the other way around (dogs as a substitute for children), but I'm not nearly as bothered by that. The way I see it, if people think dogs are a reasonable substitute for children, they really don't have any business raising children anyway. It's better for all involved if they just stick with the dogs.
It's that evil Bill Gates guy trying to control our world again. ;)
Software always seems to start out simpler than it is when it reaches maturity and is retired in favor of later versions.
The journey is from something that starts out with flaws, gets updates/patches/revisions that themselves contain flaws, and ends with a product full of more flaws.. some fixed, but most of them not. The complexity comes in when the grand total of the original flaws and the flaws in the updates/patches/revisions makes further troubleshooting/bug-squashing all the more difficult and complicated.
Constrains in data entry are generally a Good Thing.
In much the same way as a statically typed, compiled language is safer than a dynamically typed context-sensitive scripting language, they prevent Error.
If fields are properly validated, then simple entry issues like filling in fields in the wrong order are largely eliminated.
If people want to have crazy names with symbols, numbers and punctuation, that's fine. They should also have a traditional character-only name for official purposes. How does one order a list people including crazy symbolic names?
OTOH, computer systems often cost a lot to develop and install, and companies make savings by employing fewer experts. When we contact a company's call center, we rarely get to talk to someone with much domain knowledge, and never talk to anybody with sufficient power to exercise human judgement. The human answering our call is just part of the user interface, like a mouse or a voice recognition system. It's not the phone operator's fault, they have not been given the authority to do anything beyond the software's capability.
This is a shame. Often, writing a letter is the best way around this. For extra points, you can find the name / address of an executive and write to him/her personally.