[gloob]

Should a Japanese octogenarian whose parents had the poor taste to spell their child's name with a character that would not make it into Unicode expect the same problem?

[alanh]

What would they enter into _any_ computer system as their name?

[tsuraan]

I believe that ISO2022 allows for the full set of japanese names (and has some sort of process for introducing new kanji). That's probably a big part of the reason that Ruby's strings are bytes with an encoding attribute, rather than just being unicode.

[gerrit]

Japanese computer systems are often not using Unicode but are based on other encodings like shift-jis.

Even if it wasn't for historical characters that aren't part of Unicode, this will probably stay that way because of the inefficiencies of encoding Asian text in e.g. UTF8.

That's part of the reason the ruby programming language didn't have proper Unicode support for a long time (and now supports arbitrary encodings for its strings, not just Unicode ones)

[guelo]

Yea, they got screwed over by the Unicode Consortion, don't go blaming programmers for that.

[Natsu]

If for some weird reason all else failed, they could just write their name in hiragana.

[gravitronic]

"Jim".

[dalore]

What keyboard would they use?

[bbrtyth]

It's not one character per key, they input phonetically or by type of stroke in the character.