Text 20118, 33 rader
Skriven 2011-06-25 15:57:09 av Michiel van der Vlist (2:280/5555)
     Kommentar till en text av Robert Bashe (2:2448/44)
Ärende: Foreign misconceptions of the USA (was: The sad cynicisms...)
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Hello Robert,

On Saturday June 25 2011 06:41, you wrote to Björn Felten:

 RB> The letter with the umlaut (or in this case, more correctly, the
 RB> dieresis) is not a part of the standard English alphabet, and is not
 RB> commonly used. The only one who ever insisted on that (and after all,
 RB> it was in his own name), was Noel Coward (think of that with two dots
 RB> over the "e", as I can't type it here).

Oh c'mon! Surely you can do better than that! For over three decades you have
been living in a country where umlauted (or diaresisted) characters are found
even on car plates. 1*) In all those years you have never felt the urge to find
out how you can get your computers to display a character with a diaresis? You
must have an above avarage affection for computers or else you would not be in
Fidonet. You learned how to read and write in German and from what I see is
that you do very well. But you stick to the US ASCII set. Amazing!

1*) I find using "national characters" on car plates a bad idea. After all what
is on a car plate, is just a code and the use of those characters could easely
have been avoided. For use inside Germany it may be fine, but character
recognition systems in other countries may have problems with it. In these days
of free transport across Europe we have to keep that in mind.

The Russians are smarter. For car plates they only use those characters from
the Cyrillic alphabet that are the same as those in the Latin alphabet. No
problem reading the plates outside their own country.


Cheers, Michiel

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