From: Norm Blazowski
To: fmoore@eroplay.com
Sent: Thursday, August 21, 2008 6:54 PM
Subject: Frank Moore For President 2008
Technological issues have proven to be major points in this year’s elections, and with good reason. Technology has become a major part of everyday American life, international finance, and even a front line in the war on terrorism.
You have made no public comments on the issue of Unicode normalization and the need for a single benchmark standard, even though it is important for the multi-national, intercultural web of communication that has been built, and continues to be built, over the Internet. I realize you do not have the time to personally answer every single inquiry that voters ask you about, but I would be perfectly happy to hear from your staff what you or your official campaign advisors think about this major issue.
Unicode Normalization Form “D” specifies that only glyphs that are noted as equivalent in the official Unicode specification (currently version 5.1 and subject to further revision) are to be considered identical. For example, under Form “D”, U+1FBB “Greek capital letter Alpha with oxia” is considered identical to U+0386 “Greek capital letter Alpha with tonos”, whereas under Form “C” that same U+1FBB is treated as if it were decomposed to two combined characters, U+0391 “Greek capital letter Alpha” followed immediately by U+0301 “Combining acute accent”.
Form “KD” will treat “Greek capital letter Alpha with oxia” just like form “D”, but it will also treat U+03D4 “Greek Upsilon with diaeresis and hook symbol” as U+03AB “Greek capital letter Upsilon with dialytika”, something which Form “D” does not. Form “KC”, on the other hand, treats U+1FBB exactly the same as Form “C”, but also treats “Greek Upsilon with diaeresis and hook symbol” as U+03A5 “Greek capital letter Upsilon” followed immediately by U+0308 “Combining diaeresis,” which Form “C” does not. This is important, since even though both “Greek capital letter Upsilon with dialytika” and the duo of “Greek capital letter Upsilon” and “Combining diaeresis” derive from the same original glyph, no Normalization Form will recognize them as equivalent to each other.
Though it seems insignificant, the consequences of not choosing a standard, or choosing one poorly, are in fact far-reaching, as many government institutions, departments, and agencies, including the Defense Department, the State Department, the Library of Congress, the Federal Trade Commission, Citizenship and Immigration Services, and many others. If, for example, programs for heuristic scanning used by the C.I.A. cannot identify certain variant glyphs as being identical, advance warnings of future terrorist threats could be missed.
I look forward to your reply, and I urge you to consider this issue most thoughtfully as you continue your campaign.
Yours,
Norm Blazowski
to be honest, norm, i don’t know. when have you ever heard a candidate admit that?!
In Freedom,
Frank Moore
