[jessriedel]

Your argument would be a lot more useful and falsifiable if you put it in cost-benefit terms. I'm not so convinced that having a few billion people use ASCII approximations is "inexcusable", but at least if you said "the worldwide benefits are worth the implementation costs" that could be wrong or right.

[mikestew]

His comment is plenty useful. We've had computers around long enough that one doesn't need to provide a cost-benefit analysis to justify saying "this is stupid". "Check this out, I've got a box that can play movies. It can immerse you in a 3D video environment that you can interact with. You can talk to people thousands of miles away for free. It allows you access to much of the world's knowledge. It can solve numeric problems that would take years to solve by hand."

<a large portion of the world's population responds> "Yeah, that's neat and all. How come when I type my name all I see on the screen are squares?"

Perhaps it doesn't qualify for the "inexcusable" tag, but it sure seems pretty broken. "It's always been that way" doesn't strike me as a very good resolution reason for the bug.