What-all's in a name?

A friend's g-chat status brought this to my attention.

Fascinating, and kind of amusing (if you're callous like me). Also sort of pathetic.

I think it's pretty sad to cut off the use of such a huge percentage of characters in such a rich linguistic tradition! The Chinese language really awes me. Yeah, as one person quoted in the article says, 8,000 characters is enough "to convey any concept in any field." Maybe. But the same number of synonyms or near-synonyms that drives me nuts also makes for such incredible nuance of meaning... and, as this article points out, the possibility for a measure of uniqueness in expression, or name.