Companies Want To Insert Ads Into Unicode (thenextweb.com) 262
AmiMoJo writes: Food company Nestle has started a petition to get a KitKat emoji into the Unicode standard. They aren't alone, Taco Bell wants a taco emoji added, and Durex suggested adding a condom. While the latter two are at least generic, KitKat is a trademark of Nestle and the "break" image a key part of their marketing. Next year Unicode will include a faceplam emoji (U+1F926) for occasions such as this.
Sure (Score:5, Insightful)
Just assign the images, trademarks and logos over to the public domain and we are done.
U+1F36B Chocolate Bar (Score:5, Insightful)
That's why U+1F36B [emojipedia.org] is a generic chocolate bar rather than a HERSHEY'S® bar.
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This.
Unless the kitkat shape is a generic, non-patented, non-trademarked, non-copyrighted design, it should not be included.
Re:U+1F36B Chocolate Bar (Score:5, Insightful)
I spoke too soon.
The proposed misappropriation of the word "break" is plain and pure evil.
If "apple" were to be included in UTF-8, it should be a generic apple-shaped fruit symbol, not the computer brand trademark.
Similarly, any "break" symbol, if adopted in UTF-8 in the proposed context of "a small time-out in between work", should be a generic symbol indicating such, not one indicating a specific brands' marketing campaign.
Douglas Adams' described marketeers best: "A bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes".
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If "apple" were to be included in UTF-8, it should be a generic apple-shaped fruit symbol, not the computer brand trademark.
Exactly: see U+1F34E Red Apple [emojipedia.org] and U+1F34F Green Apple [emojipedia.org] even in Apple's emoji font. They're encoded next to other foods. And instead of Twitter's logo, we get a generic U+1F426 Bird [emojipedia.org] even in the Twemoji font.
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A friend who worked for a company that was sold to Apple told me about an email their HR sent out. It went something like this:
Many people use the Apple logo in their email. Please note that people not using an Apple email program are unable to see it properly. For everyone else, this works fine.
Shachar
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No "trying to pass it off". The Nordic countries have been using this symbol since the 1960s [wikipedia.org], predating Apple's use of this symbol for the Command key.
Re:U+1F36B Chocolate Bar (Score:4, Insightful)
We should allow it as long as the Unicode Consortium makes a royalty-free penis emoji an acceptable alternate rendering. That way when you send someone one, you never know if you are sending them a KitKat or a dick pic.
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Come on, we must be gender neutral, it should be a hand flicking someone off. Everyone has a middle finger, we can't leave out the women!
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Now you're discriminating against amputees. You sexist monster.
Unicode has U+26C4 Pale Man Without Legs [emojipedia.org].
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That's why U+1F36B [emojipedia.org] is a generic chocolate bar rather than a HERSHEY'S® bar.
Given that Hershey's is a disgusting concoction that barely resembles real chocolate I am happy that the emoji for a chocolate bar is generic.
LIGHTSPEED BRIEFS (Score:4, Funny)
Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 21st century?"
Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.
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Useless new emojis are for :cow: [emojipedia.org] Moo, :cow2: [emojipedia.org], moo.
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Who needs cow emojis if you have cowsay?
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Gimme a break with a picture of a broken leg?
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I, for one, welcome tons of fonts with inappropriate(TM) kitkat emojii.
Fonts would have been one thing. Unicode now has gazillions of characters for all sorts of stupid reasons. It was good when the idea was to encode the scripts of all languages, including presumably dead languages. Even emojis I can take. But now they have different characters for different complexions of emojis - something that should be a font, rather than a character change.
Complexions are diacritics (Score:2)
But now they have different characters for different complexions of emojis - something that should be a font, rather than a character change.
That'd be like needing a separate font for à, á, â, and ä. Think of color of emojis as analogous to a diacritic.
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So? (Score:3, Interesting)
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If you feel so strongly about his, perhaps you should open a competing petition stating that Nestle should not be allowed to force their trademark into the Unicode database without also having to give up the trademark. The proper way to fight an inappropriate petition is to file a competing petition, not bitch about it as an AC on Slashdot.
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There's already an emoji for "You are all cows" (U+1F42E Cow Face [emojipedia.org]). There's even one for "App appers app apps with apps" (U+1F4F2 Mobile Phone With Rightwards Arrow at Left [emojipedia.org]). And there are plenty of faces for the integrated face system [emojipedia.org]. But what would the hosts file emoji look like?
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I'm with the AC there, but I would suggest a foaming at the mouth raving lunatic.
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Together?
No, don't tell us.
Re: So? (Score:3)
uh, we're on a site founded by CmdrTaco.
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Someone else is familiar with the exploits of Motley Crue.
U+1F926 (Score:2)
Re:U+1F926 (Score:5, Funny)
I prefer U+1F595 [fileformat.info]
Where to put them (Score:2)
If they do, then assign them at code points starting: U+110000. That will teach them to keep marketing out of international standards.
slowpoke.jpg? (Score:4, Insightful)
There already is a taco emoji. It's in Unicode 8.0.
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There already is a taco emoji. It's in Unicode 8.0.
The Taco Bell petition was from 2014 before it was added. Whoever submitted the summary wasn't paying attention I guess.
Time to fork unicode (Score:3, Funny)
This is pure rubbish. We dont need more crap gunking things up. Make advertising illegal.
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http://emojipedia.org/fork-and... [emojipedia.org]
It's got a knife, too, but you might say it's already been forked.
Why emojis/emoticons are in Unicode? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why emojis/emoticons are in Unicode? (Score:5, Funny)
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Japan
And yet no schoolgirl/cephalopod emoji.
U+1F467 and U+1F419 (Score:2)
Unicode has U+1F467 Girl [emojipedia.org] and U+1F419 Octopus [emojipedia.org]. If this were SoylentNews, I could show them inline, but Slashdot uses a code point whitelist because of past abuses of bidirectional control characters.
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Why does software have icons in the toolbar? Why do smartphone apps need icons, instead of just text? The reason is icons are just quicker to comprehend, once you're familiar with them.
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Why have a separate table, when we've already learnt that having multiple glyph lookup tables is a terrible idea, and leads to no one being able to figure out which lookup table to use for a particular file. Unicode has plenty of room for all forms of written communication (hyroglyphics/emojis included), so use the one single table that we have pretty much standardised, and move on.
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We teach young children through simple picture concepts because they're too young to understand the nuances of complex concepts. It'd be a shame if we don't continue to evolve concepts past the point of images as people
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This is a good idea. We need emojis for file open, save, cut, copy, paste etc. (if not already present).
There's nothing complex about a KitKat or McDonald's emoji logo. It's just a blatant ad right inside your content and therefore should be banned. Everything in the world is regulated to some extent, except ads. Are politicians getting paid to ignore the loud, annoying, irritating content they call ads that i
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They are a common form of written communication in the modern world, and Unicode aims to encode all forms of written communication.
Emoji are quite useful. Text doesn't convey tone very well, so adding an emoji to clarify often helps. Unicode also encodes many useful symbols. A bar and triangle seems to be pretty universally understood to mean "play/pause", for example.
Would you prefer Chinese labels on buttons? (Score:3)
A bar and triangle seems to be pretty universally understood to mean "play/pause", for example.
Not among certain members of my family. One keeps asking me "Why doesn't it just say 'Play'?" when she can't figure out which button to push. When I try to explain the reason behind internationalized pictographs by asking "It's made in China. Would you prefer that it said 'Play' in Chinese?", it still doesn't help.
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It is, of course, well known that careless talk costs lives, but the full scale of the problem is not always appreciated. For instance, at the very moment that Arthur Dent said, “I seem to be having this tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle” a freak wormhole opened up in the fabric of the space-time continuum and carried his words far, far back in time across almost infinite reaches of space, to a distance galaxy where strange and war-like beings were poised on the brink of frightful interste
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Because Unicode aims to be a superset of all national character sets. Some emojis, such as the card suits and the smiley face, date back to code page 437 [wikipedia.org] on the IBM PC from the early 1980s, where they were encoded at 01h-06h. The Miscellaneous Symbols [wikipedia.org] largely derive from Wingdings.
Re:Why emojis/emoticons are in Unicode? (Score:4, Insightful)
Can someone explain me why emojis are in Unicode at all?
What emojis? People keep sending me texts that my RAZR flip phone* renders as solid white boxes.
Now get off my lawn
* I actually do use an original RAZR flip phone that is going on 7 years old now. It makes phone calls.
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2 - I miss my flip. The gentle wrist snap in particular.
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original RAZR flip phone
Has icons to indicate secure/unsecure calls and data connections. Like when the local cops fire up their Stingray to listen in on calls.
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To unify things like Japanese emoji, Wingdings, Webdings, ... that previously used proprietary codepages and saw enough use to be included into Unicode.
For the Japanese, not including emoji would have been a deal breaker for using standard Unicode in text messages.
Re:Why emojis/emoticons are in Unicode? (Score:4, Funny)
Can someone explain me why emojis are in Unicode at all?
So that people can exchange written communication in a standard way, interoperable among vendors and software systems.
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ROAAAARRRRR!
I can comprehend the demand, just cannot comprehend why insert in Unicode table. It's used for "official", spoken charset languages, not trend.
Can you realize how bad will if we got the 90's emoticons on it, then after they got no more used, inflate Unicode with all the internet 2000's expressions too, and then very new decade, the new trend inflating Unicode after the old one got no more used?
Why not keep Unicode for the languages charsets, and create a separate table for this kind of demand?
More than 26 sounds (Score:2)
Adding emoji to Unicode makes about as much sense as adding new letters to the alphabet, and nobody seems to feel any great need to do that.
Except when a language has more than 26 sounds. This is how Icelandic gets the thorn and edh, some African languages get a stretched-out s whose capital looks like Greek sigma, German gets a ligature of stretched out s and s, Mbembe gets a fish-shaped round A, Nigerian languages get letters with hooks and a turned E, Chipewyan gets capital and lowercase glottal stops, and more [wikipedia.org].
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There are 26 letters in the alphabet, but significanbtly more than 26 sounds. IIRC, the English language can be represented by about 72 allophones [wikipedia.org]. You are confusing this with language elements that are constituent parts of a whole. In this case, the character is the whole. It is logographic (like Kanji) etc rather
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It is logographic (like Kanji) etc
Yet kanji are enCJKoded.
If each product, or even 10%, have an emoji, how much time will it take me to sift through them all and find the one I want?
That's why, as I wrote above, Unicode has a generic chocolate bar rather than a branded one [slashdot.org]. Likewise, it'd likely end up with a generic wafer bar.
What are the chances will have no idea what most of them are supposed to indicate?
Slim. Unicode Consortium publishes code charts describing what each code point encodes.
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No shit Sherlock.
And yet the discussion is about specific Kit Kat / Taco Bell / etc. emojis (and you didn't say anything of the sort in the post to which I replied. I certainly hope you don't expect anyone to remember who said what in every post in multiple threads.)
That answers my question in a way that makes it sound like a rebuttal, but actually concedes my poin
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as I wrote above
I certainly hope you don't expect anyone to remember who said what in every post in multiple threads.
Nope, just trying to cite rather than repeating myself.
You admit that I will likely need to consult a table of thousands of emojis.
And someone just learning Chinese or Japanese would need to consult a table of thousands of hanzi/kanji. Likewise, someone using lesser-known punctuation in English, such as the en and em dashes and mathematical symbols, would need to consult a table for those. Perhaps the solution involves improved emoji input methods rather than not including emojis at all.
fallacious
Which I'm willing to do my best to repair.
Re:Why emojis/emoticons are in Unicode? (Score:4, Interesting)
Because the newest generation likes to express themselves differently than the dinosaurs...
Believe me the demand is there, just because you can't comprehend it doesn't mean it shouldn't exist.
I'm sure that lots of people disagree with me, but historically the most creative writing emerged when base words and concepts were generally not acceptable in speech. Sure, it's censorship, but on the other hand, you don't find Shakespeare to simply be dialogue loaded-down with vulgar words either, and when vulgarities are employed, sparingly, they are highly effective.
Emojis are a form of base communications, when one does not take the time to express one's self properly. That doesn't mean that there isn't a place for them, but it isn't unfair to judge people by their choice to use them instead of the express themselves otherwise.
Re:Why emojis/emoticons are in Unicode? (Score:4, Insightful)
Web designers need to go back to the low-bandwidth model. They need to be forced to using ISDN (128kb) speeds to make the framework of their pages efficient before they start filling-in the meat of the pages with content. If the framework without content takes significant time to load, even without a character-set full of garbage to pull from, then the designer needs to rethink the design.
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This (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why I hate Emojis.
Seriously, they were a bad idea to begin with. Then the politically correct nazis started getting upset about them. And now this.
None of this should be in Unicode. If you want stupid little graphics in your text, then use stupid little graphics.
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You must be kidding. ASCII isn't even sufficient to write English, let alone the many other languages which genuinely benefit from being typeable.
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You must be kidding. ASCII isn't even sufficient to write English, let alone the many other languages which genuinely benefit from being typeable.
Strange, I never had a problem with it, and the abc's taught in English classes are a subset of it. Also, you didn't seem to have a problem expressing your thoughts in English, without unicode :-)
Code pages were a much simpler solution that worked.
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Any non-alphabetic language is basically emoji. Think of unicode emojis as a kind of universal Chinese if it makes you feel any better.
Faceplam indeed (Score:2)
I do wonder if they can get a Picard specific facepalm one...
Obligatory https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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This is a good idea (Score:2)
This Is Such A Good Idea!! I Really Mean It!! Maybe I Shouldn't Have Had 5 Pints Of Espresso!!
In fact, why don't we petition for the mandatory includion of marketing oriented microcode on all CPUs? This is what we all need!!
go ahead! (Score:3)
i have a nokia 3310, i don't mind what goes into unicode, because every SMS where people send me unicode smileys ends up as little rectangles.
Next up for sale.... (Score:2)
Standard SMTP headers!
From: fred@fredco.com
To: employee@fredco.com
Enjoy-A-Coke-While-Discussing: Fred's meeting memo
HTTP status codes!
404 Not Found - Have a Snickers instead!
Errno descriptions!
Program terminated (errno 31 Wonderful Flavors at Baskin Robbins!)
Sure (Score:2)
I think if Nestle is willing to make KitKat a public domain/generic word rather than their own trademarked brand, then I think it could be considered.
Otherwise... no.
OK, so I can use it anyway I choose? (Score:2)
So if KitKat and Durex get their own emojis, then I can use those emojis any way I choose and without licensing or trademark considerations?
Because that's what happens when you put it into the standard code pages.
So I can put (KitKat)(Condoms)(Donkey)(TacoBell)(IceCream)(PartyHat)(Cigarette) ... and KitKat and Taco Bell have NO legal right to say anything about how I use that image, right?
That will be awesome, and I'm sure the marketing clowns will love what happens when they make their trademark part of a
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I am sure they will just have the "emoji" clause written into some law which allows "fair use" of the image in the context of communications between devices or some such thing.
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If they make it part of Unicode, they should lose all ability to tell me what I can do with that character.
If they wish to have "an emoji clause", then they should be getting told to piss off and go away now.
As I said ... either it's just a character, and they have no right to ever say anything about how that character is used ... or it's a trademark they wish to restrict, and it has no business being in unicode.
But letting corporations stake out parts of the unicode standard AND continue to tell us how we
Article Should Be Renamed (Score:2)
It's a revenue generator for them... (Score:2)
It's a trap (Score:2)
.
For Once I Am Glad /. Has No Unicode Support (Score:2)
Subject line says it all.
This is the future of fine print (Score:2)
Just wait until pharma company disclaimers and car rental contracts are given single Unicode characters of their own.
U+1F595 Middle Finger Extended (Score:2)
The additional code to load them for display on the web
...is no more than the existing code to display any other glyph in a font. But in any case, perhaps U+1F595 Reversed Hand With Middle Finger Extended [emojipedia.org] might be more to your liking.
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The additional code to load them for display on the web
...is no more than the existing code to display any other glyph in a font. But in any case, perhaps U+1F595 Reversed Hand With Middle Finger Extended [emojipedia.org] might be more to your liking.
Oh look, none of my otherwise up-to-date browsers display that glyph, despite it being from 2014. So what do websites have to do to give their users what they want (which is apparently emojis)? That's right, web fonts and/or Javascript libraries to render them.
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Likewise, if you don't have any Korean fonts installed on your PC, you need "web fonts and/or Javascript libraries to render" Korean characters.
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What's the Unicode for "tinfoil hat"?
unicode is bigoted rabblerabblerabble... (Score:2)
Granted, most are appropriately in the dingbats section according to wikipedia.
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Yeah man. I mean what kind of sicko thinks that it is normal to discuss sex. It's so ... unnatural!
U+1F3CF (Score:2)
What I really want though is a bat, there's two fucking rabbits, but no bat.
Unicode has a bat, but it has a ball [emojipedia.org].
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Is there Unicode characters for the FSM [wikipedia.org] and IPU [wikipedia.org]? If not, that's just religious discrimination!
U+1F35D and U+1F984 (Score:2)
U+1F35D Spaghetti [emojipedia.org] and U+1F984 Unicorn Face [emojipedia.org] exist.
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I'd be willing to bet you they would look exactly the same. Think about it. No history class is going to go into such fine detail that it discusses this particular "event", regardless of the outcome. You might see it mentioned in a computer class, but certainly not in history class.
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Is there a transcript, in case people can't watch video (hard of hearing, on break at work, capped Internet, or can read faster than real time)? The trend of presenting things as video when they could as easily be text disappoints me.
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Satan? Don't denigrate my religion by confusing it with theirs.
Re: Well the muslims have their filthy prayer to (Score:2)
Killing in the name of YHWH (Score:2)
If you're combining God of Abraham as viewed by Christians and the God of Abraham as viewed by Muslims, it's even easier to make the case that more people have killed in the name of that God than of Satan.
Mod down your filthy post (Score:2)
I wish I had some mod points to mod down your filthy little post.
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