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Open Sarcasm Fighting Copyrighted Punctuation
pinkushun writes "SarcMark is a copyrighted punctuation mark, that claims 'It's time that sarcasm is treated equally!' Pretty damn cheeky while they're charging for their software, which only inserts their punctuation through a hotkey. Open Sarcasm is destroying SarcMark by advocating a new punctuation mark (not displaying here properly — alt+U0161) as the new open and free sarcasm symbol. Either way, this will be one interesting turnout. With bad unicode support across the web, displaying the characters properly might be an issue. PS Left out sarcastic end sentence as Slashdot doesn't display the U0161 character."
We've come a long way, baby.
... but the thread would probably implode at this point.
it's a character in a font. it should be displayed by your local font choice as long as HTML is passing the correct code for the character.
/. is not responsible for HTML standards, or the font's installed on your local computer alas. it's up to your computer whether it's displayed or not.
by advocating a new story topic (not displaying here properly - alt-ctrl-del) as the new form of grammar and coherence. Either way, this will be one interesting turnout. With bad grammar and coherence across the web, advocating a new story topic properly might be an issue. PS Left out new story topic end sentence as Slashdot doesn't display the alt-ctrl-del character.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If the sarcastic sentence was a question would you need to use a question mark then the sarcasm mark?
Time to come up with marks for Humor, and mood and patent them. Wait...perhaps Chinese already has it!
Eclipse PDE and Me
Oh, a sarcasm punctuation mark. That's a real useful invention!
If you need a punctuation mark to express sarcasm then you are not doing it right.
It is like a laugh track or a drum rimshot to indicate a joke's punchline. It only accompanies the worst forms of humor.
I'm reminded of Laurence Olivier's remark to Dustin Hoffman, who had subjected himself to sleep deprivation to prepare himself for his role in "Marathon Man". Hoffman came onto the set, looking like hell, and explained what he did to prepare. Olivier said, "Dear chap, next time try acting." No special punctuation mark needed.
Emoticons are not enough. Well, it can happen.
Introducing a new symbol for "something new" can also happen.
But copyrighting it is something I'm not prepared to.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Slashdot is written in Perl, a language that tends to self-obfuscate within minutes of having been written. Consequently, updating the code base for trivial things like correct display of posted text is highly problematic. Also, even if the Perl implementation was written in non-standard (that is, comprehensible) fashion, to quote Rob Malda in a recent letter to me, "Unfortunately there really isn't any engineering time available to make any changes these days"
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I can't see the open alternative website because its slashdotted, but the sarcmark is obvious based on the Debian logo. I'm thinking that's not a coincidence?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
...as to whether this thing claims to be protected by patent (not patentable) or copyright (only the exact image would be protected, if that).
Actually, it appears that they are claiming that it is a registered trademark. In that case you are completely free to use it as punctuation.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Can we all agree to use the exclamation point at the beginning of a sentence to denote sarcasm?
A question mark at the end makes sense as it's right at the end, if you read the main part in your 'mind voice', raising tone at the end makes sense.
For sarcasm, you need to know at the beginning of the sentence, so the punctuation needs to go there.
! would work I think
!Oh, that's such a good idea.
!Have we forgotten our pants today?
See? Compatible for other punctuation too.
Waiting for an amusing sig.
Wait. Wait wait wait. Alt0161 is the upside-down exclamation mark that is already used commonly in Spanish sentence structure. WTF are you guys pulling?!
As others have noted, if you need special punctuation for sarcasm, you aren't doing it right.
On the other hand, what a great way to dodge accusations of libel alt+U0161
President (Bush | Obama) has sex with baby chickens every Sunday while listening to old 8-tracks of Jerry Fallwell alt+U0161
PROSECUTION: You have deceived millions of your fellow Americans into believing their (former president | president) engages in sexual relations with assorted poultry while taking communion.
DEFENSE: No I didn't. It's obvious I didn't mean what I said, because I put a alt+U0161 on the end of the sentence.
JUDGE: Case dismissed.
Now replace with a plausible accusation (I have proof that June is sleeping with Joe's husband), yet defamatory, aimed at a colleague or local figure, rather than a national politician. Rinse, lather, and repeat for an easy recipe to defame with no legal liability. After all, we all know punctuation speaks louder than words, alt+U0161
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Quelle surprise. Does Slashdot display any Unicode characters correctly, apart from English letters and punctuation? I think I saw some madman use the British pound symbol once, but that was Dark Magic and he was burned at the stake.
Dislike the Electoral College? Lobby your state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
"Pretty damn cheeky while they're charging for their software, which only inserts their punctuation through a hotkey."
Hint: In many cases, Sarcasm loses its usefulness if there's no ambiguity about it. &irony;
I prefer to wrap mine in tags, like bold, italic and underline.
If sarcasm is done right, as a previous poster mentioned, then it should be obvious, and thus a symbol is not needed.
If the inventor of the sarcasm symbol needs help understand sarcasm, why should the rest of us point it out to him? And, for that matter, why should we pay him for the privilege of point it out to him.
Anyway, there is already a well know symbol that doesn't require any addition to the Unicode standard, nor any addition to any existing fonts. :-p
Easy as that, really!
Reminds me of a joke where an American actually 'got' sarcasm for the first time. It was raining outside, and his non-American friend says 'Isn't the weather just great!'.
The American bloke realises that his buddy just said the exact opposite to what he meant. Wow! What an amazing thing.
He then went on to use this device himself...
The following week in work, a friend closed a filing cabinet on his finger. Our friend, now endowed with his new found sense of sarcasm, pounced on the opportunity to put this into practise...
"Isn't the weather great!", says he.
*sigh*
I thought this character is already reserved for Trogdor!!!
It's a matter of who your audience is.
Are you adequate?
What's wrong with the good old percontation point?
Please please please please please, dot NOT overload Unicode by assigning a punctuation to U+0161. This is the code for a small s with caron, and is necessary for writing Czech, Estonian, Finnish, Slovak, and other languages. If you want to support a new character, put it in the Private Use Areas. There's over 130,000 code points that are set aside, just for this sort of thing. It's like those idiots trying to support the new Indian Rupee symbol, but end up calling in to question the interpretation of all sorts of data.
Here's the rules:
1. Every assigned code point has a defined meaning. If you are trying to do ANYTHING that means that code point should be interpreted any other way, it is WRONG!
2. Reserved (ie, Unassigned) code points absolutely can NOT be used for information interchange. Reserved code points are two meetings away from being assigned code points, and using them is just as bad as using a code point wrong.
3. There is a place where you can play around. It's called the Private Use Areas. They are three blocks: U+E000-U+F8FF, U+F0000-U+FFFFD, and U+100000=U+10FFFD. You can literally do whatever the heck you want there, no questions asked.
I`m sic of this!
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/0161/latin_small_letter_s_with_caron.png
That's SOOOO interesting. I mean, we REALLLLLY need help in pointing out when someone's being sarcastic. That'll be SOOOO helpful. I can't even BEGIN to tell you how useful that will be. These people REALLY are geniuses, and I TOTALLY mean that.
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Oh, yeah, sure... it's time that sarcasm BE treated equally...
U0161 is Latin Small Letter S With Caron
U+0161 is a real character, used in many languages as a normal character. This is English-speaking imperialism at its worst: can you imagine if someone proposed to use "x" as the sarcasm character since it's not in all Latin languages? At the same time, I can't see why a patent could or would be granted for this, although I'm sure it could be copyrighted.
At opensarcasm.org they mention the Ethiopian sarcasm mark, the Temherte Slaqî. It's pretty much indistinguishable from the Spanish initial exclamation mark. I'd show it here, but Slashdot doesn't support anything beyond basic ASCII, apparently.
2019 is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop.
I'm sure THAT'S gonna happen.
What happened to the Open Sarcasm website? I can't open it so I have no idea how to add that sarcasm mark to the end of this question asking why the site is down!
I really care about this. It's probably the most important thing I've read this year.
See? No special punctuation needed. Next!
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Yeah, I can totally see that catching on...
;) ;-) and ;~), is pretty universally accepted and understood to indicate joking, kidding or sarcasm; and, even then, if you can't write in a manner where your sarcasm is not obvious, maybe you should just improve your writing skills or only carry conversions by text with people who have compression skills greater than those of a rock.
(see what I did there?)
Besides, we already have a symbol for sarcasm. The winky face, in variations of
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0100.pdf
"Small Latin Letter S with Caron"
"Czech, Estonian, Finnish, Slovak, and many other languages."
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
The beauty of sarcasm lies in its inherent ambiguity and its delayed-action effect.
A sarcasm symbol is crude and ugly.
Is it April 1?
The summary states that the character code for the open sarcasm mark is U+0161, but the opensarcasm.org site says that it should be U+00A1, which is graphically identical to the Spanish inverted exclamation point but apparently has a historic Ethiopic precedent as a sarcasm marker. Incedentally, when I first read the summary I opened up the Character Viewer applet in osx to see what the mark looked like. Since I misread the summary, I first looked up U+1610, which looks almost exactly like the proprietary bullshit SarcMark, only lacking the interior dot. The shape of the spiral is almost identical though, and U+1612 has the same spiral shape and does have a dot, though the dot is placed slightly differently than in the SuckMark. If a drop-in replacement for the proprietary mark is ever needed I'd nominate U+1612.
To what "bad unicode support" is the submitter referring? The Web has excellent Unicode support. Every browser supports just about every BMP Unicode character I can throw at it (except IE in Windows XP, but even that does at least a fair job).
The Internet is full. Go away.
So how about using [!] as the mark of sarcastic comments? I won't try to copyright this. You are now free to be sarcastic without the need of special software.
Sarcasm mark - that's real useful.
If you can't read something and know it's sarcasm, well...stupidity should be painful. Just ask all those news organizations who keep quoting The Onion stories as real news.
You wouldn't want that kind of fun to stop, would you? That's one of the best parts of sarcasm. Pitching it over the heads of stupid people and watching them not get it. There is an element of sadism to really good sarcasm, and a punctuation mark to make it obvious would ruin that.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Sarcasm, Inc., is based in Washington, Michigan, a bit north of Detroit. I, for one, will be paying the buck ninety-nine to support the Michigan economy. We're at over 13% unemployment, and we never recovered from losing our manufacturing economy. And now, my great state has once again started building something: punctuation! If you support open punctuation, you're destroying Michigan jobs!
Oh, I just visited their website, and there's no Linux version of the SarcMark software.
Fuck you guys, SarcMark.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
I work in an office where we use chat for a large amount of communication. A few months ago I suggested we use "//" either before or after a sentence to denote sarcasm. So far it has taken hold fairly well, everyone knows what it means and about half are using it frequently.
I got the font from the SarcMark's site and it turns out, SarcMark uses U+03A9 Greek Capital Letter Omega dressed up with a font.
Makes sense because no one uses that character for any application. Ever.
Oh, great, another punctuation mark, now people won't keep mistake sentences for sarcasm when they aren't, like this one.
Let's put this thing in perspective. I'm in France where the Euro has been legal tender for about 10 year, I'm a geek who changes computer every couple years, and even on my brand new Dell laptop 8G+500G+4proc I have no frigging idea where the euro key is. So for me (and many others), the solution to the sarcasm symbol will be ;-) or :-P for quite a while still.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
U+0161 is not a punctuation mark. It is a letter. It's a lowercase s with caron. Czechs, Balts, and everyone else who uses that letter as a letter will really appreciate your proposal. I hope you get my sarcasm (or is it sharcasm now?) without the sign.
Some of my friends and I occasionally use what we've dubbed the 'sarcarrot' (^) at the end of a sarcastic sentence
As in: The government should totally force everybody to use the SarcMarc^
Excellent idea, I can see this taking off in the near future for sure.
That said, this largely seems like a cop out for writing appropriately. The only type of discussion that benefits from a specific punctuation mark is that of which is brief to begin with, a la Facebook and Twitter posts. Any continuous communication past a couple of sentences render this punctuation unnecessary, as the frame of the sentence gives the reader clues as to the author's intent.
Additionally, even sarcasm in the short, burst style communication of social websites can be made apparent by appropriate word choice with a touch of redundancy. But maybe it is too much to ask for MySpace users and co. to think about what they're writing.
I know of at least three ways of expressing sarcasm through the internet already.
One of them, we all do anyway, more or less, using smiley faces. The second is used in closed captioning and is an exclamation mark in parentheses, although is somewhat ambiguous as it can be used to indicate surprise as well. The third, and the one most likely to appeal to slashdotters in my opinion is the use of one pipe symbol to get it across (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_bar#Language for why).
Actually, there are loads here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation
I think there's a fair degree of overlap between people who use emoticons and those who dot every "i" and "j" with hearts or smiley faces.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Can't display the symbol? Will Prince be the official spokesperson?? Dan
i give you sarcastrophes!
i just ^love^ being modded down.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
<sarcasm>What everyone is forgetting is that XML is the perfect solution to all of our communications problems and guarantees universal interoperability.</sarcasm>
The summary should have said U+00A1 (decimal 161).