Slashdot Mirror
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."
Time to come up with marks for Humor, and mood and patent them. Wait...perhaps Chinese already has it!
So does the Internet: emoticons. For example, "=)" means happy, "=(" means unhappy, ">=(" means angry, "=p" is sticking out his tongue, mocking you, laughing at you, haunting your dreams! "=^_^=" is a soft kitty, warm kitty, little ball of fur. I could go on, but I think I've made my point.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett