Do We Need More Emojis?

mikejuk writes to note that the Unicode Consortium has accepted 38 new emoji characters as candidates for Unicode 9.0, including characters depicting bacon and a duck."Why could we possibly need a duck? Many of the new characters are the 'other half' of gender-matched pairs, so the Dancer emoji (which is usually rendered as Apple's salsa dancing woman) gets a Man Dancing emoji, who frankly looks like a cross between John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever and your dad at the wedding disco. ... Other additions include carrot, cucumber, and avocado, and bacon. ... The list of additions is rounded off with new animal emojis. Some are the 'missing' zodiac symbols (lion and crab). Others are as baffling as ever – is there *really* a demand for a mallard duck? Sorry: it's in fact a drake!

Comments

couldn't hurt

[steak]

the long slow death of literacy could not possibly be harmed by more emjois.

Re:couldn't hurt

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

I chuckle when people frequenting the site that invented "RTFA" complain about other people using shorter sentences.

Re:couldn't hurt

[ganjadude]

we moved on from hieroglyphs, we dont need to be going back to them

Re:couldn't hurt

[Trepidity]

The real reason Slashdotters don't like emoji is that this site, in 2015, still can't properly display Unicode anyway.

Re:couldn't hurt

[fustakrakich]

Yeah, but now there's bacon...

Re:couldn't hurt

[TWX]

Only character that I would like to use on Slashdot that doesn't work is the Degree symbol, Alt-248. Even then I can work around that without major problems.

Re:couldn't hurt

[Zontar The Mindless]

I'd like to be able to use Chinese in my sig.

And no, we do not need fucking emoji in the standard. Especially not when there are still actual *writing* systems that haven't been properly handled yet.

Re:couldn't hurt

[Zanadou]

As opposed to your lazy caps and spelling?

Re:couldn't hurt

[Number42]

The difference between hieroglyphics and Chinese characters (Korean just uses a syllabary as far as I know) is that while hieroglyphics were actually alphabetic in nature, hanzi/kanji are ideograms. So hieroglyphics are actually closer to the alphabets in use today.

Re:couldn't hurt

[pjt33]

There are plenty of loanwords in English which still retain diacritics, as well as a few personal names. Everywhere else I just type them: on Slashdot I catch them in preview and have to replace them with HTML entities. So yes, there's a workaround, but it's not a good user experience.

Re:couldn't hurt

[KGIII]

We're moving back to dumb terminals anyhow. What's another aspect of life making the slow march towards regression?

Re:couldn't hurt

[mwvdlee]

Don't edit them away. Let them stay in all their misrendered ugliness.
Slashdot should be fixing their bugs, not us working around them.

Re:couldn't hurt

[hcs_$reboot]

this site, in 2015, still can't properly display Unicode

I don't think that's really the problem. A web site with UTF-8 encoding does not have much to do to get unicode to be displayed correctly. The site merely just has to let the characters go, any recent browser then displays the codes appropriately. The reason slashdot does not show unicode (first byte above 0x7F) is because the characters are filtered out, either when being recorded within /. database, or during the transmission up to the browsers.

Re:couldn't hurt

[Hognoxious]

I consider that a feature, not a bug.

Re:couldn't hurt

[ultranova]

we moved on from hieroglyphs, we dont need to be going back to them

We moved on from hieroglyphs since writing by hand was so tedious anyone bothering could be assumed to be serious in unclear cases. Since writing and sending messages has moved on to an everyday form of personal communication, it also requires a concise way to express tone and emotion a non-professional writer can manage. And in practice that means some form of smileys, so we can as well optimize them.

Technology exists to serve people's needs, after all.

Re:couldn't hurt

[Tom]

And now, for the first time, I'm happy that it doesn't.

If they ever add it, please, please, please also add a "rate all posts using emojis at -5" filter at the same time.

Re:couldn't hurt

[AmiMoJo]

The Chinese, and to a lesser extent other Oriental and east Asian cultures, are what are driving the adoption of these new emoji. As you probably know, Chinese characters are ideograms, little pictures representing things and concepts. It's hard to describe just how influential this has been on Chinese culture... I guess it's kind of like a emoji of a carrot is sort of pun, almost.

So yeah, while I agree that there are huge problems with Chinese in Unicode and other issues that need addressing, these emojis are already in use in China (special software support on phones and in IM apps like QQ) so they should be supported. The goal is to support all forms of written communication, and these characters are in common use.

The ones added for completeness, e.g. male counterparts to female emoji, are obviously important for other reasons.

Re:couldn't hurt

[quantaman]

the long slow death of literacy could not possibly be harmed by more emjois.

I like the joke but think it might be wrong.

I use emojis for the same reason I use big words and complex syntax, it gives me the ability to communicate with more clarity, nuance, and fun.

Sometimes the emotion I'm trying to convey is properly captured using real words and proper sentences. But sometimes I'm simultaneously trying to imply a child-like state of mind, and emojis do that really really well.

Of course I don't know what they hell they're doing in unicode, not to mention the quixotic quest to make them gender neutral. Do they think they're going to make them race and culture neutral as well or is the standard just going to contain this big blog of largely Western references and the rest of the planet is unrepresented?

Re:couldn't hurt

[jellomizer]

Except for the fact that illiteracy rates are at an all time low.
Back in the good old days when people weren't interested such stuffy formal books, they just decided that reading wasn't for them, so they never learned. Yes emojis are silly, and are used in informal methods. But for the most part they used for fun. If I get an email from my boss and it has emojis on it, it means it is informal communication, as he is just joking around. However if it is more of a formal request there are no emojis, so it means it is strict business.
When we live in a world of unprecedented mass-communications as I expect even this silly post is being read across the world, having new tools to express themselves in a concise way format is useful. Heck books often have pictures too. Not so much in formal literary books, but in instructional books, children books, and are you really going to open up a can of worms and say comics are just kids stuff.
Sometimes we just need to lighten up, and realize not all communication needs to be strictly formal.

Re:couldn't hurt

[jellomizer]

When they moved off hieroglyphs, I expect the reasoning was more political than an actual analysis of the benefits of changing.
You know that getting taken over by Rome stuff. Having the population and demographics shifts where people from other cultures gets integrated in the culture where some of their ideals and values get moved in.
Now there was probably some level of communication loss by leaving the hieroglyphs, that its alternatives never really did pick up. Now as time goes on perhaps we should allow some changes, and get out of Victorian values in literacy.

Re:couldn't hurt

[jellomizer]

That is just a standard fluctuation in the computing market. It moves back in forth from centralized to de-centralized systems. Normally based technologies available, and how we use the data available to us.

Re:couldn't hurt

[drinkypoo]

The Chinese, and to a lesser extent other Oriental and east Asian cultures, are what are driving the adoption of these new emoji.

No, just stupid ones. It takes a real idiot to think "this picture-writing system that we've got has been a stone around our neck limiting our ability to express complex thoughts for two thousand years... what we really need is another picture-writing system".

Re:couldn't hurt

[Xyrus]

We're transforming our language into hieroglyphics. Soon, only Cortana will be able to read the old books, and that' only with a Rosetta Stone plugin.

Re:couldn't hurt

[drinkypoo]

Since writing and sending messages has moved on to an everyday form of personal communication, it also requires a concise way to express tone and emotion a non-professional writer can manage.

You mean an idiot? Instead of expecting people to exercise their language skills, we're just enabling stupid people to be more stupid. Their last motivation to learn to speak properly was to communicate with other idiots like themselves, and emoji shits on that.

Meanwhile, they're actually a really shitty way to communicate, because they are far more difficult to tell apart on a small screen than are words. Emoji are stupid, and people who use them are stupid by extension. But we knew that, because if they weren't, they would have just written what they meant instead of using an ambiguous sad face fucking a duck.

Re:couldn't hurt

[AmiMoJo]

Right, culture should remain static forever, no one should have the hubris to make anything new.

Re:couldn't hurt

[drinkypoo]

Right, culture should remain static forever, no one should have the hubris to make anything new.

We're talking about pictograms. It's the opposite of something new, only this time, it makes no fucking sense.

Re:couldn't hurt

[ChrisMaple]

If emojis are supposed to convey emotion, hopefully in a standardized fashion, what's the emoji for sarcasm, universally agreed to and understood?

Re:couldn't hurt

[Pieroxy]

We're moving back to dumb terminals anyhow.

To be fair, our terminals are getting smarter and smarter by the day these times.

Re:couldn't hurt

[Pieroxy]

If emojis are supposed to convey emotion, hopefully in a standardized fashion, what's the emoji for sarcasm, universally agreed to and understood?

emojis are supposed to convey emotions, which is not to say emotions are all represented by an amoji. Do you eat bananas? Are you a chimp?

Re:couldn't hurt

[ultranova]

You mean an idiot?

No. Why would you think I did? Apart as a rhetorical prelude to your following tirade, of course, but surely an expert communicator like you you could launch into one without having to twist other people's words into a springboard?

Instead of expecting people to exercise their language skills, we're just enabling stupid people to be more stupid.

And believing that you of course used a telnet client to read this discussion and post your message, since a "browser" makes the process easier, thus letting even you manage it? Or does it only apply to skills you already (mistakenly think you) are good at, thus completely coincidentally maximizing the chance that you have an unfair advantage in any interaction?

Grammar and spelling exist to faciliate efficient communication. Trying to use them as a barrier to silence people you dislike for whatever reason means you not only missed the mark, but somehow managed to get a bullseye on your own asshole. Though judging by your attitude, that's easier for you than most.

Their last motivation to learn to speak properly was to communicate with other idiots like themselves, and emoji shits on that.

Smileys are only relevant to written text, not spoken word. Furthermore, unless it's one specific emoji you're concerned about, it's "emojis shit", not "emoji shits".

Meanwhile, they're actually a really shitty way to communicate, because they are far more difficult to tell apart on a small screen than are words.

This is the first and only relevant or even remotely intelligent point you've made in your own sad attempt to communicate. And if you insist on using a mobile device which lacks a zoom function yet supports less-used unicode characters, and use this device for the type of communication where it's critical to be able to tell a smiley from a frowney, it might actually make sense to ask people to take this into account when messaging you. But frankly, that sounds like a very specific corner case that has little if any relevant to designing technical standards for common use.

Emoji are stupid, and people who use them are stupid by extension. But we knew that, because if they weren't, they would have just written what they meant instead of using an ambiguous sad face fucking a duck.

And yet your message would had been improved by replacing most of its content with oral bestiality. At least then you could had blamed it on a computer virus rather than whatever is infecting your central nervous system, and even if you'd failed you'd come across as a mere pervert rather than an arrogant shithead who wants to make life more difficult to other people for the mere reason that you think it should be. It would also have provided more value to this discussion, or any discussion.

Re:couldn't hurt

[michelcolman]

My reply to that is "" .

Re:couldn't hurt

[freeze128]

"I'm feeling very BACON today."

Re:couldn't hurt

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Ugh. Nerd elitism rears its ugly head for the most frivilous of things.

Re:couldn't hurt

[AthanasiusKircher]

We moved on from hieroglyphs since writing by hand was so tedious anyone bothering could be assumed to be serious in unclear cases. Since writing and sending messages has moved on to an everyday form of personal communication, it also requires a concise way to express tone and emotion a non-professional writer can manage.

Excuse me if the following sounds a bit exasperated, but you do realize that people actually communicated informal messages to each other written form BEFORE texting, right?

People wrote letters and postcards, and they've been doing this for centuries. People wrote office memos and short notes to loved ones, either left in a box for someone to pick up or perhaps carried by courier to the recipient. Once the telegraph was developed, people sent telegrams and paid by the length of the message, so they often managed to communicate extraordinary emotions in a few lines of text. (I have the telegrams sent between my grandmother and grandfather when my mother was born during WWII and my grandfather was overseas. You can easily get the emotions they were experiencing from the short texts; it's quite moving, actually.)

I don't think you realize the extent that people used memos and couriers in the days before telephones, or the extent that people wrote informal postcards to each other or short letters on a regular basis to keep relatives and friends abreast of ongoing events. Mail used to even be delivered multiple times per day in many places in the U.S.

While handwritten notes sometimes could include graphical symbols, most people didn't make a lot of use of them, because text is so efficient at conveying ideas.

And we already have symbols to express written emotion and tone -- they're called punctuation. Even a "non-professional writer can manage" to use them. The main ones are ! and ?, but you can also convey quite a variety of emotions through combinations: !! vs. !? vs. ?! vs. ??, or even things like (?) or (!), etc.

A little personal anecdote: a few years back, I happened upon some letters sent between my grandparents during WWII. Actually, both of my grandfathers served overseas during WWII, and I have letters from both of them. A few things to note:

(1) They didn't seem to need emojis to express a considerable range of thoughts, ideas, and emotions. (It's very moving to read some of their letters.)
(2) They possessed a better grasp of written grammar, usage, and style than most college undergraduates I've taught. They still made errors, but I assume the fluidity of their writing is due to lots of practice in casual written communication (as was incredibly common back then).
(3) They weren't professional writers. In fact, one had attended school to 6th grade and the other had attended only until 4th. (This was also fairly common in the U.S. before WWII.) Yet they somehow got enough out of "grammar school" back then to be able to communicate in writing on a level comparable to at least a high-school graduate today.

I've seen enough examples of letters written by other relatively lower-class soldiers in wars (in documentaries, etc.) to know that my grandfathers weren't outliers either.

And in practice that means some form of smileys, so we can as well optimize them.

"Smileys" are/were somewhat different. Most "smileys" were used in place of actual facial expressions: a grin, frown, wide-eyed look of surprise, wink, etc. There's no direct verbal equivalent to these facial expressions, but they could of course be simply represented as *wink* or [grin] or whatever too, utilizing only a couple more characters.

The set of easily recognizable facial expressions is relatively small. Even if we include common and nearly universal body language gestures like nodding, shaking the head, and "thumbs up," we might only need a dozen or so such representations to convey expression/gesture.

But as you say, emojis are no lo

Re:couldn't hurt

[BlackHawk-666]

Sarcasm isn't actually an emotion, it's an inflection of speech.

Re:couldn't hurt

[tepples]

The reason slashdot does not show unicode (first byte above 0x7F) is because the characters are filtered out

And this character whitelist exists because in the past, vandals have used bidirectional control characters in Unicode to spoof moderation scores.

Re:couldn't hurt

[ultranova]

First, I am quite capable of retrieving the page content via telnet.

But did you? Y'know, to practice your skills?

Second, the page content was actually deliberately formatted to be interpreted with a web browser. A whole layer of material was added to the content specifically to make that convenient.

So your convenience matters, but other people should "exercise their language skills". How utterly unsurprising.

In what way am I using grammar or spelling to silence people? I am trying to encourage grammar and spelling, so that people can have a voice. You are trying to encourage people to engage in the digital equivalent of baby talk, so that they can never express a complex thought. You've got it completely backwards, fucko. You want to disempower. I want to empower.

Really? Because this is what you actually wrote: "Instead of expecting people to exercise their language skills, we're just enabling stupid people to be more stupid. Their last motivation to learn to speak properly was to communicate with other idiots like themselves, and emoji shits on that."

So tell me: if smileys enable "stupid people" (to use your elitist terminology) to express the thoughts they wish, which is the logical requirement for them to replace some other form of communication, such as written text, in what way would disabling them "empower" said people? All it does is make communication less convenient and thus less frequent. Of course, if that's your actual goal, your means make perfect sense.

If you insist on being a disingenuous douchebag, you can only talk meaningless shit.

I assure you, my dislike of your ideas and attitude is quite sincere. Also, perhaps you shouldn't call people "idiots" and expect a polite response. Douchebags exist to deal with shit, after all.

There's plenty of places where you're not allowed to zoom, yet where emoji can appear.

Such as? And in any case, if they can render modern fonts, which are vector graphics, making said smileys part of the font should actually solve this problem. Or at least let you read the HTML source, which you above imply you're capable of doing.

Seriously, everything you said was wrong. Why do you even bother?

Because malevolent bullcrap like yours is slowing down progress everywhere I look. If you want to communicate solely through six-page hand-bound letters written in calligraphed Oxford English, that is certainly your right. And if someone else chooses to use pornographic smileys to imply that getting a blowjob from a duck turned out to be a bad idea, that's theirs. But no - you insist on having a say on how they may or may not communicate, for their own good of course.

Re:couldn't hurt

[lgw]

We moved on from hieroglyphs since writing by hand was so tedious anyone bothering could be assumed to be serious in unclear cases. Since writing and sending messages has moved on to an everyday form of personal communication, it also requires a concise way to express tone and emotion a non-professional writer can manage.

Excuse me if the following sounds a bit exasperated, but you do realize that people actually communicated informal messages to each other written form BEFORE texting, right?

You went off the rails there. The earliest writing was only used professionally - there just wasn't any vocabulary (at least none surviving) for anything but accounting. Using writing for sending messages from place to place was an evolution, and not an instant one. The earliest messages seem to be accounting/business related as well, from tax information to contracts to customer complaints. Since you had to send a human messenger anyway, who was perfectly capable of memorizing long and detailed messages, sending a written message with him was a somewhat specialized need.

It was only with the growth of the idea of using writing to send a message through time, and/or in multiple copies throughout the land, did written language become expressive enough to be useful for "informal messages" in a way that the person carrying the message wasn't. Laws, histories, treaties, and so one required more vocabulary than common trade objects, numbers, and "promise to pay".

Even if we include common and nearly universal body language gestures like nodding, shaking the head,

There's a girl in my office new enough to the US that she still shakes her head from side to side as an affirmative gesture, which is common for at least a billion people. Everything's arbitrary.

By the way, the one emotion/tone that has frustrated writers for centuries is irony/sarcasm. Many have proposed a simple symbol for this, usually a backwards question mark. But for some reason no such mark has become standard. That's perhaps the only "emoji" I have ever felt the need for in writing.

I find it interesting that this is also indicated by tone of voice, well within the normal sort of thing modern language captures. We use punctuation and accents in many ways in many languages to capture tone of voice. Isn't it odd we don't already have something for sarcasm?

Re:couldn't hurt

[Bing Tsher E]

I happen to be a chimp who is allergic to bananas.

Why did you post your hateful comment without a prominent 'Trigger Warning' at the top?

Re:couldn't hurt

[hcs_$reboot]

Interesting. And that's a good reason to remove anything below 0x20 (besides \n of course), where the control characters reside. But removing anything else, eg above 0x7F, is not necessary, though.

Re:couldn't hurt

[tepples]

The bidirectional control characters are up in the U+20xx block, not down below U+0020 as you appear to assume.

Re:couldn't hurt

[sfcat]

The difference between hieroglyphics and Chinese characters (Korean just uses a syllabary as far as I know) is that while hieroglyphics were actually alphabetic in nature, hanzi/kanji are ideograms. So hieroglyphics are actually closer to the alphabets in use today.

The Korean alphabet (Hangul) is a probably the most efficient alphabet of any widely used (ie live) language in the world. The hieroglyphic nature of Chinese is what makes it so hard to read and write. Roman alphabets like we use in the west are more efficient as words can be sounded out in most cases due to our more consistent morphology (then again, we wouldn't have spelling bees if English had better morphology). But Hangul can be seen as a perfection of that idea but you could also consider it to be similar to a subset of IPA (international phonetic alphabet). Hangul's mapping to the sounds in the Korean language is much closer than the mappings in western and romance languages. It also has a very intuitive and efficient written representation combining consonants and vowels into one glyph in a regular way. This is partially due to the fact that Hangul is much younger and was developed specifically for Korean (unlike the alphabet English uses). You can learn Hangul in an afternoon and be able to (mostly) pronounce written Korean but not understand it. Spoken Korean is just as hard to learn as any other Asian language but the written form is a marvel of linguistics.

More info here: https://www.zkorean.com/korean...

Re:couldn't hurt

[hcs_$reboot]

So these U+20xx have to be removed as well, but why remove the rest? Regarding below 0x20, in UTF-8 these single byte characters are also control characters which were probably filtered out by /. in the first place - that's why the AC used the U+20 chars.

Re: couldn't hurt

[loufoque]

Both of you have way too much karma to burn.

Re: couldn't hurt

[loufoque]

Chinese is handled just fine by Unicode, silly nationalist complains about CJK han unification notwithstanding.
They even added non-unified radicals.

Re:couldn't hurt

[ultranova]

That's stupid or disingenuous bullshit. Emoji makes an expressed thought harder to understand, while the HTML presentation coupled with a web browser makes it easier. It's exactly the opposite.

Smileys make it easier for the people who use them to express their thoughts. That is why they use it. And you know that too, at least based on your comment: "Instead of expecting people to exercise their language skills, we're just enabling stupid people to be more stupid. Their last motivation to learn to speak properly was to communicate with other idiots like themselves, and emoji shits on that."

So it's you who's disingenius here. Or, to put it bluntly, a complete hypocrite. Especially since your own grip on the English language appears to be tenuous at best, as demonstrated below.

I don't expect if I get a polite response, and since you appear to understand English,

Pity you can't write it :-D. Perhaps you should focus more on your own language skills rather than those of others.

Such as when displaying a short message, for example. They are typically displayed in system font sizes, which are usually non-trivial to change for the average user.

So now average user's convenience matters. Of course, they seem to be just fine with smileys since they keep using them... So perhaps it's you who finds changing font size non-trivial?

Why is everything HTML to you? Is that the only technology you "understand"?

HTML is cross-platform, allows embedding images, and is often used to render messages, so your "small-smiley" scenario could theoretically happen with it. Was that really too hard to figure out?

Never mind, rhetorical question. I see little reason to continue this, since it's obvious you have nothing besides playing(?) dumb to add. So long, and the next time you have trouble with technology simply ask for help, rather than coming up with a ridiculous tale about trying to protect "idiots" from too much convenience.

Re:couldn't hurt

[wardrich86]

We're basically headed full-circle back to glyphs.

Re:couldn't hurt

[nazrhyn]

You forgot to close your dashed appositive in the second-to-last paragraph ;).

Re: couldn't hurt

[Cinnamon Beige]

That said, Chinese is not as much a single language with many dialects as it is a family of languages that share a common grammar and writing system. It would be somewhat like if all the Romance languages used a common writing system so anybody who could read one literally could read them all, and in a pinch could people who didn't have in common a spoken language could still communicate with each other by passing a notebook back and forth. What prevents this historically with Chinese is the sheer number of hanzi needed for literacy, though touch screens and electronic dictionaries mean I can look up a character I don't know without needing to know the reading: I just write it on my screen. Honestly, I'd be fine with pushing emoji towards working like an easier-to-learn version of it: work out a common grammar of some basic flavor, keep all of the symbols pictographic, and start mapping them after a certain point as alts to the corresponding Han characters instead of as unique characters to save space in Unicode. Basically, set it up as a way for people without a language in common to communicate important non-abstract things like bathroom locations or a need for a doctor. Abstract concepts can be saved for when you can manage to have a full language in common, concrete concepts are less likely to require a common culture and more likely to have urgency.

Re: couldn't hurt

[Cinnamon Beige]

What gets me is that it would be easy enough to handle gender and race variants as alternate forms of the base characters, something Unicode already supports and which would let those of us perfectly fine with using literally yellow people of any gender just go with that. It also means that the new emoji will be more supported from the start, as those whose systems don't display the new ones will get the basic one instead of a Mystery Box. This seems like it would suit Unicode's goals a lot better anyway. (Especially since I think it would generally be more useful for us all to have to go to some trouble if for some reason we need to specify in our emoji that M* Duck is a Mr or a Ms, since I suspect normally nobody cares.)

Re: couldn't hurt

[KGIII]

With everything going towards the cloud, I would say we have a trend. We have everything from Office to Photoshop in the cloud now. To my mind that is reminiscent of the days of yore when we had dumb terminals and rented time on the mainframe and I don't see this trend ending any time soon. I actually envision more and more Software as a Service and more and more cloud applications.

Heck, I am forever using VNC to connect to a PC of my own and working from there. I see that as so very similar to the days gone by that I can't help but notice the similarities. It's also "trendy" these days so I think we'll see more and more of this for the time being. As someone mentioned above, the pendulum will keep swinging. How long before we have gone to entirely dumb terminals where even our OS is grabbed across a network and we work from there? At the same time, there will also be a viable OS on the chip itself which, I imagine, will be the pendulum swinging back in some regards. I'd expect some sort of melding.

Hmm... Come to think of it... I know lots of people who neither know how to configure or use an email client - even on their phones. They simply access the web and, to them, email is a web service and a web service alone.

Re:couldn't hurt

[tepples]

Slashdot has "lameness filters" to stop certain known vandal patterns, and vandals were using homoglyphs to evade lameness filters. In addition, Slashdot is in English. Most characters that aren't on the whitelist are more useful for what some call "ASCII art" or "Shift JIS art" than for text in English. The Slashdot administrators want to discourage ASCII art because vandals were posting pornographic ASCII art, such as an ASCII version of the goatse.cx receiver, a drawing in a similar style titled "Jack Off", and a smaller drawing called "Penis Bird". Finally, a blacklist doesn't work so well because new dangerous characters could be added to a new version of the Unicode standard and used for vandalism before the administrators can react.

Re:couldn't hurt

[cas2000]

We've just become lazy in our writing. Despite the huge increase in short bursts of written communication, we don't tend to spend much time on even slightly longer bits of written communication.

yes, this exactly. lazy writers have shifted the burden of comprehension onto readers - instead of putting in the effort to clearly express what they are thinking/saying/feeling, they use a handful of inscrutable icons with ill-defined meanings...leaving it up to the reader to a) try to identify what that bizarre little picture is supposed to be, b) what it means in general, and c) what it means in the current context.

what, for example, does a sad face next to a duck mean? does it mean "i don't like ducks", "my duck just died", "a duck just shat on my head", "haha! duck-lips photos suck!" or something else entirely? it does not clearly express anything, just (possibly) something sad (possibly) involving a duck or perhaps another bird but duck was the closest picture i could remember or find quickly or perhaps something whimsically represented by a duck-like picture.

where no actual meaning has been conveyed, there is no actual communication.

if you want to communicate, it's up to you to do so clearly...not just scribble some inscrutable gibberish and expect your reader to figure it out. this is true no matter how simple or complex the thing you are trying to communicate.

words, by way of contrast, are a) easy to distinguish from other words, and b) have fixed meanings and don't require a great deal of interpretation (that doesn't mean ONE meaning per word, as words can have nuanced meanings, but a small number of meanings. the correct or most appropriate meaning can *easily* be deduced from the context)

communication involving hieroglyphs, ideographs, icons etc sucks because it is extremely difficult to understand what is meant (thus defeating its own purpose) and requires an enormous memory for the meanings of slightly different-looking pictures.

there's a reason why literacy is so much more difficult and uncommon in China - you aren't literate until you've memorised thousands upon thousands of different symbols and combinations of them. compare this to having to memorise roughly 20-50 different symbols (depending on the language - e.g most variants of the roman alphabet have 20-30 characters, while devanagari has 47) for the sounds/letters of the words. in both cases, you still have to know the words you're trying to write but in the latter you can write *ANY* words with just 20-50 symbols while in the former you can only write the words you have previously memorised.

in part, this has been deliberate - an illiterate peasant class is an uneducated peasant class and easier to control. the poor do not have the luxury of time or the money required to learn a skill that is nearly useless for their daily lives

democracy depends upon a literate and educated population, which is one of the reasons why the dumbing down of the population should be resisted in whatever form it takes (and that includes emoji and the over-dependence on short "messages" as a substitute for long-form writing)

Betteridge's law of headlines

[Foochee]

According to Betteridge's law of headlines: No.

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines

[thegarbz]

Is wrong.

This update is very critical. Finally we have a facepalm emoji!!!!!!

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines

[Calydor]

You just did. Just sayin'.

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines

[michelcolman]

Yes, and there's a certain particular kind of emotion that can only be accurately expressed with a cucumber.

Re: Betteridge's law of headlines

[tandavanadesan]

One day I'm going to submit an article "does this article conform to the Betteridge law of headlines?"

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines

[Pieroxy]

Yes, and there's a certain particular kind of emotion that can only be accurately expressed with a cucumber.

Aaaaaah, no! Now I'm all turned on!

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines

[Dogtanian]

According to Betteridge's law of headlines: No.

Yawn... years later, there are still oh-so-clever people kneejerk yelling "Betteridge" in response to every headline phrased as a question, not understanding what the original point of Betteridge's law actually was.

Hint; this isn't it, it's a (probably) legitimate question, and even if it was a crap attempt to kick-start a discussion by phrasing it in that form, it's still not an example of Betteridge.

Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[UnknownSoldier]

We got enough glyphs -- we don't need a fucking symbol for every idea / concept / etc.

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell that to the Chinese that after 8000 years still don't see a use for a phonetic alphabet. If the Japanese were able to modernize their language in 46 Hiragana glyph I don't see why we should tolerate that Chinese non-sense in unicode. These assholes keep adding new kanji every year just because some prick want to write his name in a unique way.

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[JoeMerchant]

Disagree, if you're going to do emojis at all, you need to do every possible concept, most of them several times for nuances of expression.

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[Daniel_Staal]

Several of these really need to be generalized. We're getting male/female/black/white/asian/etc. variants of everything, needlessly complicating the system. Unicode has inflection support - just mark that 'male' or 'female' is an inflection, like an accent mark. Combined characters, for one glyph.

And yes, that means the 'standard' is gender and race neutral. People might make assumptions; deal with it. It's better than doing 'this is a smiley, and this is a female smiley'.

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[JoeMerchant]

Agreed, but this is the bitter price of incremental improvement: backward compatibility.

Maybe it's time to open a new "expanded emoji" section with inflection dimensions and leave the old ones where they are for backward compatibility.

But, how many varieties of avocado will we need? http://ucavo.ucr.edu/avocadova...

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[fredgiblet]

We should add in lesbian, gay, transgender and genderqueer versions of all the emojis! Even bacon!

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[HoleShot]

Yeah, yeah. We really need a donkey, it could be used in troll responses.

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[phantomfive]

If the Japanese were able to modernize their language in 46 Hiragana glyph I don't see why we should tolerate that Chinese non-sense in unicode

The Japanese language has over 2000 standard characters, and even more in common use.
Anyway, Chinese is a beautiful language, you should learn it some time.

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[I'm New Around Here]

And yes, that means the 'standard' is gender and race neutral. People might make assumptions; deal with it. It's better than doing 'this is a smiley, and this is a female smiley'.

This is exactly what we would expect a man to say.

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[Zontar The Mindless]

The Chinese wouldn't add more kanji. They might add more hanzi, though.

You are aware that the Japanese still use several thousand kanji in addition to hiragana and katakana, right?

Oh, and the Chinese do have at least two systems for phonetic representation--zhuyin and pinyin.

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[arglebargle_xiv]

We got enough glyphs -- we don't need a fucking symbol for every idea / concept / etc.

I would agree with you, but not before they introduct an emoji for "Ah fsck, I know I went out to pick up some more nappies and baby formula but they had a discount on beer right next to the entrance and after I got that I forgot about the baby stuff because they had beer nuts as well, those little crunchy ones where you can eat a ton of them without them making you feel sick, and then I ran into Joe, you remember Joe, we were at school together, and what with one thing and another I completely forgot the nappies so I'm heading back again now to pick them up, which is why I'll be late". Then you'd need a few variants to deal with things like running into your friend Alex instead of Joe, the beer nuts actually being pretzels, and so on. As soon as they add the emojis for those critical communications, we'll be done.

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[Octorian]

Yet Emoji actually came from Japan.

Re: Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact there was an article in a printed newspaper that many Chinese no longer can write Chinese. If they need to write certain character they will enter pin yin in their phone, then copy the character.

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[Carewolf]

Yet Emoji actually came from Japan.

The name did. The Emoji signs actually developed in parallel, and we still mainly use the emoji native to the West. For instance, Japan: ^_^ West: :-) The icons are just graphical representations already establish systems of emotional tags in chat.

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[Carewolf]

And yes, that means the 'standard' is gender and race neutral. People might make assumptions; deal with it. It's better than doing 'this is a smiley, and this is a female smiley'.

This is exactly what we would expect a man to say.

How can you tell the gender of the generic smiley? You are the sexist person if you assume it is male. It has no male markers.

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[SuricouRaven]

But only 46 Hiragana characters. You can write anything in Japanese using only hiragana if you wish, with the exception of loanwords, though native speakers may look down on you as semi-literate if you do so.

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[SuricouRaven]

The choice of symbol can even be a signature of subculture affiliation. It's not uncommon in the furry community for those playing birds to use the :>, :>- or /:> symbols. They correspond to the standard smiley, 'silly' and 'questioning' respectively.

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[phantomfive]

Anyway, 2000 characters isn't a huge deal, so it's not really worth complaining about......

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[KGIII]

Considering that I know no Japanese they'd be technically correct to look at me as an illiterate in Japanese.

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[KGIII]

In hindsight, I can barely speak English - as my prior post shows. Yay me! Illiterate in every language!

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[Hognoxious]

Would you smile if you were being repressed? No, you wouldn't. So clearly it's male, and you're a rapist.

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[ultranova]

Would you smile if you were being repressed? No, you wouldn't. So clearly it's male, and you're a rapist.

Is it just me, or does every article become an MRA self-pity fest nowadays? Honestly, this crap makes me miss the creationists....

Re: Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[johanw]

We already have a pig emoji for that.

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[SuricouRaven]

The real issue with those idographic languages isn't character count, it's staying current. New characters are introduced over time, which means the unicode standard needs constant revision to add them, and fonts need regular updates to add the new characters too.

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[AmiMoJo]

Already done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Hopefully one day people will stop making jokes about this sort of thing and just accept that gender isn't binary or simple.

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[Thruen]

This is especially interesting given the way the consortium addresses the issue of different symbols representing the same character in different parts of East Asia. From http://unicode.org/faq/han_cjk...:

Q: If the character shapes are different in different parts of East Asia, why were the characters unified?

A: The Unicode Standard is designed to encode characters, not glyphs. Even where there are substantial variations in the standard way of writing a character from locale to locale, if the fundamental identity of the character is not in question, then a single character is encoded in Unicode.

Characters, not glyphs. So emoji are characters, while various Asian writing styles are glyphs, I guess. And a couple lines further down in the same answer...

There are occasional instances of unified characters whose typical Chinese glyph and typical Japanese glyph are distinct enough that the Chinese glyph will be unfamiliar to the typical Japanese reader, e.g., U+76F4. To prevent legibility problems for Japanese readers, it is advisable to use a Japanese-style font when presenting Unihan text to Japanese readers.

So if you're Japanese and want to see Japanese characters, you're told to use a Japanese font. But, you'll never be forced to choose between a male and female dancing emoji, you deserve to have BOTH in your character set. Why are emoji more important to Unicode than the Japanese language?

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[ChrisMaple]

Chinese is a beautiful language

Sounds like cats fighting to me.

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[ChrisMaple]

See, that's why we need a precisely defined sarcasm emoji. I suggest a fist with one finger raised.

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[ultranova]

No, there are plenty of utter imbeciles who totally don't get sarcasm.

I get sarcasm perfectly well. Specifically, I get how it can be used as a cover against all criticism while in the process of repeating a lie often enough that it gets accepted as a part of the general culture of a community. MRA bullshit is like furry porn: it spreads and takes root anywhere it's left alone. But that comparison is unfair, since the most disgusting cartoon porn about imaginary creatures is ultimately not harming anyone, it's simply an eyesore, while your crap is directly and actively hindering humanity's efforts to rise above its past and seek a better tomorrow.

You creeps already shat on fedoras, the concept of equality, and any man who's actually been mistreated by a female to the extent of needing help (no, women not liking you is not mistreatment, it's your cue to take a long hard look at yourself), do you absolutely must soil Slashdot too?

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[GuB-42]

More than the name actually.
Japanese cell phones companies already had emojis in Unicode private code pages before it was standard.

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[phantomfive]

Obviously you don't understand it

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[phantomfive]

New characters are introduced over time

Nah, they really aren't anymore. Especially in Japanese, the trend is to go the opposite way, to have fewer and fewer characters.
The reason more characters are being added to unicode is because there were characters in common use that were missed the first time they digitized the character set.

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[russotto]

But that comparison is unfair, since the most disgusting cartoon porn about imaginary creatures is ultimately not harming anyone, it's simply an eyesore, while your crap is directly and actively hindering humanity's efforts to rise above its past and seek a better tomorrow.

Spotted the SJW.

Re:Betteridge's law of headlines says ... no

[ultranova]

Spotted the SJW.

And you're going to spot more and more as the world moves on. You can be bitter about that and reminisce about bad old days when people were forced to pretend bullshit designed to keep everyone in their place wasn't bullshit, or you can let them go and enjoy the good progress brings. Either way they won't return.

Who proposed tem?

[phantomfive]

Who proposed the emojis? Someone must want them.

Re:Who proposed tem?

[DNS-and-BIND]

There are people out there who want new for new's sake. They are desperately bored with their lives and demand novelty. Long-term thinking is alien as well as boring. They're going to demand the mallard duck and the avocado, cheer when they are approved, and then never use them. Next round of Unicode, they'll have more dumb ideas to include.

Coming up: Unicode 16, when the committee gets fed up with all these dumb symbols that nobody uses and purges the list.

Re:Who proposed tem?

[fredgiblet]

As someone who did technical support for cell phones. Probably Indians.

Re:Who proposed tem?

[mwvdlee]

I call this the "Greenpeace syndrome". After having achieved ones goal, the organisations' continued existence becomes the new, unspoken goal.
For Greenpeace this meant taking on new targets which had nothing to do with (or were almost opposed to) the original goals (which is why Patrick Moore left).
For the Unicode Consortium, having come close to including every existing character, this means inventing new ones to include and grasping for straws.

Re:Who proposed tem?

[MrL0G1C]

I call this the "Greenpeace syndrome". After having achieved ones goal,

You really live in a fantasy world if you think the world has stopped polluting and destroying the worlds ancient natural environments.

Re:Who proposed tem?

[mwvdlee]

Greenpeace wasn't founded to stop pollution or preserving old nature. It was founded to stop nuclear testing.
Those other goals might well be good goals for an environmental group and this is not a criticism of going after these goals.
I'm just using Greenpeace as an example of an organisation that could have been the breeding ground for new groups, but instead chose to justify it's own continued existence by drastically altering it's own purpose.
Likewise, standardization of smileys might be a good goal, but probably not one for the Unicode Consortium to handle. UC could be breeding ground for a group that could try to standardize smileys, but UC itself should only adopt them afterwards and stick to symbols already agreed upon in the outside world.

Re:Who proposed tem?

[buchner.johannes]

I read that the point of these food emojis was to be able to universally indicate allergies/intolerance/diets on restaurant menus. Which seems like a good reason.

Re:Who proposed tem?

[TheRealHocusLocus]

There are people out there who want new for new's sake. They are desperately bored with their lives and demand novelty. Long-term thinking is alien as well as boring. They're going to demand the mallard duck and the avocado, cheer when they are approved, and then never use them. Next round of Unicode, they'll have more dumb ideas to include.

Coming up: Unicode 16, when the committee gets fed up with all these dumb symbols that nobody uses and purges the list.

Everyone wants to lift their leg and etch their mark on the Monolith. For example, I have my very own IANA-allocated SNMP Community Enterprise Number. It has four digits in the mid-5000s allocated some 20 years ago and since they're up to ~46,000 now that makes me an Internet alpha male. When I'm drinking at bars late at night I rehearse pickup lines in my head, you know, let's get out of here and I'll show you my private IANA SNMP CEN. Over the years it's really paid off and I'm now well rehearsed, able to deliver a pickup line should the occasion ever arise.

Some day I'll finally settle down with some other SNMP Community Enterprise Number. The circle of life goes ever on and on, down from where it began. C'mon Baby, let's go load Unicode Support. Would you like to see my avocado?

But for real excitement we could dispense with all these centralized standards committees and map ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING into DNS-and-BIND namespace. Then we can map DNS namespace through a virtual device driver into an NTFS filesystem. Then use de-frag in Windows XP de-frag the whole damned Web and condense it into a single spherical shiny clump. Then jump back and see where it rolls.

Re:Who proposed tem?

[MMC Monster]

It's only universal if they're rendered the same way in every font.

I don't think that's how unicode works.

Re:Who proposed tem?

[ChrisMaple]

In my lifetime, the obvious example of repurposing a charitable organization is the March of Dimes. Polio was cured, so after a mad scramble they chose birth defects, which has the advantage that it will probably never be cured.

Re:Who proposed tem?

[arglebargle_xiv]

I read that the point of these food emojis was to be able to universally indicate allergies/intolerance/diets on restaurant menus. Which seems like a good reason.

No-one's allergic to ducks. The emoji was added so people can indicate they have anatidaephobia.

Re:Who proposed tem?

[arglebargle_xiv]

It has four digits in the mid-5000s allocated some 20 years ago and since they're up to ~46,000 now that makes me an Internet alpha male.

Huh, I have a three-digit one. Some of my closer neighbours in the IANA list have email addresses that are bang-paths.

Oh gawd, if you're in Internet alpha male, that probably makes me an Internet dinosaur, just one step removed from the fossils with two-digit ones.

Re:Who proposed tem?

[arglebargle_xiv]

In my lifetime, the obvious example of repurposing a charitable organization is the March of Dimes. Polio was cured, so after a mad scramble they chose birth defects, which has the advantage that it will probably never be cured.

That sounds like some Internet standards groups, of which TLS and X.509 spring immediately to mind:

Is the Internet secure yet?

No? Well then keep standardising, dammit!

Re:Who proposed tem?

[tepples]

So long as the "peanut" symbol recognizably depicts a peanut in each font, it still serves its purpose as an allergen symbol.

Re:Who proposed tem?

[TheRealHocusLocus]

just one step removed from the fossils with two-digit ones.

The Usenet Oracle has pondered your question deeply. Your question was:
> Am I an Internet dinosaur?

And in response, thus!spake!the!Oracle:

} All God's critters got a place in the choir
} Some sing low, some sing higher,
} Some sing out loud on the telephone wires,
} And some just clap their hands, or paws,
} or anything they got now
}
} You owe the Oracle an original Hayes modem with a dipswitch on its belly.

We were testing out the .vi top level domain prior to its launch and just for the geek-hell of it I slapped an MX record and wildcard forward on it over the weekend. I then proceeded to contact everyone I knew around the world to send test emails to <i@vi>, which really does look like an eye. All the mails arrived. Fortunately no one had vi host names in their domain, though a trailing period would have ensured delivery. I had visions of handing out @vi mailboxes to fellow combatants in the vi-emacs war, but removed the MX because, best practice.

Re:Who proposed tem?

[MrL0G1C]

Syndrome is a word used to describe a disease, I object to Greenpeace referred to in this manner.

Greenpeace may not be perfect but they have a hell of a lot more morals that the money grabbing politicians who they are up against while trying to keep our global ecology from being destroyed - That hasn't changed from day 1.

oh, why bother?

[retchdog]

"Other additions include carrot, cucumber, and avocado"

can't we be honest and just put a long skinny dick, a thick dick, and a stubby thick dick, so that people don't have to use vegetable analogues?

otoh, this way we can text shopping lists and sexual encounters/anxieties with the same symbols, so i guess it makes some sense.

Re:oh, why bother?

[antdude]

Also flipping the bird/giving the bird. :P I just use an online/1 liner ASCII art: ..!..

Re:oh, why bother?

[retchdog]

how about "finger_pointing_up << 1"?

Re:oh, why bother?

[antdude]

I don't get it?

Re:oh, why bother?

[retchdog]

it's a bitshift operator; so "00010 1" evaluates to "00100".

Re:oh, why bother?

[retchdog]

god fucking dammit, i meant "00010 << 1" evaluates to "00100".

eh? drakes are ducks, male ones

[iggymanz]

you know what's scary, drake penises

Re:eh? drakes are ducks, male ones

[KermodeBear]

I don't find them scary at all. I find them absolutely fascinating. Biology Gone Wild, basically. Really neat stuff going on there.

Re:eh? drakes are ducks, male ones

[JoeMerchant]

New meaning to cork screw.

Re:eh? drakes are ducks, male ones

[I'm New Around Here]

I'm not sure what you are implying there, but I just did a google image search for drake penises, and there were many pictures of black guys.

Re:eh? drakes are ducks, male ones

[iggymanz]

no, I was talking about the fact that ducks are one of the few birds that have penises, and they have very scary shape because the hen's vagina also has very scary weird shape:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:eh? drakes are ducks, male ones

[iggymanz]

not scary? Those corkscrew penises FALL OFF after mating season and a new on is grown!!! Eeeeeeek!!!!!! Let's show videos of that in sex ed classes and tell boys if they have sex their penis will fall off, that'll keep the teen pregnancy rate down.

These emoji selections are so random!

[Volanin]

At least they should try to come with "thematically complete" sets!
We already got a burger emoji and fries emoji... where is the soda emoji? Instead they give us redundant single/double beers emojis.
We also got a bike emoji and surf emoji, but no skate emoji. Instead you have redundant snowboard and an ski-set emojis.
Some things that usually go together are sorely missing... some other are complete bonkers.
O.o

No.

[jpellino]

Next question.

Instead of trying to create a unique set of symbol

[dovgr]

Instead of trying to create a unique set of symbols "one size fits all", why either not include the entire 50x50 pixmap (or vector graphics) for every symbol? Or alternately each IM service create their own repo for all users into which they can update symbols and then use them by a short UID reference? Is the band width saving by using a "fixed dictionary" of predefined symbols really worth it? In any case API compression and aggressive caching could reduce to a minimum the additional bandwidth for sending the entire pixmap. I'd like to use an inline image of our cat when chatting with my family. None of the current IM services that I know of support that.

The Unicode Consortium

[msobkow]

To me it seems like the Unicode Consortium is just trying to "justify" their continued existence, as the main job they set out to do was finished several years ago.

Re:The Unicode Consortium

[93 Escort Wagon]

Have you ever heard of any committee anywhere voluntarily disbanding?

Re:The Unicode Consortium

[arglebargle_xiv]

These things are holding Unicode back. There is a reason why, for example, airlines and hotels are using software that avoids Unicode.

It's because they're using legacy software that goes back, in some cases, to the 1960s, not because of some evil anti-Unicode conspiracy. Heck, I've been to hotels where they're restricted to 7-bit ASCII only, and they just make do. These industries' primary business is offering hospitality services, not of correctly rendering Mojibake-San's name in the guest register.

Re:The Unicode Consortium

[Carewolf]

Have you ever heard of any committee anywhere voluntarily disbanding?

Yes.. Most people in inefficient commitees do not want to be there (might be part of the reason they don't work). Now dismantling it is much harder. I have seriously seen motions to have commitees dismantled proposed by the commitees and then rejected by the assemblies or boards that made them.

Was the summary written in emoji?

[damn_registrars]

I see a link for "Unicode 9.0" but it doesn't go anywhere, and clicking on it does nothing (even though my cursor changes to correct for hovering over a link). What kind of crap is this?

Re:Was the summary written in emoji?

[CrashNBrn]

An "[a]Unicode 9.0[/a]" TAG with no href. Gotta love how HTML will take garbage in - makes working with it so pleasant.

one emoji per Chinese character

[NostalgiaForInfinity]

I suggest just getting it over with and making one emoji for every Chinese character. We can then smoothly transition to writing in pure emoji.

I don't believe this

[93 Escort Wagon]

Some of you guys are complaining about bacon? What is wrong with you people?

Re:I don't believe this

[dinfinity]

You know you can't eat emojis, right?

Why did they take a male duck

[Anonymous Coward]

These patriarchist nazis really chose a male duck for the duck emoji! I demand them to add a female duck as well, and a gender undecided duck with male and female attributes!

Re:Why did they take a male duck

[johanw]

BTW, we need more emojis to express political ideas. A swastika and a hammer and sickle emoji are badly needed when discussing politics. To describe one's opinion about a certain politicial perhaps gallow and guillotine emojis. Now we are stuk with the much too soft middle finger emoji. :-)

At least with the new racial emojis we can now describe a white cop shooting a black guy, but the smiley face to show after that is available only in yellow.

Re:Why did they take a male duck

[TheRealHocusLocus]

BTW, we need more emojis to express political ideas. A swastika

Been there, done that. Emoji Deleted. Funny how the Star of David disappeared same time.

Actually this whole Emojii thing is an Orwellian setup, where controversial 'undesirable topics' are given their own emoji so dissidents will then begin to use these symbols in place of actual descriptive language. Then after a decade or two, some Central Planning Committee further edits Unicode replacing these meaning-laden symbols with, for example, a duck. A master stroke to render whole generations of political correspondence void and incomprehensible.

It has happened throughout history. The Voynich Manuscript is a collection of emoji messages written by love-struck teenagers in the 15th century describing cool things you could do with plants. Its true meaning was lost when the Roman Catholic Church deleted the whole code page and substituted some meaningless squiggles.

Fixed Headline

[ZeroSerenity]

Do we need Emojis?

Batman

[rhadc]

Batman emoji is the one I'd use the most. Surprised it wasn't isn't the original set.

Re:Batman

[Lennie]

Because of silly copyright that is why.

Re:Why isn't there a simple smiling face still?

[Time_Ngler]

Because no one wants to support it and risk having the emojis they really want not getting in. A member of the unicode board can only realistically support so many emojis before some of them are up for the chopping block. And who is going to suggest chopping regular smily face? It'd be political suicide!

Re:Fuck the Chinese

[fredgiblet]

Wrong country, but you're AC so you probably already knew that.

Yes! anything to keep sites using text

[ciaran2014]

We need unicode symbols for whatever people want to express. Otherwise sites will use clip-art or other proprietary things.

No

[ronnie39]

Definitly not , emojis are for s7up1d ppl

Emoji to express rage over excessively Emojis

[floon]

Emoji 1: pure rage about Emojis

Emoji 2: moderate rage about Emojis

Emoji 3: oncoming rage about Emojis

Emoji 4: pure bafflement preceding rage about Emojis

No

[davidwr]

Bandwidth is cheap enough to send the entire glyph each time it is used.

2 very important ones are missing

[davidwr]

They left out http://a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/gr... and http://a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/up... .

The consortium needs to finish human languages

[pauljlucas]

This guy still can't write his own name correctly.

Re:The consortium needs to finish human languages

[Hognoxious]

Keep adding them until he can add a picture of himself. In various different moods.

Re:The consortium needs to finish human languages

[SuricouRaven]

If I was in charge of the world, unicode and my world government would support the top fifteen languages, or thereabouts. All lower-popularity languages would be documented and designated for systematic eradication via the educational system and mass-media, thus bringing us a little closer to a utopia where anyone can communicate with anyone else and access all the accumulated knowledge of civilization without being segregated by the linguistic barrier. It'd help avert wars too - hard for a country to declare war on another when many citizens have friends among the enemy.

Re:The consortium needs to finish human languages

[johannesg]

That guy needs to get off his high horse. White people designed computers. White people designed unicode in an effort to allow non-white people to use computers. White people apparently made an honest mistake when creating the code points for a complex, and to them largely unknown language. And apparently white people must fix it, because I don't see this guy doing anything but bitching about it.

Oh, and I'm a white person whose family name contains a character that is not in ASCII either, a situation that has pretty much forced my family to adopt a different spelling (using either 'y' or 'ij' instead of Dutch lange-ij, a character I cannot even write here). So much for white superiority, then...

Re:The consortium needs to finish human languages

[GuB-42]

He can, in fact, write his name.
The debate is on more complex matters like : is it a different character or a combination, should we create codepoints or let the renderer use rules do display the text correctly, etc... Even native speakers don't seem to agree ( https://news.ycombinator.com/i... ).

Things like Emoji or Klingon, while arguably futile, don't have such problems. You can debate on whether or no they should be included but the "how" is very straightforward.

Re:The consortium needs to finish human languages

[Misagon]

Why don't you re-educate the world to speak Lojban while you're at it? Then computers would also understand humans, with much less difficulty as many of the ambiguities of language have been removed.

If you have studied anything about any ethnic minority, then you will have come across cases of their native language being suppressed in schools and society at large.
You will find several examples of such if you read up on the history of Native Americans and in the history of French-speaking Cajun and Creole in Southern USA.

Suppression of language is a form of suppression of culture, and suppression of a people's culture is oppression of people.

Re:The consortium needs to finish human languages

[SuricouRaven]

So what is your alternative? Let them continue to speak a language that is hardly spoken by any outsiders, not only maintaining their isolation but also the isolation of their next generation? Able to access only that news and knowledge of the world that limited and possibly manipulative translators allow? Their opportunities for economic advancement severely limited?

A self-imposed ghetto is a ghetto nonetheless. It it still a ghetto even if the residents take pride in living there.

Don't care

[Chewbacon]

Emojis are supposed to be fun, don't suck the fun out of them by taking them so seriously.

Re:You need a DUCK to catch Witches

[I'm New Around Here]

No, the king was quite surprised by the knowledge of the knight, Sir Bedevere, concerning the material composition of witches. The king knew about the difference between African and European swallows.

Concern over emoji

[tompaulco]

After reading about this concern over emoji, I decided to go look it up to see what it is. Apparently, it is little cartoon icons, possibly animated, that people slip into their online conversations. Other than auto-changing of some popular emoticons to emoji, I have never used them. Don't care, next story.

Not invented here.

[westlake]

It wasn't so very long ago when the geek was drawn to to the creation of intricate typographic art (aka ASCII art) and emotions.

The central idea of using of letters, numbers and symbols, dots and dashes, bits and bytes, to send simple cartoons or more complex and engaging images over low bandwidth connections is, after all, at least as old as the telegraph.

But it seems forbidden to build a full, working, global vocabulary of images at higher resolution --- in both black & white and color --- and drawing on sources from outside the geek community. The western geek community and the US, specifically.

We need 2^64 black and white emojis.

[dsmatthews9379]

Each automatically generated from the binary pattern of their Unicode value.

great news!

[jjeffries]

This will be a boon to Duck Bacon producers everywhere!

Re:Instead of trying to create a unique set of sym

[Octorian]

In other words, the "eXtensible Emoji Protocol" (or XEP) that I keep joking about around the office :-)

The problem with emoji is that there are so many, but not enough to cover every possible symbol someone might want to send. As such, people see the gaps a bit too easily, and are constantly demanding "just one my symbol." (Not to mention that most people don't realize they're part of a universal standard, and not something each individual IM service decided to include/exclude.)

Eventually, you'll either wind up with an unmanageable bazillion emoji (rather than just hundreds), or there will be a backlash where we reduce to a minimum set necessary to represent all possible concepts. (Hey, isn't that called an alphabet?)

"Why could we possibly need a duck?"

[Guy Harris]

Why a duck?

Re:"Why could we possibly need a duck?"

[wonkey_monkey]

Don't forget your duck.

voluntarily disbanding

[aepervius]

"Have you ever heard of any committee anywhere voluntarily disbanding?" Yes, but unfortunately only ethical and integrity committee...

Re:voluntarily disbanding

[ion_]

Have you ever heard of any committee anywhere voluntarily disbanding?

FWIW,

The (informal) standardisation of Haskell 98 was an important turning point for another reason: it was the moment that the Haskell Committee disbanded. There was (and continues to be) a tremendous amount of innovation and activity in the Haskell community, including numerous proposals for language features. But rather than having a committee to choose and bless particular ones, it seemed to us that the best thing to do was to get out of the way, let a thousand flowers bloom, and see which ones survived.

Re:unicameralism

[Hognoxious]

The terminology for upper and lower case didn't even exist before the printing press was reinvented in Europe

Clearly that terminology didn't exist, since that derives from the boxes printers kept their type in. However the concept did, as can clearly be seen here: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmh... Perhaps you're thinking of the Romans?

I never saw much sense in mixing majuscule and minuscule scripts to denote proper nouns or the start of a sentence.

I never saw much sense in referring to things that don't pee, either standing or sitting, as "he" or "she". But I doubt the French and Italians will invent a neuter gender for my convenience.

Re: Fuck the Chinese

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't flame me for posting anonymously. My job at strategic defence command forbids identifiable posts.

do we need emojis at all?

[Tom]

Ok, I'll admit I'm not 16 anymore, but I'm not 60 either and I wonder WTF does the Unicode Consortium have to do with stupid smileys?????

This is one of the "don't they have more important things to worry about" moments. But more importantly, this is utter crap and doesn't belong into a fucking fontset. You want to have dancing teddy bears and cups of coffee and stuff, fine, make your own icon font, nobody stops you.

Until this post I didn't even realize that this crap is now official Unicode, and I still can't believe it. Solution looking for a problem, yes?

Re:do we need emojis at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a video on the subject.

It's worth spending the time to watch it (heck, it's worth spending time to watch most of Tom Scott's videos - it's Sunday, you don't have anything better to do anyway), but the jist of it is that the goal of the Unicode system was to have a single representation which would be able to encode *all* existing electronic documents. Emoji were already existing as a special feature of documents (text messages) send over certain Japanese phone systems (this is why we call them emoji, rather than "smileys"). If you wanted to represent those messages in Unicode, you need to have code points for emoji. To omit them from Unicode means there are existing electronic documents which *cannot* be converted into Unicode, meaning you're still stuck with standard proliferation, the very thing which Unicode was intended to fix.

Now that rationale only goes as far as the existing emojis. It doesn't extend to the new emoji. The reason for those ... well ... that's because emoji escaped their Japanese origin, and the worldwide community is wondering why there are six different emoji for sushi and none for <insert other regional cuisine here>

Re:do we need emojis at all?

[Tom]

Thanks for the explanation.

So, we have a new standard with built-in unlimited legacy issues. Good design.

Frankly speaking, we should have two Unicode standards. One for what's actually being used and one for all the legacy crap.

That feels so 1990's

[AndyKron]

That feels so 1990's. I like the face palm girl though.

In the name of political correctness

[CanadianMacFan]

They should add a female duck too.

And then the other species of ducks will want to be represented.

Emoji are amibiguous too

[Blaskowicz]

Some emoji (which everyone in my country calls smileys) may be too much emotional, and if they're Unicode instead of proprietary they will show up differently in the two ends of a conversation if the software is not the same.
Not that I use IM anymore though : MSN was proprietary and insecure, but you could at least use it with different clients. It's been replaced by the giant asocial media company and by Skype. Cell phone service for non "data" has crashed in price compared to a decade ago too.

where were emojis when...

[cellocgw]

We really needed them? as in:

"This post may cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars to distribute around the world. Are you sure you want to do that?"

In those days we invented all sorts of stupid initialisms to reduce message sizes. Just think how emojis could have helped. Remember, "a picture is worth 4k bytes"

Yes

[tommyjcarpenter]

The purpose of writing is to convey information. If you can convey the same information using less information, it is a win in my opinion. "I'm having [emoji duck here] for dinner" is quite fine.

Definitly!

[bickerdyke]

Yes, we do.

Because there are still lots of words left that don't have an emojii yet. And without emojii they would be lost forever, like tears in the reain, when we finally reach the state of "Idiocracy"

Re:Instead of trying to create a unique set of sym

[ratboy666]

Hasn't that already been done?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

x-face is a 48x48 bi-level bitmap that is compressed.

 

Re:Instead of trying to create a unique set of sym

[ChrisMaple]

Not enough. We need UHD video emoji, uncompressed for maximum fidelity. Multiple fibers to every home to handle the bandwidth.

People are multilingual. SoylentNews is people.

[tepples]

Slashdot should be fixing their bugs, not us working around them.

If we move from Slashdot to a site whose developers have fixed Slashdot's bugs, does that count as "working around them"?

Need is a curious thing.

[lq_x_pl]

I think emojis are entertaining. Do we NEED more? No. Will new emojis be used? Yes. Do we NEED optimized fab processes for processors? No. Will we benefit fr optimized fab processes? Yes. Do we NEED bacon? No. Do we love and enjoy delicious bacon? Yes.

The Unofficial Smilie Face Glossary

[TheDarkener]

This was pretty much the definitive list of what later became known as Emojis - The Unofficial Smilie Face Glossary. Even this was excessive and most weren't used besides :-) or >:-). Later on, most people dropped the nose, resulting in :) . As technology became more mainstream, for some reason some dumbasses thought it would be cool to have graphical smilies replace what people had created as an artistic expression using standard ascii, and in some cases upper-ascii and even ANSi on BBSes. BBSers used to customize smilies to try and stay away from the current "mainstream"... Perhaps they thought conveying emotions with smilies had become too standardized and didn't reflect them as an individual. Favorites of mine were :>, =), and most recently =} , all of which somehow get eaten up by my phone and turned into graphical pieces of garbage. I just want my smilies. That's it. Now get off my damn lawn.

Language Skills, D, People Skills, F.

[westlake]

You mean an idiot? Instead of expecting people to exercise their language skills, we're just enabling stupid people to be more stupid...Emoji are stupid, and people who use them are stupid by extension....

The intellectual play of combining words and pictures is centuries if not millennia old and really needs no defense. Rebus

No, but we do need to make a decision...

[michaelmalak]

No, but we do need to make a decision about the plural of emoji.

why no beards?

[evil9000]

I'm still hanging for at least 1 bearded happy face icon. Dont care if it's yellow or green. The repression of men must end ;)

Meta

[serendipitousP8615]

I need an emoji for the word / concept emoji.

Meta

[serendipitousP8615]

I need an emoji for the word /concept emoji. Not joking.

Emojis got useless

[allo]

Idea: Encode Smileys in Text
Realization: Display an image instead of rendering a glyph.
Okay. Like different fonts, now everybody can have different smileys, but with a standard for codepoints. no questions anymore, if :) is a smiley or only :-) is one.
Now different vendors implemented the smileys in totally different ways (apple rendering a yellow heart (btw. WTF), android a hairy heart (even more WTF)).
Next: The big apps like whatsapp bringt their own (or a apple clone) set of emojis.
So we can get back to application specific smileys with :smile: or a simliar encoding. This will remove the need for complicated unicode handling (did you read the section about composing i.e. colors and smileys?). And while we're at this: Why does a smily need a skin color? Smileys are yellow.