Get Out of Gun Control, Apple | Hacker News Reader

Get Out of Gun Control, Apple

nytimes.com

23 pointswhack10 comments

> Apple hasn’t said why it would be making this change, but this summer, along with Microsoft, the company lobbied Unicode, the nonprofit consortium that decides which emojis should exist, against adding a separate rifle.

The rifle emoji Apple and Microsoft opposed was a sporting rifle (used in biathalon) that was proposed along with other winter sports. It had absolutely nothing to do with "gun violence" except for the vocal protestations of a tiny minority.

I look forward to Apple removing the football emoji soon since pro football has a problem with chronic traumatic encephalopathy and tinkering with emoji will clearly help with solving the problem.

This is a perfect example of what Peter Thiel calls the phony culture wars distracting Americans and politicians from real issues.

Totally agree. Some US people are not living in a real world

Which/what do you and he consider to be phony about this culture war over guns?

Linking the frequent sending of gun emojis to gun violence would be hard indeed. Perhaps it's not phony, per se, but it is so hilariously ancillary to the actual discussion regarding mental health, access to field combat-grade firearms, and disparities in urban molestation of certain classes of people that this smacks more of Apple doing solid PR than it does actually solving issues in our communities.

That's my take on Thiel's point, and guns are NOT the only topic where big corps trot out stupid stunts to capitalize on what yesterdays big cultural outrage was.

But this does put the very clearly on one side of this cultural war, so it's something more than nothing. Virtue signaling at the very least.

And it's not as if Apple isn't giving OS X/macOS plenty of reasons to switch to something else from what I've been reading....

> Apple’s change is ill considered because it breaks the conceptual compatibility that Unicode is meant to establish. Anyone with an iPhone ought to be able to send a message to someone with another company’s products — like Google or Microsoft or Samsung — and have what’s delivered communicate the same idea as what’s sent.

If Apple is guilty of causing miscommunications, then so are the other platform vendors:

http://indy100.independent.co.uk/article/your-favourite-emoj...

So far, variance from the unicode standard is pretty widespread. The gun is not the first, probably not the worst.

More good examples of variance in the artistic style and implied meaning are the various non-people emojis. In general, google has "cuter", "friendlier", and more anthropomorphized versions.

http://emojipedia.org/octopus/ http://emojipedia.org/ghost/ http://emojipedia.org/monkey/

It is widespread but it's not variance in message and interpretation.

One can argue about who has the "cutest" monkey or the "spookiest" ghost but they are still a monkey and a ghost.

A water pistol is not the same thing as a "realistic" gun. What do you think would happen if some one sends a text from an iphone saying "war in the school parking lot bring your [gunemoji]" while being used to the water pistol emoji and some one gets the same message with a realistic gun emoji?

Having artistic variance is fine, but there are guidelines, the emoji still has to be universally recognizable and not misleading a water pistol is not a gun.

>Apple’s change is ill considered because it breaks the conceptual compatibility that Unicode is meant to establish..

News flash: ALREADY BORKED (ref: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/what-the-emoji-youre-sendin...)

Totally agree that this distracts from the real issue, and there are many here. Stop distracting folks Apple/Microsoft and chip away at the harder stuff!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com