
Get Out of Gun Control, Apple - whack
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/16/opinion/get-out-of-gun-control-apple.html
======
etendue
> 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.

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

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

~~~
secstate
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.

~~~
hga
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....

------
kennywinker
> 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...](http://indy100.independent.co.uk/article/your-favourite-emoji-dont-
mean-what-you-think-they-mean--xklmeNGvvZZ)

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

~~~
dogma1138
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.

------
jcbeard
>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...](http://motherboard.vice.com/read/what-the-emoji-youre-
sending-actually-look-like-to-your-friends))

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!

