First smiley abuser arrested :)
We just got an anonymous mail from Klaus-Günther Schmidt informing us about the first arrest of a smiley abuser in the People’s Dictatorship Republic of Kyrchgäzstan.
(We included the mail header as indisputable proof)
From: kgschmidt@schmidt.kg
Subject: Top Secret! Krhgsgsjstan to introduce smiley abuser penalty
Date: March 27, 2008 7:09:41 PM GMT+01:00
To: fakeaddress@fakerumors.com
Smiley abusers have been in the spotlight for their excessive and incorrect use of smileys in chat-rooms and mailing lists since 1995.
Now an official law of the otherwise free country has taken the problem to the next level.
The incorrect use of a smiley in chat conversations will result in a minor fee of approximately $ 5000.00 ~ 153.00 €
Public smiley abuse -such as in weblog entries, comments or other explicit demonstrations of smileyism- on the other hand is totally prohibited and the (ab)user has to expect jail sentences between 7 and 25 years.
We are proud to introduce this law and we hope this will send a message to the illegal community of smiley abusers and distributors all over the worldwide web, the so called internet.
So the official statement of the government of the People’s Diplomatic Dictatorship Republic of Kozichkusztan.
Charles Frost @ March 27, 2008
The ‘Smiley© Abuse Sentence’ was apparently only the prelude to an even bigger event, which hit the unprepared public rather hard earlier this day as a Mr. E. Smile©s has officially announced to be the exclusive owner of the copyright for the smiley© symbol.
As a result of this, Smileys© in both written and pictogram form will have to be followed by the copyright symbol ©. This according to the details of this copyright also applies for all variations that contain the root form ‘Smile’©.
This will make it quite difficult indeed for excessive smiley© users as typing will take twice the time. Our experts have predicted that this might as well lead to the extinction of the smiley© we have come to love over the time as it regularly put a smile© on our faces. Already other forms of over-usable pictograms are discussed in many forums all over the web.
Yet a small community of frequent smiley© abusers have sworn to fight the copyright and have developed a pirate-smiley© to express their defiance of the same.
Protest marches all over the country also show many protesters, who have tattooed the copyright sign on their faces as even the living expression of a smile© as an emotional statement falls under the copyright terms.
We will keep our audience informed about further events related to the topic.
Smilies causing major bankruptcy.
Research in the more recent years show that the use of so called “emoticons” in corporate communication has made a major impact on how customers perceive the busines´s significancy.
Many Fortune 500 companies have gone insolvent after letting employees send their emails culminating with a combination of punctuation marks meant to be viewed sideways.
Even though this is not known to have reached executive levels, the root cause analysis shows human-human communication to have just as big an impact on the company reputation as major press releases.
The top 500 most successful companies have formed a committee to fight the intensifying use of emoticons, called the Anti Smiley Initiative (ASI™), to regain market share and ensure future growth and profit.
“If a corporation is so afraid of showing emotions I wonder where the world is going to end up” said Turp Dickpin, a representative from the Anti-Anti-Smiley Initiative (AASI, also known under the name ProSmiley) in a recent interview with Fake Rumors.
“A mis-spelled emoticon can end in disaster” Says Joe Brickwall from Import/Export Inc., who just lost a prodigious contract worth €50 millions only because of a parenthesis mark put the wrong way by one of their employees.
Dr. Brian Ferry-Tale from The University of Kalahari have studied the smiley tendency since it first arose a few years after Gutenberg invented the printing press with movable types around 1450: “Creative use of loose types including punctuation marks have been around for many hundred years. It was, HOWEVER, first discovered as a possible tendency when we got digital chat channels around 1990 (IRC or Internet Relay Chat). I would therefore not even call this a trend yet, looking at the big picture. We do not have proper evidence that emoticons actually occur in corporate writing, and looking at the time frame we are operating within, 17 years out of 557 years is not a long enough period to jump to conclusions.” It is known that Dr. Brian Ferry-Tale and his students will loose their funding after 2012, the same year he is due for retirement.