NewYearsResolution: Avoid InCaps

Uh, people aren’t talking about “authority,” they’re talking about clarity and usefulness. Sorry you’re so pissed about “entirely commercial pursuits” but that doesn’t mean you should purposely be confusing when reporting on them.

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I like DrO.

Also, remember “Doctor DOS”?

What about musicians? Are they creative enough to get to use their names as written or are they so commercialized they will be written as dictated by you and Cory? Does it depend on how artistic the musician is? Or is it perhaps a stupid stand to take because you’re deciding whether or not to write something correctly based on your view of its value?

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Still no clearer on ‘whore presents’ or however else you have misunderstood the intention.
Also, that is their advert. Their advert.
Also, I was implying the petty and misdirected ‘correction’ bandwagon seems to have a few more passengers.

Four^H^H^H^HThree months too early.

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It’s a small thing, but it’s amazing how much incapping leaps off the page when you start paying attention to it.

Nope, it’s not really amazing at all. When you start fixating on something unimportant it’s easy to get annoyed. For example, using second marks in place of quote marks, low-resolution digital photos appearing in books and magazines, using the word “literally” for emphasis, using the word “like” as filler or quotatively, Comic Sans and Papyrus, using brand names generically, the Wilhelm scream, imperfect green screen or rear projection, characters not finishing meals in movies, toilet paper being turned the wrong way, children crying in public, and so on. When you start seeing something everywhere it’s because you started fixating and stewing, not because the thing is inherently bad or important.

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music is art.

If someone is confused because iphone is not spelled iPhone then they’ve got serious problems.

Protip: See that little pencil? It’s an edit button.

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So K.D. Lang and Cassius Clay, not k.d. lang and Muhammad Ali. Or is it still acceptable for the owner of a name to decide what that name is and how it should be capitalized?

Cory must be a Windows user, case insensitive. I’d prefer the Unix case sensitivity myself. How else am I too distinguish between Apple’s iPhone (swiped and auto capitalised by Android) and the ipHOne, my new branding for something very acidic on the Internet?

My only annoyance is that my swipey keyboard auto capitalises the word apple without giving me the lower case option. Honestly I rarely mention the company but do talk about actual apples from time to time.

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Are other proper nouns (e.g., World war ii) also affected by this New year’s day decision?

Is the core of the objection that somewhere out there is a marketing department that would like you to capitalize something one way, and therefore you are going to capitalize those things a different way?

Comes across as petty, to me.

This is plainly silly. It is deliberate obfuscation and nothing but. The goal of avoiding free advertisement would be better served by not publishing front page Apple product launch stories. Will MakieLab appear as Makielab in your continued coverage of their products?

That said, I applaud the anti-corporate sentiment. To serve the goal of deliberate obfuscation I propose a site wide text filter that redacts 100% of trademarks in the USPTO database. Perhaps someone can whip up a Chrome extension that will do that in the meantime?

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At the risk of having my account deleted again, I’d like to add to what I stated earlier.

Using an image of the BP logo inserted into text in order to illustrate a story about InCaps is, at best, intellectually dishonest. Further, conflating logos and product names (as if saying they are the same made it so) underscores the shaky ground that Cory’s argument rests upon.

Ultimately, this site is a blog, and I would never be so naive as to think that Cory should be held to any kind of journalistic standard of integrity. However, simple honesty would be a much better New Year’s resolution than this misguided effort to inject an agenda into everything Cory doesn’t happen to like.

And Cory, I’d like to remind you (before you press the delete button again) that silencing those who are politely critical of your tendency toward sensationalism is also intellectually dishonest. I’d very much appreciate a dialog rather than just being smited again.

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They don’t delete accounts for criticism. Try again.

You must be new here.

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So much heat and so little light…
It seems like a lot of folks are uncomfortable with this idea, but they can’t place exactly why. So they settle for caricaturing or exaggerating it for the sake of argument, rather than engaging the idea in a thoughtful way.

I’m not sure what I think, but I’m pretty sure I don’t agree with any of the criticism I’ve read in these comments.

Pretty big claim considering all the other dumb stances round here. :smiley:

You do not seem to be engaging with these criticisms in any sort of thoughtful way.

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So they settle for caricaturing or exaggerating it for the sake of argument, rather than engaging the idea in a thoughtful way.

The above would have perhaps been more effective if it hadn’t immediately followed this:

So much heat and so little light…

why wasn’t anyone up in arms while he was doing this all 2013?

The only thing that bothers me is that when i first see 'Ios" i see ‘los.’

Just to be clear, I don’t think that International Business Machines has changed their name, so it would be OK for the Wall Street Journal to use the traditional abbreviation method. IBM and WSJ are acronyms not abbreviations.

Further, website URLs should be written all lowercase. In regular speech I refer websites by their proper name, for instance “Boing Boing” not boingboing.net.

As for using iPhone, if you don’t want to use the brand name just use Apple’s smartphone. I’d personally prefer that everyone start referring to smartphones as iPhone and tablets as iPad regardless of the manufacturer.

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