Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
from the guess-who dept
It probably won't come as a surprise to anyone that this week's top comments were dominated by responses to the Patrick Zarrelli situation. Three out of the four winners by vote were on that post, with the first being GMacGuffin taking most insightful comment of the week with an observation about word choice:
You can tell that Mike is fully gobsmacked by the stupidity of a circumstance when he uses "Dude" as a pronoun more than once in a story.
Second place on the insightful side is the exception, coming instead in response to the leaked Comcast documents that confirmed what everyone expected about data caps. That One Guy unpacked the company's weasel words:
Truth by technicality, the best kind of truth
Don't say: "Data Cap" (This is not a cap. We do not limit a customer's use of the Internet it any way at or above 300 GB)"
In the same way, 'speed limits' don't actually stop you from going over the listed speed, you're just penalized if you do.
For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start out with a simple anonymous response to the news that the head of the House Judiciary Committee went for dinner with the head of the MPAA following a Los Angeles copyright hearing:
To a large extent, Silicon valley is about enabling people to do things, while the MPAA is about controlling people. Guess which group politicians feel most at home with, and will therefore listen to?
Next, after a charity started attempting to claim ownership of the recently-invalidated Happy Birthday copyright, another anonymous commenter made a key observation about the lyric side of this copyright battle that's often easy to forget:
The lyrics consist of 6 words (minus the repetition) ! It's got less content than a 1/4 of a tweet. How is that worthy of a copyright monopoly.
Over on the funny side, we return to Patrick Zarrelli's world and remain there for the duration. In first place is an anonymous commenter who may have figured out the nature of the supposed "bar complaints":
He's probably filing bar complaints to his local bartender as he cries in his drink of choice.
In second place, it's techflaws coining a new version of an old term:
This will probably soon become known as the 'Chewbacca offense'.
For the editor's choice, we'll follow up with Mark Wing, the one commenter on that post who expressed some concern:
Are you going to hire Tim back when he gets out of prison?
And finally, since he made a good point (and called my attention to it directly), Roger Strong and Patrick Zarrelli himself can share the final spot based on the former's nomination:
Attn: Leigh
So many comments on this topic have been "deemed funny by the community", all of them were inspired by Patrick Zarrelli's performance art.
Let's not forget that while Zarrelli's own submission may have arrived by post, it was still a Reader's Comment to Techdirt. Please do not deny him the Funniest Comment of the Week honors.
That's all for this week, folks!
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Here’s Hoping The French People Stay Strong
Don’t give in to those who claim that the only way to prevent these sorts of attacks is to put in place more surveillance and security checks—in short, to succumb to a police-state mentality. Because that’s what the terrorists want you to do.
To those who feel that such loss of liberties is a small price to pay for helping to save lives, the only proper response is: is liberty not worth dying for?
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Re: Here’s Hoping The French People Stay Strong
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Re: Re: Here’s Hoping The French People Stay Strong
It's a shame governments have made it that way.
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Re: Re: Here’s Hoping The French People Stay Strong
You can however choose to give them up.
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Re: They can be denied.
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What a load of absolute rubbish.
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This is not the Religion of Islam
Similarly, we need to be sure and undertand that the Crusades had nothing to do with Christianity. Those folks were also just by happenstance kind of intense about Jesus.
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Re: This is not the Religion of Islam
Anti-Semitic Romanian Orthodox fascist movements in Romania, such as the Iron Guard and Lancieri, were responsible for involvement in the Holocaust, Bucharest pogrom, and political murders during the 1930s. In Europe there were pogroms by Christians against the Jews even *after* WWII. Meanwhile the British government bombed five ships and attacked another as part of a campaign to discourage post-war Jewish refugees from sailing to then British-controlled Palestine.
The "Curse of Ham" was used by Christians to justify slavery in the US, and later to used to justify treating blacks as second class citizens.
Currently in India there's the National Liberation Front of Tripura. Crimes include forcible conversion of tribal cadres/civilians to Christianity. In Uganda the Lord's Resistance Army, a guerrilla army engaged in an armed rebellion against the Ugandan government, has been accused of using child soldiers and committing numerous crimes against humanity; including massacres, abductions, mutilation, torture, rape, porters and sex slaves. It's led by Joseph Kony, who proclaims himself the spokesperson of God and a spirit medium, primarily of the Christian Holy Spirit. LRA fighters wear rosary beads and recite passages from the Bible before battle.
You can play that game against any major religion. That doesn't mean that those horrible acts represent a majority let alone a sizable minority of the religion's followers.
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Re: This is not the Religion of Islam (Or Christianity. Or Whatever.)
As Arthur C Clarke said, “The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion”. Religion is purely a matter of belief, and belief can be whatever you like. But morality is not purely a matter of belief. Notions of right and wrong are something we hold in common as a species, independent of religion. Thus, the only path to religious tolerance must lie in the rejection of religion as a basis for morality.
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Re: Re: This is not the Religion of Islam (Or Christianity. Or Whatever.)
Should the rest of Christians "change their branding" because of televangelists ripping off the elderly? Or because of IRA and Ulster loyalist violence?
The Tea Party suffered from a small number of people showing racist signs. The Occupy Wall Street movement suffered from enough allegations of rape, sexual assault and gropings that women-only sleeping tents were set up. Should either movement have "rebranded?" What's to stop the bad people from adopting the "new brand?"
Any popular movement - especially one with no central leadership - is going to attract extremists and unsavory types that they have no control over.
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From a purely marketing point of view, probably, especially if you include distancing from the more extreme fundamentalists. If they had, they would certainly be viewed in a more positive light by more people than they are.
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Shiites aren't going to let a Sunni group control the trademark on their "rebranded" religion. The United Church would insist that rebranded ethical Christianity means recognizing and performing same-sex marriages, while Catholics would insist that it does not. Etc.
A trademarks is controlled by one entity, and there's no such single entity for Christianity or Islam. Or popular movements like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street.
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