Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

from the out-of-order dept

We're going to pull another switcheroo this week and present things out of order, so that it's easier to give our first-place insightful winner its proper context. Thus, we start with our first editor's choice for insightful — a comment from DannyB responding to the MPAA's latest anti-piracy messaging with an important point about convenience:

Tech Dirt has pointed this out in the past.

Pirated movie: Insert disk, push play, enjoy moie.

Purchased movie: Insert disk, push play.
FBI warning
Homeland Security warning
Other warning
Unskippable ad for a movie released three years ago
Unskippable ad for a movie released five years ago
More warnings
More unskippable ads
Finally the movie starts, and you have already finished your popcorn.

And now, we move to our winner for most insightful comment of the week — a reply to that comment from Thad that added one more thing to the very beginning of the list:

That's assuming your disc is from the "correct" region and plays at all.

In second place on the insightful side, we've got a response from Doug to a former FCC Commissioner calling net neutrality a "two-year old experiment":

The internet has always been neutral. We've only recently been forced to defend neutrality. What's new is the attacks on it.

And for our second editor's choice on the insightful side, we've got a response from Roger Strong to the idea that patents are a proud, quintessentially American tradition:

Oh, spare us.

Patents have been around since ancient Greece. The English patent system, evolving from early medieval times, was the legal foundation for the Industrial Revolution.

One more time: NO-ONE HERE IS OPPOSING PATENTS. THEY'RE OPPOSING PATENT ABUSE.

THAT is what America leads the world in. THAT is what's driving efforts for an open platform. Any good thing implemented in bloody awful way is going to lead to opposition.

It's not like you - as an inventor - can invent something and reap the rewards any more. Trolls will patent every conceivable use of your invention - ESPECIALLY the obvious ones - and then charge YOU to use it. There are tens of thousands of patents on image compression alone. Create something truly new in the camera or smartphone or web browsing field, and image compression is just one of the things you'll be sued over.

And so patents are trading cards for large corporations. You need a massive portfolio of patents to play. When Samsung tosses BS patent claims at Apple, Apple has wealth of BS patent claims that they can toss at Samsung products.

That doesn't even cover the endless overbroad patents, where someone obtains a patent on something very specific, and declares it to be a patent on ALL internet commerce.

THAT is why America has so many patents. And now China has been taught how to play the game.

The folks boarding the Titanic's lifeboats weren't anti-ship. They weren't making a statement about row boats being better than ocean liners. But then no-one was standing up on the deck screaming straw-man arguments that this was the case.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Michael Barclay with an observation about our description of the incredibly complex Snopes legal fight:

This is so complicated, even the TL;DR would be too complicated.

In second place, we've got an anonymous response to a commenter who was incoherently angry about... something to do with the comments, as usual:

Yes, all websites publish their anti-spam techniques so that people can bypass them.

For editor's choice on the funny side, we start out with a comment on our post about errors in a recent story about the DNC hack, which hinged on broadband speeds and reminded TechDescartes of something else entirely:

As everyone knows, "10Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream is all one needs."

And finally, we've got an anonymous comment that offered a small grammar lesson to someone who asked "how many less faces" we would see at white supremacist rallies if their speech was curtailed:

Dammit, when it's an abstract concept, you use "less." Less time, less money, less trouble. When it's something you can count, like Nazis, the word is Fuhrer.

Er, that is, "fewer." I meant to say "fewer Nazis."

That's all for this week, folks!

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