Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
from the you-said-it dept
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side comes from all the way back on last week's comment post, where an anonymous commenter took a moment to thank us for the openness of our comments:
tiny bit off topic, but since this article is about comments this still seems fitting:
I wanted to say thanks for having a site that makes it easy to post comments.
There have been several sites that I've felt inclined to comment on (or file software bug reports to :( ) that I simply gave up on due to insane requirements like having to create an account or give my email address. If the barrier to entry for "basic community participation" on a site is not trivial, then odds are it's not worth the time or energy.
I know it sounds kinda crazy but in person you don't have to present photo ID or give your street/mailing address just to talk to someone. Internet communities have no strong reason to be different (that can't be addressed in better ways).
(Thanks for the kind words! We have every intention of keeping it that way.)
In second place, we have a response to SCOTUS's decision not to review Kim Dotcom's civil asset forfeiture case, where one anonymous commenter responded in the form of a quotation:
It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished.
But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, 'whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,' and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever.
- John Adams
For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start out with one more response to that post, this time from That One Guy offering a brief summation of events:
So the DoJ steals his stuff, tries to hold it over his head by requiring him to forgo his right to fight extradition if he wants to try to get it back, the courts buy the DoJ's argument in it's entirety, and the supreme court decides that it's not interested in even considering the case.
Goodbye right to fight extradition.
Next, we head to our post about the UK Home Secretary's patronizing and ignorant stance on encryption backdoors, where one commenter proposed that a safe system could be developed by using a separate individual encryption key for every message, prompting an anonymous commenter to put the scale of that suggestion into perspective:
Average number of iMessages sent per year: 63,000,000,000,000,000.
Current secure key storage size: 2048 bits (256 bytes)
That's 1,600,000,000,000,000 bytes of information per year.
Would you care to put up the cash for the 1.6 petabytes of storage that your suggestion would take (not counting the necessary metadata needed to tie the key to the message)?
Oh, and don't forget that you have just shifted the one thing you would need to decrypt all messages from "the master decryption key" to "access to the database of decryption keys." Unless you really trust Apple to keep those keys secure (as much as you'd trust, say, Yahoo!, Equifax, eBay, Target, Evernote, FriendFinder, SnapChat, the Turkish government...)
Over on the funny side, our first place winner comes in response to the lawsuit against a King's College football coach over tweeting a page from a 1982 motivational book. Roger Strong was struck by the book's title:
You have to respect someone who writes a book called "Winning Isn't Normal", and 35 years later still endeavors to prove it by example.
In second place, we've got a response to Oracle's letter attempting to scare the White House away from open source software, where Toom1275 took advantage of the syntactically ambiguous punctuation in the letter's subheadings, which began with the label "False Narrative":
At least Oracle was nice enough to clearly label some of its false narratives as such for us.
For editor's choice on the funny side, we start out with one more nod to Roger Strong, this time for a comment on the UK Home Secretary post making a good comparison about the futility of demanding the impossible:
Her government would also find it much easier to balance the budget, if only those mathematicians weren't so patronizing in their responses to requests to change the rules of mathematics.
Finally, we've got a comment from Vidiot about Oracle's letter, which went ahead and gave a key sentence a new ending to make it much more accurate:
"The USG’s enthusiasm for open source software is wholly inconsistent with..."
... Oracle's need to skim easy federal money from decades-old, proprietary installations.
That's all for this week, folks!
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Reader Comments
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Thought For The Week
Any questions?
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Re: Thought For The Week
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Re: Thought For The Week
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Re: How were the people down in that plaza made safer by being completely helpless?
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Re: Re: How were the people down in that plaza made safer by being completely helpless?
only if such a case were the only case, which is a blatantly false assumption.
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Re: Re: Re: How were the people down in that plaza made safer by being completely helpless?
No-one made that assumption.
Different circumstances might have yielded different results. But in this case it IS the case, over 50 people at dead, and having every last one of them fully armed and trained and ready to return fire would have made no difference. There was a well-known and well-armed gun advocate in the crowd recording himself, and it made no difference.
Sure, a one-on-one encounter could be different, but even then only sometimes. Consider the Oregon 'open carry' advocate who was robbed of his handgun at gunpoint back in 2014, while exercising his 'open carry' right. The thief apparently made off with the man’s entire argument.
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Re: Thought For The Week
Any questions?
Yes.
By Ignoring your fake presumptive gun grabbing politics, we could discus how to SUE under the UCC law against all the doctors that GOUGED every person that got shot, just like in a hurricane how if the price of gas is raised/gouged, Every Business out there gets in trouble if they gouge you, except the "medical system." Every doctor needs to be in
SUPERMAX under 15USC Chapter 1. oF course your going to want to fight about medical costs while your shot
But if you really want to make me a happy scrunch get me on the grand jury that gets to do discovery on this puppy, the I am gonna open a can of DHS JTTF deep state Worms., the might want to just legalize automatic weapons instead of fufilling the discovery I ASK FOR.
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dilly dilly
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Re: Re: Re: Re: How were the people down in that plaza made safer by being completely helpless?
This is why discussing things with you nuts is pointless. You only have 1 dimensional minds. You ignorantly think that the only result is a fucking shoot out at the OK corral with everyone hiding behind shit and waving their shit stained underwear like a white flag.
Guns being everywhere means that any shooter in a highly populated area is likely to face others with guns even if their targets are far away. If staff at the hotel were armed they could have been up there in a couple of minutes shooting at that fucker.
Mass shootings are easy to perform in the USA because Americans are cowards and want others to die protecting them instead of stepping up and helping each other out. But no, everyone needs to be sitting fucking ducks for you guys. And because of your fear of guns it has directly translated to the police assuming the position of shoot first ask if that lollipop was a gun later stance instead of just operating under the idea that everyone is already armed. Now you have helped give them a direct excuse to be afraid, because that is the culture you anti-gun nuts bring... FEAR!
Switzerland has their fucking act together and they don't have the anti-gun cowardly culture over there that we do.
The ONLY new gun law that we need, is EVERYONE REQUIRES TRAINING, no fucking exceptions, you don't want to learn how to shoot a gun, ask canada if they want you or you can move to mexico and get your pansy ass shot off by a cartel.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: How were the people down in that plaza made safer by being completely helpless?
So you are responding to the shooting, and when you arrive their is an armed stranger outside the suspected room, Do you shoot?
You have a 50:50 chance of being wrong, and a fraction of a second to make the right decision.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: How were the people down in that plaza made safer by being completely helpless?
You've got your argument backwards.
The police is ALREADY
it is THE REASON they
Why else would they be shooting? Hell, why even draw a gun if you assume people are NOT armed?
You also seem pretty callous and/or a disbeliever of prevention being better than a cure:
"A couple of minutes" is still a whole bunch of dead people.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: How were the people down in that plaza made safer by being completely helpless?
I am willing to put my life at risk to save others if I can, can't say much about the rest of the cowards that want to run and hide while someone else takes those risks. I would say those that want to run and hide should shut the fuck up and just stay out of everyone else's way. You really have no room for fucking with the people taking risks while all you want to do is cower in a corner somewhere.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: How were the people down in that plaza made safer by being completely helpless?
So what are you saying here? Better to let someone keep murdering people to wait for the police instead of trying to save folks if you are able?
We reap what we sow. The more we want cops to serve as our protectors the more they WILL believe themselves to be your keepers. They already view themselves as above the law and believe all citizens should offer only compliance.
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Re: Re: Thought For The Week
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: How were the people down in that plaza made safer by being completely helpless?
Switzerland has their fucking act together and they don't have the anti-gun cowardly culture over there that we do. Switzerland is better than the US for gun deaths - but that is not hard - even S. Africa is better than the US. Switzerland is stil 10x worse than the UK.
Japan has more or less eliminated gun death by very strict gun laws.
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You know, it'd be hilarious if we could get a chain reaction going.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: How were the people down in that plaza made safer by being completely helpless?
Guns have near ZERO impact on the murder rate. You take guns away people get run over, stabbed, bludgeoned, or poisoned to death instead. The only thing you have essentially said, you don't care if or how people die, so long as it was no by a gun.
Japan also has a radically different culture. You could die from over work, they even has a word for it called karoshi, you can also go to jail because your defense lawyer did not want to insult the prosecutor.
It is incredibly easy to kill, we even do it by accident. And if your objective is to kill, its even easier to accomplish if you take them by surprise, use a weapon, or have a particular set of skills.
So yea, if someone wants you dead... they don't need a gun. Your fear of guns is quite literally... irrational.
Culture, not guns, is the primary cause of murder.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: How were the people down in that plaza made safer by being completely helpless?
Heard that before? Do you think the many famous people that said much the same in many different ways were eating paint? They all crapped bigger than you.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: How were the people down in that plaza made safer by being completely helpless?
Most western democracies have the same level of liberty WITHOUT even remotely the same level of gun violence. For all the "Obama gonna take away your guns" grandstanding the Republicans do to rally the ammosexuals, even they understand this. Which is why CPAC and Republican conventions don't allow guns.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: How were the people down in that plaza made safer by being completely helpless?
This is of course, utter nonsense.
Yes, the other things happen. They happen even in America WITH guns. But America's murder rate is so much higher because of gun violence.
Shootings by children are a daily occurrence in America. You could cut back on that with some laws and penalties enforcing responsible gun ownership. Much like laws and penalties cut back drunk driving deaths in the late '60s and early '70s, without taking away everyone's alcohol.
And no, stabbings and poisonings by children will not increase to fill the void. Nor would most mass shooting death tolls be anywhere near as high if the shooter used a gun instead.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: How were the people down in that plaza made safer by being completely helpless?
you just need to give up your guns and obey the police when they wave theirs in your face. I hear police brutality is at an all time low these days...
*shakes head*
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: How were the people down in that plaza made safer by being completely helpless?
http://www.factcheck.org/2015/10/gun-laws-deaths-and-crimes/
"There’s no discernible pattern among those cities, nor clear or convincing evidence in these statistics that shows more gun laws lead to more or less gun crime."
http://people.howstuffworks.com/strict-gun-laws-less-crime1.htm
"The former Soviet Union's extremely stringent gun controls, successfully implemented and enforced by a police state, did not keep the nation, and successor states like Russia, from posting murder rates from 1965-1999 that far outstripped the rest of the developed world [sources: Kates and Mauser; Kessler; Pridemore; Pridemore]. The killers in question did not obtain illegal firearms -- they simply employed other weapons [source: Kleck]."
You just have a bad case of stupid and ignorance and so far I am not aware of any soap to help you wash that shit off.
Maybe if you stopped being a sheep and started thinking critically about things... I hear that helps sometimes! There have been more than enough studies, guns laws just change the way we murder and fuck with each other, it is the culture we generate that better controls the fuckery.
Yes, alcohol laws helped reduce death a lot, but the problem here is that you are comparing apples and oranges issues. People become mentally impaired with too much alcohol, and sure you can "joke" about the same happening with guns but they are not even remotely the same. With alcohol there is no guarantee that you will die if you drive with a little buzz and there are a lot of folks willing to look down the barrel of a bottle to see how much beer is left.
You might have a hammer, but every problem is not a nail, and you clearly do not get that!
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: How were the people down in that plaza made safer by being completely helpless?
So you're not even going to consider prevention, only mitigation? You really want to be stuck choosing between many gun deaths and even more gun deaths?
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: How were the people down in that plaza made safer by being completely helpless?
People become mentally impaired with too much alcohol
The level of argument from the gun lobby is giving me the feeling that people become mentally impaired with too many guns.
I've looked around the raw statistics about these matters (as opposed to your biased sites) and it is quite clear to me that you are simply wrong here.
Japan has an exceedingly low murder rate. In fact if you google "Japan murder rate" you gey articles saying "why is Japan's murder rate so low?"
Murder rate in Japan (very strict gun laws) 0.31/100,000 Murder rate in the UK (strict gun laws) 0.92/100,000 Murder rate in the every single US state >1.0/100,000 almost every year. Typical large US states have murder rates above 3.0/100,000 eg California 5.0, Texas 4.4, Illinois 5.8, New York 3.5.
So actualy your argument is not supported by the facts.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: How were the people down in that plaza made safer by being completely helpless?
The fact is that no civilised state allows private ownership of arbitrary weapons. No US state would allow private ownership of tactical nuclear weapons or even large artillery pieces.
It follows that there can be no liberty issue in the principle of gun control. The second amendment is a red herring here. It should be simply a matter of setting in place rules that will minimise loss of life and serious injury while allowing reasonable use of guns for hunting, target shooting etc.
Unfortunately in the US it has become an emotional issue for the gun lobby - and emotion crowds out reason as the tone of the pro-gun comments here proves.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: How were the people down in that plaza made safer by being completely helpless?
Again, nonsense. ALL the cities listed are in the same country, where guns can flow freely from one city to another. Chicago's stricter laws are in response to a very high gun crime rate, not the other way 'round.
Comparing cities that aren't in the same gun market, and you get different results. Canada's capital city of Ottawa had 16 murders in 2007, and Washington, D.C., which has roughly the same population, had 195 murders.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: How were the people down in that plaza made safer by being completely helpless?
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: How were the people down in that plaza made safer by being completely helpless?
Handguns are available for self protection in Seattle,
Of course this is the illusion that gun advocates live under, that your gun might somehow save your life.
It is a fantasy. In reality if you were in that situation the bad guy would be ready, prepared and hyped up. You would be off guard. Guess who would win.
Much more likely are
The bad guy kills you with your own gun.
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Re: You know, it'd be hilarious if we could get a chain reaction going.
In the most Inception-esque manner possible?
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Re: What we need to do is get rid of airplanes.
Except airplanes have many constructive uses, whereas guns are purely destructive weapons.
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Re: Guns have near ZERO impact on the murder rate.
Nonsense:
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: How were the people down in that plaza made safer by being completely helpless?
The point being this - a gun to be used for self defence has to be kept accessible, loaded and ready for use. A gun for sport can be kept in a locked cabinet, unloaded and with the ammunition in a separate secure location.
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Re: Re: Thought for the weak.
Does the Government need guns?
Guns are a tool.
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