Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

from the the-word-on-the-blog dept

This week, following our coverage of the disturbing actions of a cop that led to a high-speed crash killing an infant, one commenter for some reason felt it was time to turn the blame around on the mother, suggesting the death must have been caused by her negligence. A reply from Alexander won first place for insightful:

As an Automotive Engineer who has engineered seats in cars I can tell you for certain that none of them in ordinary vehicles are designed to deal with a 94mph collision. Cars disintegrate at that speed.

Those videos you see for car safety, the super slow motion ones, they occur at ~20mph. Yes, that is how much the seats move at 20mph. At 94mph they disintegrate.

Fastening the straps correctly or not would likely not have changed the outcome at those speeds. The officer is clearly grossly negligent and the mother did not contribute in any significant way to the death of her infant. I say that with confidence of someone who's signature is still on the approvals for seats still carrying children in cars today.

That cop should have his drivers license cancelled for reckless driving for a decade. If he loses his job, then stiff shit. Then talk about trying him for negligent homicide.

In second place on the insightful side, we've got Dingledore the Previously Impervious using Microsoft's anger about a computer recycler offering Windows recovery disks to highlight the hypocrisy of "copying is theft":

Microsoft - Eats cake, yet still has cake.

Microsoft have spent years explaining that they sell licences, not DVDs of software.

Now, they're apparently selling the DVDs again. If it's a lost sale, where can we buy them?

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start out with an anonymous commenter who offered a framing that resolves the apparent hypocrisy of the government's tech demands and failings:

This is actually self-consistent. The government believes that secure encryption with a Law Enforcement Agency Key ("LEAK") is possible if the technology companies would just "nerd harder," even as the government offers neither reference implementation nor convincing proof that this can be done. Likewise, the government now seemingly believes that the companies could identify, in real time, trolls that the government's own intelligence/surveillance agencies failed to spot. In both cases, the government:

• Expects the private sector to solve the problem, and is actively demonizing anyone who fails to drop everything to work on the problem
• Provides no useful assistance in solving the problem
• Provides no reasonable explanation for why, with its vast resources and supposed subject matter expertise, the government cannot offer useful assistance solving the problem

Next, we've got a simple response from PaulT to a commenter who, when we criticized Trump, told us it's "hard to take anything serious from someone throwing a tantrum":

Which is why Trump is making a laughing stock of your country. He does little else.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is an anonymous response to an even more absurd criticism from one of our less coherent detractors, who questioned the sincerity of Mike's opposition to torture and demanded a resume of proof:

Masnick is obviously not against torture.

After all, he allows visitors to this site to be exposed to your drivel every day.

In second place, we've got crade with another response to Microsoft's aggressive actions:

Re: Bring back the commercials!

PC: We are having trouble with our people getting around our planned obsolescence.

Mac: Amateur.

For editor's choice on the funny side, we start with a response from That One Guy who complained that our coverage of the recklessly driving cop was irrelevant to Techdirt:

The magic code strikes again.

Truly, the greatest sign that TD is not filled to the rafters with pure evil is that they have chosen to only apply the code that forces people to read articles they didn't want to on one site, rather than weaponizing it and taking over the world.

Finally, following our positivity regarding California's push for its own net neutrality rules, one critic accused us yet again of being inconsistent in our stance on government intervention, leading an anonymous commenter to get understandably snarky about this sort of blunt idiocy:

Man, it's almost like some regulation is good and some regulation is bad.

This is shocking!

That's all for this week, folks!

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