Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the potluck-comments dept

Some weeks, the most votes for funny and insightful don’t overlap at all… and some weeks, there’s a ton of overlap. This was one of those weeks. The comment that was voted most insightful, by Brent Ashley, also received a bunch of funny votes. It was in response to Senators complaining that Google was too big. Brent felt that perhaps there were some other things that were “too big” that needed attention:

Congress should expand their search for systems that need dismantling or breaking up due to bigness. Take their own two political parties for instance. Not enough competition. If one goes out of business all you’ll have is the other one.

Coming in second, talking about the same topic, was Craig’s comment recalling some other organizations that were declared “too big” by the government but seemed to get very different treatment from the government:

We get hearings on why Google is too dominate but not about the banks that are “too big to fail” and how they dominate the financial system. Where are the trust busters when we need them?

It is a good point. Why was it okay for the banks to get too big to fail?

I’ve got just one editor’s choice comment this week, which just missed making it as a top vote-getter. It’s from an Anonymous Coward, on the post about the US Chamber of Commerce lobbying to break and censor the internet. Someone in the comments was mocking the worries of people about PROTECT IP, saying they didn’t know what they were talking about, to which someone else pointed out that some of the folks who are complaining basically built core internet infrastructure, and this AC took it from there:

Yep, that’s us. We built the greatest distribution platform EVER for the music, movie, publishing, etc. industries. We did it at zero cost to them. We labored in obscurity for decades figuring out how to make it work, often funding our experiments out of our own pockets. We created something beyond their wildest dreams. (Surely, nobody thinks that the myopic dimwits in these legacy industries could have POSSIBLY imagined the Internet, let alone created it. Such work is far beyond their pitifully feeble intellects.)

Anyway, so we made it possible for them to do incredible things…and make a lot of money doing so, by the way. All they had to was adapt, to change, to embrace.

And as it turns out, this is ALSO beyond their pitifully feeble intellects.

So I look forward to their extinction. They’re already obsolete, it just remains to wait for them to die off.

And, as we move over to funny, the top vote getter also got a ton of “insightful” comments, and came very close to entering the winner’s circle on that side as well. It came from “John Doe,” in response to the story about whether or not arresting someone for flashing their lights to warn oncoming drivers of a speed trap represented a free speech violation:

The crime is “Felony Interference with Police Revenue Generation.”

Coming in second was an Anonymous Coward’s comment on someone expressing surprise that nightclubs would have to pay higher licensing fees if the club was deemed an “adult entertainment” club (i.e., one with strippers). The AC explained one theory for the pricing differential:

I speak from experience when I say that bare boobies cost more than covered boobies.

Believe it or not, that one got a ton of “insightful” votes too, though I’m not sure why. Anyway, we’ll close with just one more editor’s choice. This one concerning the guy in the UK who trademarked the government slogan “Keep Calm and Carry On” and then whined about how he should get to keep it because he quit his day job to focus on the trademark. An Anonymous Coward wished he’d gotten some advice:

He quit his day job to become a trademark troll? Someone should’ve told him to “Keep Calm and Carry On” before he did that.

Anyway, keep calm and carry on all of you. We’ll be back tomorrow with more posts.