Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
from the insights-up-top,-humor-down-below dept
The most insightful comment this week was another clear winner. (Second place was way, way behind.) It was a comment from an Anonymous Coward, in response to the claims from the NSA that Anonymous was somehow likely to target taking down power grids. This AC gave a good reason for that to be unlikely:
Let’s go the other way, why would Anon, who uses computers which require power, shut down their power source?
Coming in second was Richard’s comment in response to my suggestion that all laws should have a sunset period at which point they need to be reviewed before they could be renewed. As Richard notes, this might have a side benefit:
If it did nothing else this would limit the amount of time available for making new laws!
For editor’s choice, we’ve got Chosen Reject explaining how he deals with the fact that certain “inventors” aren’t:
My hobby: Every time someone says “Edison invented…” I mentally replace “invented” with “was somehow involved in patenting”.
For the second editor’s choice, I’ll go with TasMot’s comment on the NSA/Anonymous hacking the power grid story, which gets to the real heart of the matter:
Before chasing after the group Anonymous, let’s put the idiots in jail that put the On/Off switch for the Power Grid on the Internet. I mean how stupid was that? Does somebody working at the power company need to get on a web page from home and turn off the power grid?
Why doesn’t NSA actually look into what parts of the power grid can be accessed from the Internet and go “fix” that? Oh Yeah, I forgot, you can’t take away any civil liberties if you do that…….. You just fix the problem and move on….. And besides, that would make more sense.
Moving on to funny, we had three comments very closely clumped together at the top… and then there was a huge gap from them to number four. So, rather than leave out that “third” comment, let’s just list out all three of those comments. Amusingly, the top-voted funniest comment… is actually a response to the most insightful of the week! Never seen that before. It’s also by an Anonymous Coward (though a different one) responding to that claim of Anonymous supposedly not wanting to take down power plants because they’d lose power… and then mimicking the bizarre two sentences we quote from the article about how Anonymous can’t take down the power grid, but “experts” feared that if they did then that would increase the likelihood that a power grid would be taken down:
Anonymous doesn’t yet have the capability to run computers without a power source, officials say. But if the group’s members around the world developed or acquired it, an attack on the power grid would become far more likely, according to cybersecurity experts who spend their time giving stupid quotes for stupid articles.
The next two were both on the story about Techdirt being filtered out for kids in Germany as being harmful to minors. First we had someone going by the name “TD regular guess who” noting:
Yeah, but we just go there for the articles.
Then we had yet another Anonymous Coward explaining:
In other news, Techdirt readership among German youths is up 42%.
Of course, some of those looking for freaky German porn were notably confused.
I will admit that I was really, really tempted to make my editor’s choice comment this hater’s comment because it really is amazingly funny and gets funnier and more ridiculous the further you read (summary: it argues that I’m a total idiot, and to make my life miserable, this amazing individual might “buy” this blog just to make me suffer — I should probably just send him our starting price), but I thought that might just be funny to me. So, instead, we’ll go with yet another Anonymous Coward comment, explaining how Universal Music withholding millions from Eminem royalties to pay for Eminem’s lawsuit against Universal Music made sense:
What’s the problem with charging the artist for legal fees you incur defending against lawsuits filed by the artist for not paying the artist?
Lets compare this to a similar situation, to show Universal Music’s point.
-Universal Music hires you as an employee paid at the end of each month, with a $120,000 dollars a year salary.
-At the end of the month Universal Music pays you only $4,000 before taxes, not the $10,000 you were expecting, so you sue Universal Music.
-As the lawsuit continues you continue working for Universal music for an entire year, getting paid $4,000 dollars each month
-You win an expensive lawsuit against Universal Music, so Universal Music gives you an accounting statement saying you’re owed $72,000 in back salary. But Universal’s statement also says it cost them $60,000 to defend against your lawsuit (and that’s not counting the $20,000 you spent on your own lawyer in that lawsuit), so Universal writes you a check for $12,000 and calls it even.
You see, perfectly reasonable of Universal Music! It’s also a darn convenient way to get around pesky minimum wage laws, thanks to a little bit of creativity. Creativity is good! If we punish Universal Music for their creativity then the artists Universal Music represents won’t be motivated to create new music!
And now that we know the secret business model, I’ll leave you and get ready for the upcoming week…
Comments on “Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt”
nope
but I thought that might just be funny to me
No, that one was objectively funny, and I’ll ruin anyone who says otherwise!
Mike's favorite comment
tl;dr – Mike’s a poopyhead.
I will admit that I was really, really tempted to make my editor’s choice comment this hater’s comment
I hadn’t seen that originally, so I’m glad you drew more attention to it.
Count that guy as someone else that has you figured out.
Freetard FUD.
You can’t compete with free. Name one that made any money competing with piracy.
Freetard FUD.
Another week of music industry failures, another week of trolls who don’t get the point
Want to know a perfect service that has competed against piracy and has won more often than not? Steam.
Not only have they competed, they have been BOOMING in recent times due to the wonderful community, easy to use service they have established, and gigantic library of games they offer.
What we need is a service like Steam for the music world.
…huh, this seems familiar, almost as if a thousand repressed voices who have said the same thing before being eaten by a giant dinosaur fossil.
Freetard FUD.
I’ll do you a few better.
I’ll name one company in all four industries that have made money competing against piracy and link to articles proving it:
Gaming – Valve – “Piracy is a service problem”
Music – Spotify – “We’re an alternative to piracy”
Movies – Vodo – “Vodo is Netflix-Meets-Kickstarter for Indie Film Fans”
Publishing – – “How publishers gave Amazon a stick to beat them with”
By the way, how’s that bottled water you have near your desktop? Is it proving worth the price over the free goods you can get at a river?
Freetard FUD.
ummm? well ok, if you insist:
“An incomplete List Of Free Games (open source, property, CC, and other) (MMO, MMORPG,2D, 3D, FPS, PLATFORM and other)”
Well, no wonder you can’t compete with free. With all of those, why would you need to pay?
Freetard FUD.
I had totally forgotten about Vodo despite getting lots of FREE LEGAL LEGITIMATE content from it. They had a recent sci-fi shorts torrent awhile back, some of it was a bit odd and not to my taste, but some of it was brilliant.
As for Steam, I hadn’t used it. But with the recent Android Humble Bundle and the games available for Windows through Steam once I made my purchase, I can say I am now a fan. It is indeed a great service. (If there was a Steam equivalent for movies and music, I think a very large majority of people, both pirates and non-pirates, would use it and pay whatever REASONABLE monthly fees associated with it’s use).
ONCE AGAIN, THE GREAT MIKE SATAN PROVES HIS INTELLECTUAL TECHDIRT BY FLAUNTING THE TAINT OF THE GREAT HITLER PIRACY
You should be CAREFUL Mike HUSSEIN Masnick because I’M a BIGWIG at several MAJOR SILICON VALLEY INVESTMENT FIRMS. Me and the BOYS down at the SILICON VALLEY YACHTING CLUB were just TALKING about IMPORTANT issues such as OPINION BLOGS DEVOTED TO TECHNOLOGY.
And as I was SIPPING my CAVIAR from my GOLD-PLATED WINEGLASS, curly mustache and large jet-black top-hat punctuating the MONOCLE that I wear at my LEFT-EYE. I happened to CASUALLY MENTION HOW THEY SHOULD AVOID A RAPSCALLION SUCH AS YOURSELF and not SHOWER you with GOLDS AND RICHES that our kind is constantly donating to troubled technology blogs. I believe it went something like this:
“Why kind sir, I have the most stunning news story from this blogatory site known as the technology filth”
“You are in ill-faith kind sir! the blogatation site known as techdirt is a folly run by an absolute FLIBBERTIGIBBET known as Michael Hussein Masnick. Here is a SAMPLE of his site that I have had HAND-WRITTEN by my team of internet-scouring monks which I use in place of an ELECTRONIC DEVICE. As you can SEE, there are many ANONYMOUS PEOPLE who criticize him primarily with swear words. Clearly not the behavior of a well-groomed community of an internet establishment”
AND NOW YOUR DAINTY NAME IS TAINTED ALL THROUGHOUT THE TECH-WORLD. YOU HAVE BEEN UNDONE MIKE MASNICK. YOU WILL NEVER BE SHOWERED WITH CHECKS AFTER THE HEARTY LAUGH ME AND MY KIND HAD AT YOUR EXPENSE.
Long time reader, but the autorun video full browser screen advertisements suck.
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have you ever tried adblock?
compete against free
Ill give you 3 big ones.
IBM
Red Hat
and the company formerly known as Sun.
Indeed, they even pay/paid their programmers to write code to give away..
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You had me at “great Hitler piracy”.
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but ad-blocking is piracy is theft
and just because some people use such technology (about 14% of users)
?That doesn?t mean that we should make the use of ad-blockers socially acceptable?
At least according to James Cridlands personal and now ad-free blog as highlighted by Andrew Dubber earlier
http://james.cridland.net/blog/piracy-and-ad-blockers-are-both-theft/
never cease to wonder how people that cant remember the difference between here and hear, their and they’re, your and you’re continue to think that anyone is going to pay attention to anything they say….
“…why would Anon, which uses computers that require power, shut down their power source?”.
Maybe they’re planning to use computers that can run on a 9-volt battery like that kid in “Explorers” had.
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Gotta love all the block caps, bolding and the mere grinning and chuckling before the second paragraph.
If there’s a better outraged AC parody this site has ever seen I haven’t come across it yet.
9.9/10
The first candidate for funniest post of the week for next Sunday!
Freetard FUD.
Red Hat(half a billion dollar company), Arduino(million dollar company), MakerBot, MySQL, Apache, Blender(3D software).
I mean they all give their product for free, others can copy, modify it and make anything out of it and don’t need to pay for it and still they make money how is that possible?
Cooperation not exclusion is the key, they give something for free and get a lot of people working to help them create a market and the bigger that market becomes the more they make money selling services and goods to others.
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Agreed. I’m just glad I wasn’t drinking anything at the time of reading it.
nope
large parts of that thread managed to be both hilarious and rage inducing at the same time :-S
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its and it’s is entirely understandable to the point where even a lot of grammar nazi type people have just given up and don’t even care anymore.
(seriously, according to the ‘rules’ they should both be ‘it’s’ anyway. stupid exceptions…)
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…that sentence was supposed to contain ‘on the other hand’ at some point, i’m sure of it…
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ya know, that’s probably entirely doable, but the battery life would SUCK.
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Surely, it should be,
can not or can’t rather than cant, but then whose going to be gauche enough to make an issue of it.
If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?
In a science-fiction anthology of yore called Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison, wot I read in my younger days, there was a story, set in a future where the human race was inhabiting hundreds of planets, all happily coexisting with one another?except one. By common consent, it seems, this one world was ostracized, its inhabitants persecuted whenever they tried to venture onto other worlds. And all because of a certain, ahem, ?lifestyle choice? that they made.
The result of this choice was (in the story) a dramatic reduction in their health problems, both physical and mental. They were happier and less stressed than people elsewhere. Their families got along better. Yet in spite of all these well-established facts (in the story), the very mention of their name could cause inhabitants of other worlds to puke in disgust and recoil in horror.
And so it is, I think, with the very mention of the idea that the world would be better off without patents and copyrights. Or that illegality of most psychoactive substances does more harm than the substances themselves. Or that people don?t really need to run around with guns all the time. The overwhelming?and increasing?weight of evidence that these facts are so counts for nothing; that our lives would be simpler and happier, businesses would prosper, ordinary people would have less to worry about, counts for naught against the overwhelming, visceral conviction that, that is how things have always been, that is how they always must be, and anybody who says different must ipso facto have something seriously wrong with them.
Thankfully non-violent resistance tends to have a happier history than violent uprising. We?ll win them over eventually, because they cannot erase the fact that we exist.
“YouTube Identifies Birdsong As Copyrighted Music”
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/02/26/2141246/youtube-identifies-birdsong-as-copyrighted-music
One interesting comment
“The *PROBLEM* is that Rumblefish is claiming copyright on other people’s work. That’s completely unacceptable–it’s piracy. And that’s what needs to be stopped.”
Posted by im_thatoneguy
But will Rumblefish get slammed for potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars for an act worse than infringement? Of course not, they get the high court treatment.
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Count that guy as someone we’ve figured out. Do you think acting like an asshole on the internet is going to increase sales of your music/product or decrease them? Whether you’re right or wrong, that kind of braindead behaviour only drives paying customers and fans away. It never attracts more.
Freetard FUD.
Radio, Netflix, Hulu.
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Describing yourself as looking like the LulzSec Avatar prolly won’t end very pretty for you.
Keep your eyes open for the Louise Boat on the horizon and pray you can escape…
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Just as soon as the birds get a lawyer, PR Firm, and a Lobbyist to grease the wheels to make sure that copyfraud gets the same life time prison sentences people get for posting links to an episode of House that you missed.
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Believability: 5
Funny: 10
That is a great piece of humor there, yay!
🙂
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Ghostery(firefox), adblock(firefox), adblock plus(chrome), noscript(firefox), scriptno(chrome).
They all can do something about it, you got the power, now will you use it?
userscripts.org also can help, but you should ask someone who knows how to read the code first if it is good or not.
“Let’s go the other way, why would Anon, who uses computers which require power, shut down their power source?”
Hey, that was me. Its nice to know that at least for tonight, they like me, they really like me.
Hopefully since I was the clear winner, the media will not start hounding me.
Anyways, my last comment didnt sound right, it should read:
IBM
Red Hat
The troll formerly known as Sun.
I feel much better now i clarified that.
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What’s really funny is that the only way to tell the difference between this and the actual troll is the use of caps and the noticeably improved grammar.
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Had me at “INTELLECTUAL TECHDIRT.”
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Mike has the same middle name as Barack Obama? Who knew?
YAY! JOB CREATORS!
Isn’t is wonderful that he is employing people!
A team of Monks to transcribe the ‘series-of-tubes’ for his personal consumption.
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‘I do find it difficult to understand why running AdBlock or the like is not frowned upon by otherwise honest people. It?s somehow acceptable to write and use Web2.0 services, yet block the very ads that pay for them. If you run an ad-blocker (on your standard, unmetered, broadband connection) it would seem to me that you?re no different to a petty thief.’
when you put more ads on your website than you do content… put down the mouse, and back away from the computer.
forcing me to pay for bandwidth to load your stupid full page ads is extortion, which is worse than theft.
FTFY
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“FLIBBERTIGIBBET”