Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the company,-meet-crowd dept

Sometimes companies and customers clash, more often than not because the former isn’t treating the latter right. Such was the case this week when a UK mobile operator decided to tell users that they don’t want unlimited data simply because they aren’t maxing out their current data caps. Silverscarcat took most insightful comment of the week (and plenty of funny votes) by offering an analogy to improve on our own:

The real logic is this…

You get a group of people together who are allergic to peanuts and then serve them peanut butter-chocolate pie.

Since none of them eat it, obviously no one wants such a pie.

But that wasn’t the big story in Customer Non-Appreciation this week. That honor goes to EA and their fiasco of a launch for the new Sim City game. Though many customers were upset at being unable to play their newly purchased game, Ninja won second most insightful comment of the week by explaining why he doesn’t care, and why that’s a bad sign for EA:

Good thing I decided I would never buy from EA again a while back. In fact I don’t even bother with what they are releasing (ie: don’t even download a pirated version).

When pirates are not bothering to pirate your game then you have a problem.

Situations like that one make it all the more worrying that DRM for physical objects may be a lot more common in the near future. While I can understand the reaction of our number one winner this week, silverscarcat, who also racked up plenty of insightful votes on this post with his reaction that DRM should be illegal, the better solution is closer to what Fentex proposed, which makes it our first editor’s choice:

It doesn’t need to be made illegal, it just doesn’t need to be legislated and protected in anyway.

Let it survive or die on it’s own merits.

Mikes argument is that as it lessens the value to a purchaser of any transaction it will not succeed in a market where people have options to make more worthwhile transactions.

The problem isn’t that any supplier might try it but that legislators attempt to protect them at others expense.

And since the insightful side has been dedicated to chastising bad companies and practices, we’ll finish things off with another hall-of-famer: HBO, which has finally realized it should probably make itself available online, around the world (just not at home). The weird part, as nospacesorspecialcharacters pointed out, is that they seemed to think this was some kind of herculean technological undertaking:

We cannae do it captian!

If only there was some kind of technology that could do that today, one that was fast, efficient and possibly peer-to-peer so it didn’t tax the bandwidth on their own servers.

Imagine the possibilities if that kind of technology existed?

That bit of snark racked up plenty of funny votes as well as insightful ones, which makes it the perfect transition to the other side of things. When a misheard Will Smith lyric lead to a school going on lockdown and a student being arrested, mattshow won funniest comment of the week by suggesting that justice, in a roundabout way, was served:

The student’s use of the theme song is clearly an infringement of the copyright in the Fresh Prince theme song. Even if he wasn’t planning to shoot up the school, he still should have been locked up for this outrageous affront to the moral standards held by all hardworking recording industry shills.

But the real comedy is coming tomorrow, when everyone involved in the Prenda debacle has been ordered to show up in court where, among many other things, we may finally learn the identity of Alan Cooper. An anonymous commenter won second funniest comment of the week by musing about how that might go:

And next monday:

Judge: Ok, I have verified that both Alan Coopers are present. Finally this mess is starting to make some sen…

Suddenly, a man bursts through the courtroom door.

Man: Stop this charade. Those two man are impostors!

Judge: Who the hell are you?

Man: My name…is Alan Cooper.

Judge: Aww f***.

It just occurred to me—could Alan Cooper’s real name be D.B.? Of course, another anonymous commenter suggested an alternative possibility, winning our first editor’s choice for funny:

Would anyone like to give odds that the Judge receives a letter from Alan Coopers mother stating that Alan Cooper cannot attend court due to being sick.

Well, at least that would be confirmation that he exists.

Finally, let’s not forget that private entities aren’t the only ones who can jerk the public around—the government is good at that too, and to them we dedicate the final editor’s choice. When the NSA asked a reporter to delete the photos she had taken of their new facility, another anonymous commenter suggested an appropriate response:

Any chance we could ask the NSA to delete the photos in their possession?

Sounds fair to me, so I’m sure they aren’t interested. See you next week, folks (and so will the NSA)!