Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the catalyst dept

It’s another week with one big winner, this time coming in on our popular post about the DJ who was suspended for pulling the classic “dihydrogen monoxide” prank on his listeners. Gareth soared past the competition in both the insightful and funny categories, because our readers don’t seem to think highly of Floridians:

Hardly surprising, given:

A) It’s Florida, and

B) It’s a Country station.

Not exactly a Venn diagram that would contain a lot of smart listeners.

Meanwhile, our next comment comes in response to something that should be an April Fool’s prank but isn’t: Warner Bros’ attempt at an online streaming service. SirToreth took second place for insightful with his interpretation of the offering:

It isn’t about succeeding…
…it’s about making it look like you made a “good faith effort”, when you’re engineering it to fail, then writing off the loss on your taxes, insisting piracy (instead of lack of a compelling product) is the problem, and then insisting on more legislation to put the actually successful streaming services under, and propping up your old business model.

For editor’s choice, we start out on one of this week’s many posts about Prenda, where an anonymous commenter underlined one of the many imbalances in the system:

So change your MAC address is spoofing a network and worth 35-50 years, but lying to the judges/court system gets you a slap on the hands?

That’s justice for ya!

Next, we head to our post about the USPTO’s final rejection of Apple’s rubberbanding patent. One commenter insisted that it’s unrealistic to expect patent examiners to properly review prior art since there’s far too much out there for that to be possible. That commenter is correct, but nasch is the one who saw the actual moral of that story:

Isn’t that a problem with the patent system, then?

On the funny side, we’ve already had the number one comment, and our second place winner comes from the same post. Chosen Reject took the prize for warning us about an even bigger threat than dihydrogen monoxide:

Wait till people learn about the amount of dioxygen in the air. It’s been responsible for mass extinctions, and is highly linked to forest, home, and business fires. It has also been known to cause rust, accounting for billions of dollars of economic loss every year.

I recommend that everyone who was concerned about dihydrogen monoxide should immediately put in place measures that prevent exposure to dioxygen.

And as long as we’re riffing on chemistry, first editor’s choice goes to Some Guy for his take on the scare:

It’s no joke. Dihydrogen Monoxide kills. If we don’t address the problem now, we’ll soon be swimming in the stuff.

And finally, our second editor’s choice for funny comes from our post about NJ Assemblyman Sean Kean’s legislative war on videogames. Kean rationalized his recent anti-video-game bills thusly:

“Just as it’s unlawful for minors to purchase alcohol and cigarettes, because it’s detrimental to their well being, the same can be said of adult video games, most of which contain extremely inappropriate content for a young viewer’s eyes and ears,” said Kean. “These two pieces of legislation are intended to protect children.”

DannyB artfully demonstrated the stupidity of trying to eliminate “inappropriate content”:

I would like to point out that High School also contains extremely inappropriate content for a young viewer’s eyes and ears. So if you want to protect the children, then keep them out of high school and safe at home playing video games. This third item is at least as good for the children and for society as the first two pieces of legislation.

Thank you legislators for considering this legislation on this fine early day in April.

And thank you readers for another week of great comments.