Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the correcting-stupid dept

When Mississippi AG Jim Hood blamed Google for, basically, everything wrong with the internet, his tirade was full of plainly ridiculous assertions. Mike Shore won first place for Insightful by demonstrating this with a game of substitution:

How much sense does this make in a similar context?

Hood accused Ford of being “unwilling to take basic actions to make the roads safe from unlawful and predatory conduct, and it has refused to modify its own behavior that facilitates and profits from unlawful conduct.” His letter cites not just speeding, hit and runs and drunk driving but the use of getaway cars in bank robberies

While Hood was being stupid, the USTR was accusing the public of the same sin, and using our supposed inability to understand international agreements as justification for keeping the TPP secret. Fogbugzd won second place with a simple statement of the actual truth:

The real problem with releasing the details is that the public WILL understand it.

For editor’s choice on the Insightful side, we start with TKnarr and a response to a schizophrenic attack on Aereo from one of our regular detractors:

There’s a principle in law, though: if I’m entitled to do something, I’m generally entitled to have someone else do it for me. You do this every day when you use a credit or debit card or write a check: you aren’t paying the merchant, you’re authorizing the bank or credit-card company to pay the merchant for you. Anyone who has a secretary sorting their mail is doing the same thing, authorizing the secretary to open and read the mail instead of them doing it themselves. So, assuming that I’m entitled to record the shows and play them back later (and I am, thanks to the time-shifting ruling), why would I not be entitled to have someone else run my DVR for me?

I’d note that this same principle is why people are so upset over the government’s position about access to e-mail on servers: we think of it in terms of us having the provider run our mailbox for us, and the government wouldn’t be entitled to come in and riffle through our mailbox without a warrant if it were us operating it directly.

Next we’ve got PaulT, who heard the 21st Century Fox CEO’s comment that people shouldn’t dislike bundled TV channels in a world with $5 lattes and cellphone bills, and took on the task of analogy-busting:

Did I miss the part where you have to have the latte every time you go into a store to buy something else, or the part where the latte is only available as part of a package that includes a bottle of water, hot chocolate and sandwich for $20? Did I miss the part where you can’t choose to have the latte made the way you want it, but have to from a limited choice of options, rather than being able to choose from a range of sizes, milk types, flavourings, etc.?

Plus, maybe things are different in the US, but aren’t cell phone bills simply pre-built bundles of line rental/data/voice/text plans to begin with?

What a strange, deluded analogy.

After all those responses to idiocy, it’s nice to open the Funny side of things with some positive news from Norway, which is digitizing all Norwegian books and making them free to its citizens. An anonymous commenter won first place with some good old-fashioned maximalist-mocking sarcasm:

Well I guess no one’s ever going to write a book in Norway anymore.

/s

For second place, we head to our post about a photographer attacking Something Awful over a photo of a bird that turned up in a Photoshop contest. Sometimes in these situations, as one anonymous commenter pointed out, it would be satisfying (if not productive) to see those who live by IP die by IP:

I hope the bird sues her for violating its publicity rights.

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we head back to Jim Hood and his tragic confusion between “Google” and “the internet”, which Ima Fish likened to another common lack of perspective among the technologically unsavvy:

And in a related story, the entire internet exists as an icon on your desktop called “Internet Explorer.”

And finally, during yet another debate about copyright-as-theft, someone asserted that “what’s being stolen is time, money and brain cells.” For Nina Paley, that actually made a lot of sense:

This explains copyright maximalists: they can’t make sense because they don’t have enough brain cells. Meanwhile “pirates” are using stolen brain cells to make well-reasoned, sensible arguments.

Indeed; you might even say that we have a monopoly on intelligence and reason. Come on, governments and copyright industries — topple our monopoly!

That’s all for this week, folks.