Taking the top spot in "insightful" comment voting was Bengie, responding to big broadband players in Kansas City demanding a "level playing field" against Google's fiber offering. Bengie points out what a real "level playing field" might look like:

AT&T/TW/Comcast/etc have gotten about 1.2tril in grants and tax-breaks over the past 15 years with the intent of actually upgrading the USA's infrastructure.

I say even the playing field, but retroactively give Google a fair slice of all that stimulus. I figure a cool 100bil of free money should be enough for Google to "fairly" compete.

Coming in second was Coises with a "better idea" for a CAPTCHA to stop trolls, responding to the story about an "empathy CAPTCHA."

What about just asking a question that tests whether you actually read and understood the article?

That one actually came in second place on both the Insightful scores and Funniest. Either way, if anyone could implement that one, let us know... Moving on to editor's choice, we've got an Anonymous Coward questioning the US district court judge who denied Megaupload's attempt to get the case against it dismissed because the US could not properly serve the company. The AC questions one bit of the judge's reasoning:

I'm particularly struck by the judges claim that MU *purposefully* did not set up an office in the US. What kind of reasoning is that? If a foreign company does not set up a US office, this makes them automatically intent on criminal activity, even if the comapny's customer base is by no means US centric (MU was big in Southern Europe, Latin America and Asia, and had only a small percentage of US users)? This judge displays the kind of parochialism that seems unfortunately to be typical of many Americans these days. Wholly absurd reasoning, given that MU intentionally complies with the DMCA even though as a non-US company they didn't have to...

Next up, we've got a comment from Ninja responding to the story of Sony suing an actor from its commercials for appearing in another commercial and... um... looking too much like himself.

If I were the actor I'd then ask for a lifetime monthly wage since they are earning so much with my image that I can't get any other jobs as an actor. Sounds fair.

Moving over to the funny side of the ledger... we've got Beech's response to someone claiming that Google fiber is a form of "fascism":

If it gets me gigabit broadband for what google is charging the people of Kansas city, then I, for one, welcome our new fascist google overlords.

The second place comment we already mentioned above, so we'll jump straight to the third place comment, which was Mike C.'s response to the Copyright Clearance Center trying to insert credit to "copyright" for the Google book scanning settlement. Mike C. suggested that their statement left out a few words (in bold):

Mike, Mike, Mike... you're such a realist, always trying to look at the bigger picture. Of course, in doing so, you completely misread the quote. Let me "enhance" it down for you:

"Today's news not only further establishes the value of copyright as a tool to hinder innovation and progress while generating new sources of legal fees, but also points to the importance of working with rightsholders when undertaking mass digitization unless you WANT to get sued, of course. Collaboration is key when it comes to copyright because if you don't collaborate voluntarily, we'll just get the courts to force you."

See? It's all in reading the hidden meanings...

For editor's choice, we've got two separate comments from yet another case of the RIAA's questionable math skills being shown again. A thorough debunking of the RIAA's claims that there were 41% fewer musicians today than in 1999 apparently brought out your funny bone. First up, we've got Chosen Reject rejecting my theory that this is about bogus math. Instead apparently I just didn't get the right equation:

That is demonstrably false. Politicians are very good at math and can readily calculate the correct sum. An RIAA lobbyist will tell them that they donated X to their campaign to get them elected, and will donate Y if they pass bill Z. All politicians were successfully able to calculate the sum of X and Y. Further, they were also able to determine that (X+Y) > X (X and Y > 0 being a given). In addition, the politicians were finally able to compute that (X+Y)-(Cost of vacation for spouse) > (cost of hookers and blow).

I dare say you need to retract your obviously false statement and publicly recognize the great intelligence found in the political species.

Finally, we've got saulgoode pointing that if the RIAA's numbers are accurate, it also means something else that the RIAA probably wouldn't want noticed:

So what the RIAA is saying... is that Sonny Bono's Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 has been an abject failure resulting a dramatic reduction in the number of artists being "incentivized" to create.

Seems like a relevant point... that will get almost no attention in Congress.