The voters have spoken, and to them, the most insightful comment of the week comes from Machin Shin responding to a Brit jokingly calling July 4th "Happy We-got-rid-of-a-bunch-of-useless-colonies Day." Machin then explained the conflicting feelings of being American and many of you found it to be quite insightful:

Well, We may have been "a-bunch-of-useless-colonies" for a while. We then became the most powerful nation in the world.

Of course sadly we have now slipped back into the "useless" category. I must say, it is very conflicting being an American, I am extremely proud of what this nation once was and the principles it was built upon, but I am now disgusted when I look at what it has become and how far we have strayed from those principles.

I do wonder how many of those votes came from Americans and how many from foreigners...

Anyway, we had a rare (but not unheard of) second place tie this week for votes on "most insightful." I'll just post them in the order they came in. First up was MrWilson's comment on his criticism of libertarianism:

My criticism of libertarianism has always been that they seem to attribute to the government all these bad characteristics of control and abuse and getting too large, but they're completely blind to the fact that privately owned entities are prone to do the same thing and no amount of a mythical self-regulating free market (which requires a well educated and organized consumer base in order to function - something we're not likely to achieve under current circumstances) is going to stop human beings from over-reaching and trying to control others regardless of whether they're in the public or the private sector.

And, sharing the second place podium was Loki, who commented on the claim that Kim Dotcom -- a person who is easy to dislike -- has become a cult hero:

I don't think this issue has turned him into a cult hero, as much as it has put into perspective just how reviled Hollywood, the RIAA, and the MPAA are. I actually heard someone last week say, "sure Dotcom is a piece of scum and a dirtbag, but at least he's not Chris Dodd."

And in the end, they really don't care about Dotcom's image one way or another. All they care about is that they delayed his efforts to bring to market a potentially viable competing service by at least two years (and scared off a lot of other potential competitors who might have considered following suit). If it keeps their businesses afloat for another couple years longer, they wouldn't care if people thought Dotcom was the second coming of Jesus.

Since we had three comments make it into the winner's circle on votes alone, I'm just choosing a single editor's choice comment this week, and it's fogbugzd discussing the ridiculous advice of some "TV analyst" suggesting that Viacom and Disney should stop putting content on Netflix because kids like it and they might want to keep using Netflix.

Wow doesn't begin to cover how clueless this advice is. Suppose both Viacom and Disney eliminate all their on-demand offerings. That would still leave dozens of other sources of online content. It isn't the oligopoly situation big media is used to. If one source goes away, two more will pop up in its place.

I see exactly the phenomenon described in the article happening in our family. The variety of programming gives parents plenty of choices, and there is some very good content to choose from. There are no commercials for sugared breakfast cereal or toys. The content is good enough to be the basis of a lot of family discussions.

The one thing I have noticed is the fierce brand loyalty the kids and the whole family develop to the shows they watch. There is a ton of merchandise being sold for even minor programs. If Disney wants to cut itself off from the kids market, I can't think of a more effective method than the one that Juenger recommends.

Moving on to the funny junk. The winner this week dominated the voting... and it's MrWilson yet again (nice week, dude) with his comment responding to the story of a judge absolutely slamming Universal Music for trying to play games with the royalties owed to Eminiem's production company.

RIAA to pirates: "Stop stealing from artists. That's our business model!"

If only they'd patented it as a business method patent... While second place trailed far behind first place, it had an equal distance to third place, so there seemed to be widespread agreement that Josh in CharlotteNC had the second funniest comment this week, responding to the news of ex-Righthaven CEO Steve Gibson trying to tell a court he's really still in charge.

Gibson must be jealous of all the bad press that Carreon is getting and wants his fair share of it.

Moving on to editor's choice, we'll go with DannyB's description of how Apple quite frequently copied ideas of others, but many of its fans refuse to recognize this:

(Android has multitasking.)

Jobs: Nobody needs multitasking on a phone.

iSheep: Yes, nobody needs multitasking on a phone.

(Next year at same annual event where iSheep make pilgramage to see the iMessiah)

Jobs: iPhone has multitasking

iSheep: Multitasking is great, glad Apple invented it.

(iPhone has multitasking, but significantly inferior to Android. One word: badges. Android has this nifty pull down notification bar system.)

(next year)

Jobs: iPhone now has this nifty pull down notification bar

(no mention of where that feature has been seen now for several years)

iSheep: Yes, Apple is innovating!

And, finally, my personal favorite for the week. In our post about how Charles Carreon had "stopped digging" himself deeper and deeper into his self-created hole, an Anonymous Coward pondered the reasons:

I wonder, is this pause because he thought ahead and decided to learn Mandarin, or just because he needed to change drill bits?

Anyway, we're off to change drill bits ourselves. We'll be back with more posts tomorrow, assuming some news happens (which seems like a pretty good bet).