Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the home-team dept

We’ve got a double first-place winner this week! In response to the story of movie theater security guards assaulting a woman supposedly for pirating the film, one anonymous commenter won the top spot on both the insightful and funny sides by pointing out the only rational conclusion for the average person:

So the lesson, if you don’t want to be assaulted by rent-a-cops in a movie theater, just download the movie online.

In second place on the insightful side, as part of a discussion about the weird psychology of people who fight the reselling of their products, Jason offered up a useful comparison:

Could it be a similar mindset to that expressed by the movie/record industry, compelling them to think that if someone else is making money off my product then it has to be bad, even if it has no effect (or even a positive effect) on the money I’m making on it?

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with another anonymous commenter who suggested some additional problems with Capcom’s terrible DRM for Street Fighter:

the “update” installs a self-signed driver (using a cert issued by Symantec). That driver has no security, meaning any program can bind to it, and it only has one function: to disable SMEP (an exploit mitigation feature which prevents the kernel from executing code in userspace), and then jumps to a user-provided function pointer.

In other words, it gives anyone who cares kernel-level access to your computer.

All to prevent people from bypassing microtransactions

Next, in response to our post about the UK retroactively extending copyright on industrial designs, That One Guy reiterated the important point that if there’s any way to truly “steal” content, this is it:

This? This is what theft involving copyright actually looks like. Barring the ‘grace period’ the copyrights in question went from ‘everyone can use them, no one needs to pay’ to ‘no-one can use them unless they pay’, almost literally overnight.

What was free for everyone to use after it made it through the original government granted monopoly period is now locked back up, and to make matters worse I imagine those with ‘infringing’ stock are going to be forced to destroy it if they can’t sell it in time in order to avoid costly lawsuits for infringement, a demonstrable loss due to copyright, as opposed to the theoretical losses attributed to copyright infringement.

Over on the funny side, we’ve already had our first place comment above, so we head straight to the second place winner who is… me! On the post about our Vote2016() gear (which you can still order until tomorrow, then it’s gone forever!) one commenter noted that the function would not accept Gary Johnson as an argument, and people were apparently pleased with my response to the bug report:

Vote2016() does not accept arguments. It’s a sloppy, poorly-scoped function that just uses two global variables. Accepting third-party parameters will require a significant overhaul of the underlying engine and API.

That’s enough tooting my own horn — on to the editor’s choice! First, we’ve got a story about another one of our shirts, Nerd Harder (also still available until tomorrow, for the last time this year!) from Grey, who shared his experience wearing it:

Was wearing my Nerd Harder shirt in downtown Portland near the Tillicum crossing 2 days ago.

Older gentleman approached me with a very angry look on his face, got about 10 feet away before his face softened and he exclaimed “OH, nerd HARDER…. I thought it said “Nerd HERDER” and you and I were going to have words….

Good times.

And finally we’ve got a nonsensical but delightful anonymous comment offering an imaginary explanation for the aforementioned movie-theater assault:

The story fails to mention that suspicions were first aroused by the fact the two subjects were wearing a pegleg, an eyepatch and a hook when they arrived at the theater.

That’s all for this week, folks!