Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the snappy-rejoinders dept

A strange article in Vox lamenting the construction of currently-underutilized gigabit networks prompted our first place winner for insightful this week, with WDS making short work of the issue:

I’ve been in the network business for more years than I care to admit, and I’m searching my brain to try to remember exactly how many times I’ve heard a user say, “My connection is too fast”.

Search complete. Zero is the answer.

A far more horrifying story was the facial recognition screw-up that led to a Denver man being arrested and severely beaten, cleared of charges, then arrested again. Padpaw won second place by putting things simply:

I wanted to say I am concerned with how the police decided to try to beat the man almost to death when he peacefully came out of his home.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start with another response to that post, this time from Derek Kerton discussing the inevitability of things like this with an armed police force:

Yes, and arm the police like the military, and they immediately try to think of situations in which they can use their new toys.

“Flash bang grenades “

For real? The guy walks out of his house into a multi-officer ambush, and they use Flash bang grenades??

We really need to dis-arm the police back to 1970 standards, if not UK standards. And we need to have checks and balances for the deployment of SWAT teams.

Domestic law enforcement is not a war, guys. If you think it is, maybe this line of work isn’t for you. And if you WANT a war, we have some of those on the go, and you may be able to volunteer.

Next, we head back to our first post about gigabit connections, where Jason expanded on why such pessimistic thinking is wrong:

Although it’s been quoted so much as to probably be a cliché by now, it really does sound like the old “640k ought to be enough for everybody” situation. Just because there isn’t a need right now for more/better/faster doesn’t mean there won’t ever be. It’d be like someone in the early 1900s asking why build all these roads if there are so few people with cars… building a bit bigger than you need gives you room to grow, and (more importantly) room to allow the emergence of technology and uses (the famous “killer app”) that no one could even consider right now.

Over on the funny side, our first place comment comes on our post about the father who went to the police about his stepdaughter’s sexting, only to end up prosecuted for child porn. One commenter suggested this was to be expected, and an anonymous response included a cutting and amusing takedown:

As soon as he downloaded the content he became a contributor of child porn?

I’m not so sure about that. Case in point: just because you left a comment here doesn’t mean you contributed to the conversation.

Now, we’re going to mix things up a bit, because the second place comment for funny is a rejoinder to another funny comment that didn’t quite crack the winning spot, all in response to Comcast’s hilarious claim that its misleading fees are a way of being transparent. So we’ll make that one an editor’s choice, and present it first to keep the joke in order. Got it? HegemonicDistortion gets the editor’s choice for crafting a sample Comcast bill:

$6.50 — Broadcast TV Fee
-$6.50 — Credit: bogus Broadcast TV Fee
$9.95 — Bill Transparency Fee

In response, an anonymous commenter won second place on the funny side by adding one more line item:

$1.95 Fee itemization fee

And last but not least, we’ve got one more unrelated editor’s choice for funny — sophisticatedjanedoe with thoughts on the copyright lawsuit against Donald Trump over a photo of a bowl of Skittles:

How badly copyright law is fucked up? I’m rooting for Trump in this dispute.

That’s how.

That’s all for this week, folks!