Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

Techdirt

from the loose-lips dept

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous commenter with a straightforward reaction to the description of ICE’s fake college for busting immigrants:

Undercover investigators with the Department of Homeland Security registered the University of Farmington with the state of Michigan as a university using a fake name.

At the request of DHS, a national accreditation agency listed the University of Farmington as being accredited in order to help deceive prospective students.

The university was also placed by federal investigators on the website of ICE as an university approved by them under a government program for foreign students known as SEVIS (Student and Exchange Visitor Program)

How does that not add up to entrapment, and fraud. All the wrong doing is on the governments side.

In second place, we’ve got Thad with a response to a comment comparing Cindy McCain’s bogus sex trafficking report to incidents where people really did catch criminals:

“You mean like the Christmas bombing in Times Square, that was prevented by the disabled ex-Marine street vendor (they get most or all the permits to sell on the streets of NYC) who spotted the suspicious car and told police?”

The car was suspicious because it was on fire. Are you having trouble understanding the difference between telling the police that a car is on fire and telling the police that a woman has a child of a different ethnicity?

“Then there is Richard Jewell.”

1. Again, you seem confused on the difference between finding something suspicious because there is a bomb in it and finding someone suspicious because of their ethnicity.
2. We are talking, specifically, about the post-9/11 “see something, say something” doctrine. 9/11 was in 2001. You are referring to an incident that took place in 1996.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with one more comment from Thad on that post, mentioning another detail:

…it’s particularly galling considering that McCain, herself, has an adopted Bangladeshi daughter (who the Bush campaign targeted in a malicious, racist whisper campaign during the 2000 primary season). McCain knows perfectly well that people can have children who do not share their ethnicity, because she has a child who does not share her ethnicity.

Next, it’s jupiterkansas with thoughts on what will happen if the EU Copyright Directive leads to new blanket licensing systems:

Judging from the history of ASCAP licensing, they’ll eventually just demand every website get a license whether they host content or not – “just in case.” and take you to court if you don’t comply.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is Chris Brand with a response to our assertion that legacy copyright industries in Europe just want Google and Facebook to pay €x amount to satisfy them due to their failure to innovate:

Don’t be silly – they want a blank cheque, not one with a number on it.

In second place, it’s That One Guy responding to our post about Google and Apple hosting a Saudi government app that allows men to track their spouses’ movements, and to a comment that noted installing it as a third-party app is only an option on Android, not iOS:

Oh darn, self-distribution is hard enough that if saudi men want to be able to track their wives/property as easily as they currently can they’ll have to put some actual work into being terrible people, how terrible…

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with a comment from kallethen proposing a potential benefit to the “hot news” doctrine:

Come on, Mike. Don’t you see the missed opportunity by not supporting Hot News? Whenever the inevitable troll post comes along saying “But why aren’t you writing about <insert unflattering story regarding company troll hates>”, you could just blame it on the Hot News Doctrine!

And finally, we’ve got That Anonymous Coward with a response to Sony’s copyright takedowns of its own anti-piracy propaganda:

However if you let them install a rootkit, they’ll let you see it.

That’s all for this week, folks!