Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

After Portland police arrested a homeless woman for charging her phone at a public outlet, we wondered what purpose that could possibly serve. Of course, the sad truth is it's not about purpose at all, as one anonymous commenter spelled out in this week's most insightful comment:

This is far more common that you might think

Having been homeless, I've seen a lot of this. Police and security guards routinely bully the homeless because they can: who's going to defend them? They're perfect targets for sadistic behavior, and believe me, there's no shortage of that.

I've seen cops/guards steal coats ("that's too nice for you, you must have shoplifted it"), kick food away ("you can't eat here"), drag people out of bathrooms ("you can't wash your face here"), refuse transport to the ER ("you didn't get beat up, you just got drunk and fell"), steal money ("you can't beg here, give me all your cash"), demand sex ("blow me and I won't run you in"), and worse. Much worse.

Nobody sees. Nobody knows. Nobody cares.

Next, we've got a response to the baffling ongoing complaints about Netflix not being the same as traditional television with its release schedules, ruining watercooler chats and causing spoiler tension. Violynne pointed out that the whole point of Netflix is that it changed things profoundly:

Two things Netflix did to change the world when it comes to watching a TV show:

-It removed 22 minutes of ads despite being a paid service. Hulu + and cable television can't even come close to doing the same thing.

-It put the power of viewing in my control, allowing me to actually enjoy watching shows again.

Remember NBC's "Thursday Night Must See TV"? Yeah, so do I, and it was HORRIBLE. Unless you had an accompanying guide (most had TV guide), you had absolutely no control what episode aired that evening. Repeat? Pushed back because of a long-running football game?

Then there was the idiocy of the "break", where weeks would go by without any new show, allowing the very few people who didn't own a VCR/DVR to "catch up".

The entire television industry was broken since the 50s. It's thanks to technology it finally fixed itself so a show can be enjoyed, not aired based on when advertisers wanted eyeballs to their products.

There are plenty in this industry who should take notes from Netflix. Right, Hulu?

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we'll start out with one more response to the story from Portland. This time it's another anonymous commenter who proposed a radical solution to the concerns of businesses about homeless people:

There's a very good productive way for the businesses to get rid of the homeless people. Hire them.

Next, we've got a reaction to the latest instance of what I once called copylaundering - the practice whereby big media companies license or otherwise use material they don't own, then later feed it into YouTube's ContentID or other automated screening systems, which then accuse the original creators and rightsholders of that material with infringement. As Mason Wheeler points out, the irony hurts:

...and they call piracy "theft"?!?

Over on the funny side, first place comes from the post about Cisco shipping hardware to bogus addresses in order to throw off the NSA's intercept efforts. It's a valiant move, but as Michael pointed out, certain aspects of the strategy sounded very familiar:

"We ship [boxes] to an address that's has nothing to do with the customer, and then you have no idea who ultimately it is going to,"

In a related story, DHL sues Cisco for copyright infringement.

In second place, we've got a response to the news that the government will be paying $18,000 to a photographer whose cameras it improperly seized outside a tank plant in Lima, Ohio. Vidiot suggested a continued effort to drive the message home:

Throwing it open to all...

Announcing... The Lima, OH Tank Plant Photo Contest! First Tuesday of every month, we all meet outside the plant at noon, and start snapping away.

Runners-up (which is everybody else) get a free ride in a government vehicle. But one lucky winner takes home the $18,000 jackpot!

For editor's choice on the funny side, we start out with a comment from AricTheRed responding to the insane comparison of Google Fiber to... ebola:

Man if this is true, I sure hope I catch Google Fiber, as there is no apparent effetive treatment for that either...

Finally, we circle back to the complaints about Netflix's new model for TV viewing, where DannyB pointed out that the solution is easy, and would surely be super popular:

Look Netflix, here is a simple fix.

Introduce an option where a customer can pay an extra fee to their local cable company and Netflix will not allow playing each episode of a series until at least one week after you have watched the previous episode.

For an additional fee, Netflix could add a fixed time window option where you must watch the episode in a fixed time, such as 7 PM Thursday Evenings. Failure to watch it at that time means you miss it and will not have another opportunity to watch it for one year.

For people who really want the premium experience, Netflix could charge customers an additional fee that enables them to experience commercials conveniently inserted by Netflix at points in time where something exciting has happened or some major plot twist has just occurred.

For an additional fee, Netflix could remove your ability to pause the internet stream so that you must watch it live.

None of these ideas are technically infeasible to implement. Those of us who want a superior experience from Netflix should send them feedback to implement these features at once. This would allow us to blame someone other than Google for a change. (Of course, we still could look for some reason to blame Google for Netflix's lack of the above features.)

Sign me up! That's all for this week, folks.

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