Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
It probably won't come as a surprise to anyone that this week's top comments were dominated by responses to the Patrick Zarrelli situation. Three out of the four winners by vote were on that post, with the first being GMacGuffin taking most insightful comment of the week with an observation about word choice:
You can tell that Mike is fully gobsmacked by the stupidity of a circumstance when he uses "Dude" as a pronoun more than once in a story.
Second place on the insightful side is the exception, coming instead in response to the leaked Comcast documents that confirmed what everyone expected about data caps. That One Guy unpacked the company's weasel words:
Truth by technicality, the best kind of truth
Don't say: "Data Cap" (This is not a cap. We do not limit a customer's use of the Internet it any way at or above 300 GB)"
In the same way, 'speed limits' don't actually stop you from going over the listed speed, you're just penalized if you do.
For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start out with a simple anonymous response to the news that the head of the House Judiciary Committee went for dinner with the head of the MPAA following a Los Angeles copyright hearing:
To a large extent, Silicon valley is about enabling people to do things, while the MPAA is about controlling people. Guess which group politicians feel most at home with, and will therefore listen to?
Next, after a charity started attempting to claim ownership of the recently-invalidated Happy Birthday copyright, another anonymous commenter made a key observation about the lyric side of this copyright battle that's often easy to forget:
The lyrics consist of 6 words (minus the repetition) ! It's got less content than a 1/4 of a tweet. How is that worthy of a copyright monopoly.
Over on the funny side, we return to Patrick Zarrelli's world and remain there for the duration. In first place is an anonymous commenter who may have figured out the nature of the supposed "bar complaints":
He's probably filing bar complaints to his local bartender as he cries in his drink of choice.
In second place, it's techflaws coining a new version of an old term:
This will probably soon become known as the 'Chewbacca offense'.
For the editor's choice, we'll follow up with Mark Wing, the one commenter on that post who expressed some concern:
Are you going to hire Tim back when he gets out of prison?
And finally, since he made a good point (and called my attention to it directly), Roger Strong and Patrick Zarrelli himself can share the final spot based on the former's nomination:
Attn: Leigh
So many comments on this topic have been "deemed funny by the community", all of them were inspired by Patrick Zarrelli's performance art.
Let's not forget that while Zarrelli's own submission may have arrived by post, it was still a Reader's Comment to Techdirt. Please do not deny him the Funniest Comment of the Week honors.
That's all for this week, folks!
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