Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

This week, Hillary Clinton more or less told Silicon Valley to, once again, "nerd harder!" to find ways to stop terrorists from radicalizing people online. Norahc won first place for insightful with some fair play turnabout:

Perhaps if in her role as Secretary of State, she had "diplomat harder" we might have found a way to prevent the radicalization of people. Then again, that would entail people like her (including the other candidate) having to do real work instead of demanding other people work harder.

Our second place comment also comes in response to that post, and this one racked up so many votes that it also took first place on the funny side (it's been a while since we had a double winner!) Machin Sin took a closer look at the notion of blocking radicalizing speech:

Under this logic all speech coming from either Hillary or Trump should instantly be blocked. For that matter they should both just be locked up.

I can't think of anything that could cause more radicalization than the steady stream of stupidity that flows from those two. Some of the bombers are probably just happy knowing that by blowing themselves up they wont have to listen to any more news clips about those two bozos.

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment from Dave Cortright responding to the parade of false statements used by the intelligence community to smear Edward Snowden:

Ad Hominem, AD HOMINEM, AD FUCKING HOMINEM!

Look, it's great that Snowden turned out to be a nearly impeccable character that his opponents have to resort to lies and serious distortions to discredit him. But even if the guy were a drug addict with a penchant for young boys, THAT DOES NOT IN ANY WAY CHANGE THE *FACTS* OF THE MATTER AT HAND.

This whole report is just a pathetic attempt at redirection, focusing on the messenger rather than the message. And more to the point (which Greenwald astutely pointed out in his piece), Snowden was not the one who made this information public. If anyone should be scrutinized by the government it is the JOURNALISTS and their institutions who analyzed the information he provided and independently determined it to be newsworthy.

Fuck the oxymorons on the House Intelligence Committee. I hope the next leak FUBARs each and every one of their personal and professional lives commensurate with the bullshit our government has put all of the previous intelligence whistleblowers combined.

Next, we've got a small but important anonymous observation about HP disabling third-party ink cartridges with a firmware update:

There is a serious and long-term unintended consequence that MS, HP, et al are not considering here: they are teaching users that *installing security updates is bad.*

Over on the funny side, we've already had our first place winner above, so we head straight to second place where That One Guy noticed a fun detail in our story about the downfall of game studio Digital Homicide:

You just can't make this stuff up

"Games like Wyatt Derp, Temper Tantrum, and The Slaughtering Grounds (the first game Sterling reviewed)"

There is just something so very fitting for a company like that to make a game and call it 'Temper Tantrum', given their typical responses to criticism. What next, a game called 'Vexatious Bully'? Or how about 'Victim Complex'?

For editor's choice, we start out on the bizarre story of Macedonia's copyright licensing collective actually banning Macedonian music from the air in protest of having to face competition. One comment stood out as especially appropriate:

Do they also claim ownership of the word Pyrrhic

(I don't know if this was the intention of the commenter, but I found it amusing since Macedonia is in fact only about a hundred miles from the historical region of Epirus, home of King Pyrrhus himself. So... maybe!)

Finally, for the sake of symmetry, we've got another response to HP's ink cartridge debacle. Roger Strong cut short those with plans of doing their own re-inking:

HOME RIBBON RE-INKING IS KILLING THE PRINTER INDUSTRY!

(I'm not sure how well that one would work on a t-shirt, but you never know...)

That's all for this week, folks!