Tag Archive for: Funniest/Most

Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Year At Techdirt

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It’s that time again: for our final comments post of 2018, we’re looking back on the comments you voted the funniest and most insightful throughout the year. As usual, we’ve got the top three winners from each category, plus a special outlier that racked up a lot of votes across the two categories combined. For those of you who want to see this week’s winners, here’s first place for insightful, first place for funny, and the double-winner that took second place in both. Now, on to the yearly round-up…

The Most Insightful Comments Of 2018

Back in July, we covered the story of a restaurant that was accused by the local police union of serenading some officers with N.W.A.’s Fuck Tha Police, only for CCTV footage to reveal that the incident never happened — one employee just mouthed the words from across the restaurant, and the police department itself had to call out the union for lying. This garnered our 2018 first place winner for insightful from an anonymous commenter:

Personal Comment

The other night, my family and I were eating at a hamburger place-type family restaurant. Four cops came in to get their dinner. I was shocked to realize that I suddenly felt LESS safe, not more.

Restaurants aren’t the only reputations cops have ruined.

Our second place winner comes in response to another far more heinous incident of police insanity. In March, after a cop hit a woman’s car at 94mph (on a 50mph road) and killed her infant child, the mother was arrested for negligent homicide on the basis that she didn’t secure the child’s car seat properly. While there’s obviously no way to confirm the expertise claimed by commenter Alexander in responding to the incident, the information was convincing enough to win 2018’s second place spot for insightful:

As an Automotive Engineer who has engineered seats in cars I can tell you for certain that none of them in ordinary vehicles are designed to deal with a 94mph collision. Cars disintegrate at that speed.

Those videos you see for car safety, the super slow motion ones, they occur at ~20mph. Yes, that is how much the seats move at 20mph. At 94mph they disintegrate.

Fastening the straps correctly or not would likely not have changed the outcome at those speeds. The officer is clearly grossly negligent and the mother did not contribute in any significant way to the death of her infant. I say that with confidence of someone who’s signature is still on the approvals for seats still carrying children in cars today.

That cop should have his drivers license cancelled for reckless driving for a decade. If he loses his job, then stiff shit. Then talk about trying him for negligent homicide.

For third place, we head to our post in May about some copyright insanity: a director suing an actor for using a short clip of a movie in her demo reel, calling it an “unauthorized derivative work”. Killercool racked up quite a few funny votes with a quick response, but not as many as the votes that made it 2018’s third place winner for insightful:

I hate to tell you…

If a clip, or even several clips, from your movie is equivalent to seeing your movie, then your movie is bad and you should feel bad.

And now, on to the funny…

The Funniest Comments Of 2018

With all the often-uninformed nonsense flying around on the subject of regulating internet platforms this year, we’ve had plenty of comment-section dust-ups about moderation and free speech. In July, after Senator Mark Warner laid out some detailed ideas about platform regulation — in one of the few incidents of a lawmaker actually giving the issue some real thought and not getting hysterical — one regular commenter’s angry rant about Section 230 led Mike to point out that, without those safe harbors, we wouldn’t be able to let him comment here at all. Regular fixture Thad (and this was back before he created an account) responded to Mike’s point with 2018’s funniest comment of the year:

But there’d also be a downside.

Most of you probably recall in August when voting machines took another lump after an exercise at Defcon where an 11-year-old successfully hacked an ES&S machine and changed vote tallies. An anonymous commenter anticipated their response, offering up 2018’s second place winner for funny:

Voting machine company: “This was a useless test of the machine’s vulnerabilities. Eleven-year-olds can’t vote. So your machines are safe from them getting into and changing any records. “

And if voting machine problems are a perennial story, so too are freakouts about video game violence. In February, Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin decided to blame Florida’s recent school shooting on… violent video games. This garnered many responses both flippant and substantive, but one anonymous commenter rose to the top and became 2018’s third place winner for funny:

Minecraft is pretty popular yet I haven’t notice an uptick in preteens applying for construction jobs.

And now, one more…

2018’s Outlier Winner

As per usual, the combined leaderboard — based on the total votes for both insightful and funny — is primarily dominated by high-ranking comments from the individual categories. This year the third place insightful winner topped the combined board thanks to its surfeit of funny votes, while the first place insightful winner came in third by sheer force of insight. But the second place winner for combined votes got there with a pretty equal share of each, despite not having enough of either to even crack the top ten for insightful or funny alone. That’s our outlier this year.

Back in July, following the merger of AT&T and Time Warner, some comments from AT&T executive John Stankey suggested the company might try to wantonly mess with success by changing the HBO formula. His most memorable statement was an odd comparison to child birth, suggesting it would be painful now but rewarding later — leading our anonymous outlier this year to sum up how he could find himself saying such dumb stuff:

The reason Stankey likes to compare childbirth to innovation is because he has zero experience with either.

And with that, we wrap up the 2018 comment season! It’s been fun rounding the winners up every week, and I look forward to what’s to come in 2019 (in our comments moreso than, like, the world in general…)

That’s all for this year, folks!

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Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt, Plus A Note From Mike

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This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is discordian_eris with a reaction to the latest instance of egregious police misbehavior:

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them” – Maya Angelou

Law enforcement at all levels have shown us who they are. Unreliable, unprofessional, undisciplined, and corrupt to the depths of their souls. Unfortunately this is America, so there really isn’t a viable solution.

The cops are too cowardly to clean up their act. Legislators are too cowardly to pass reforms of almost any kind. And the judiciary, all the way up to the Supreme Court is too cowardly to do their fucking jobs and actually enforce the constitution. District attorneys can have video and audio of cops murdering people in cold blood and refuse to bring charges.

Every single time the list of the most corrupt countries comes out, I am astonished that the US is considered one of the least corrupt. Until, of course, I remember that the list is compiled by Americans.

In second place, we’ve got a response from That One Guy to the San Diego Comic Con’s latest legal attack on the Salt Lake City Comic Con:

“This was a very expensive case; the reason this case was so expensive was because of defendants and their counsel and the way they litigated this case,” Bjurstrom said.

Translation: ‘Our legal thuggery cost us a lot of money because our target had the utter gall to fight back and the ruling only gave us a tiny fraction of it back. We want more, make them give it too us.’

‘Actions have consequences’ does not an ‘exceptional’ case make.

But San Diego Comic-Con’s request went a step further than simply asking Battaglia to enjoin the Salt Lake convention operators from infringing its trademarks: it asked the judge to bar the Salt Lake convention from using the words “comic convention” or phonetic equivalents to “Comic Con” or “comic convention.”

So essentially they tried to claim ownership over the very concept of comic conventions by saying that no-one should be able to use the purely descriptive term of it.

Yeah, at this point I would love to see the USPTO come to it’s senses, realize just how bad this trademark is and yank it entirely. It wouldn’t help the Salt Lake Comic-con, but it would at least prevent the thugs in the SDCC from going after more targets.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment from Thad about the revelation that the FCC lied about a DDOS attack to distract from John Oliver:

This was blisteringly obvious from the get-go, but it’s nice to get confirmation.

So what are the legal ramifications of this? The FCC lied about a DDoS attack to downplay the size of the public response, kept records proving that it lied, and then fought FOIA requests for said records.

There are numerous court challenges to the Title II repeal. These emails look an awful lot like the sort of thing that will appear with the word “Exhibit” on them.

Next, we’ve got a response from stderric to the school that turned a student over to the cops for jokingly listing the school for sale on Craigslist:

Kylan Scheele got a great educational bonus thanks to his prank, and it’s probably the most important lesson Truman High School ever taught him: this world is full of idiots, and the biggest and most humorless of them all tend to be attracted to positions of authority.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is an anonymous commenter, with a theoretical future timeline of the Salt Lake City Comic Con’s woes at the hands of trademark bullies:

2019: Salt Lake City Graphic Novel Gathering has been sued by Wizards of the Coast for infringing on their Magic: The Gathering trademark.

2020: Salt Lake City Superheroes Social has been sued by Joe’s Super Hero Sandwiches for infringing on their trademark.

2021: Salt Lake City Place for People to Meet to Dress Funny and Pay $ 45 for Celebrity Signatures has filed for bankruptcy, citing the excessive costs of rebranding every year.

In second place, we’ve got a comment from Berenerd about FlightSimLabs installing stuff on users’ machines and threatening Reddit:

FSLabs new motto: CRASH AND BURN!!!!!

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we’ve got an anonymous reply to that comment adding a little extra color:

(Beeping in background) Terrain. Pull up. Terrain. Pull up. Terrain. Pull up.

Finally, we’ve got another anonymous comment about the humorless school-for-sale, in response to someone who questioned the low, low price tag:

There’s a hefty discount because the buyer will be stuck with the current administrators, who are clearly a net liability. No asset would behave in the asinine way described here.

That’s… not quite all for this week folks. Unfortunately, we also have a bit of sad news to share.

A Note From Mike:

We recently received a note from a friend and neighbor of one of our most prolific commenters, Roger Strong, informing us of the unfortunate news that he had passed away towards the end of May. One of the things that I’ve always talked about concerning Techdirt is that what keeps me going and what keeps it interesting is the community that has formed around the site. But it’s an odd sort of community. Most of the participants have no interaction with one another outside of the site, and many members of the community have no clue who others really are.

I am quite certain that, over the years, other vocal members of the community have passed away, but this is the first time that we’ve been directly informed of such a passing — and Roger’s very kind neighbors told us a bit about what a kind, compassionate and helpful individual Roger was, which was something that I think was clear if you read his comments. He was always a very passionate member of the community, always full of insight and useful perspectives. His friends informed us that being a part of the Techdirt community was an important part of his life, and just reading his comments helped give them another chance to experience Roger’s passion and ideas. We will certainly miss Roger’s presence and thoughtful comments.

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Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

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This week, our first place comment on the insightful side came in response to our post about the fact that copyright maximalists appear to have thrown in the towel on fighting for more copyright extensions. John Snape offered a simple and popular sentiment:

If you can’t make a profit after 28 years exploiting a copyright, you’re a failure.

In second place, we have an anonymous comment that also racked up quite a few funny votes, responding to Trump’s latest comments about libel laws:

I don’t think I’m ever going to get over the guy who says whatever it is that pops into his head complaining that you should not be allowed to say whatever it is that pops into your head.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment from Ninja in response to the NSA denying prior knowledge of the Meltdown and Spectre exploits, noting that this is a little hard to simply believe without questioning:

Fox denies knowledge of huge hole in the fence. Claims it would never harm chickens.

I’ve actually truncated Ninja’s comment there, because he went on to quote an earlier comment from discordian_eris regarding the FBI and the MalwareTech case, and so rather than include it second-hand, here it is as our second editor’s choice for insightful:

I’m reminded of this quote almost every time the FBI is involved in a case.

He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truth without the world’s believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions.

Thomas Jefferson

The FBI lies so habitually I fail to see how any judge can treat them as credible.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is another comment about the FBI, this time from an anonymous commenter responding to their latest cries about encryption being a threat to public safety:

News Flash: “FBI Says Whispering is Evil and Everyone must speak loudly into the microphone”

In second place, it’s back to the story about copyright extensions, where regular parodist Mr Big Content bemoaned the sad state of affairs:

This Is What Happens When You Let Teh Pirates Make Copywright Laws

It should be a Law that anybody who has ever copied ANYTHING should be probihibited from having any say in Coppyright Laws. Then we will SEE FAIRNESS PREVAIL for teh TRUE INTELECTUAL PROPETRY OWNERS. YOU KNOW ITS MORALLLY RIGHT!!!

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with JoeCool offering another analogous take on the FBI’s encryption panic:

Then the FBI lambasted the glove industry for enabling criminals to commit crimes without leaving fingerprints. The evil geniuses of the glove cartel are making the jobs of police everywhere much more difficult, and should be forced to work on gloves that leave fingerprints when used to commit crimes.

/s

And finally, we head to our post about how a satirical false excerpt from Fire and Fury demonstrated the futility of trying to ban “fake news”, where Roger Strong grasped at some threads of hope:

Some of us are holding onto hope that Trump is actually a still-alive Andy Kaufman is his greatest satire yet.

That’s all for this week, folks!

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