Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

This week, we took a look at an interesting question: should the police be able to take control of self-driving cars? One anonymous commenter won most insightful comment of the week by pointing out one of the key problems with this idea:

The problem is that if the police have the ability to take remote control of a car, then the bad guys will also have that capability, along with secret services, therefore the car should normally avoid collisons with anything, and obey hand signals and visible signal lights..

More Important is giving the occupants the ability to override the automatic system, so that for example they can force the car to drive away from, or even through a hostile crowd. Without that options, it becomes easy for gangs to hijack vehicles, spread out across the road to force the car to stop, and then move in behind the car.

In second place, we've got the result of an exchange on our post about an incoherent anti-Netflix editorial in the Wall Street Journal. The writer's bizarre comparison to the airline industry prompted one commenter to wonder what point he thought he was making, spurring Michael to offer up an interpretation:

I think he is trying to argue that the airline industry - which is clearly failing, hated by most of it's customers, being propped up by the government, and showing little or no signs of change is a shining example of a good way to run a business.

Oh, I guess that's what the cable industry actually DOES think.

For editor's choice, we start out on our post about the EPA's wrongheaded support of using copyright law to prevent people from tinkering with their cars' software. Ninja expanded on the point that potential dangers are not a reason to prevent modification:

This cannot be emphasized enough. Thinkering with mechanical parts can do a whole world more damage to the environment than anything else. Many people here remove pollution control mechanisms from their trucks because it decreases the consumption by 3-4%. You stop it by having vehicles undergo obligatory auditing or something but not by preventing people to mess with what they own. This is specially true when you are dealing with agriculture equipment where a lot of farmers do their own maintenance and need access to the software because they wouldn't have the funds to pay for maintenance from the company itself.

Next, after we wondered if Danny Rodriguez's Supreme Court win would help prevent any unauthorized searches, That One Guy made a solid case for why it won't because of a fundamental flaw in the system:

No, it won't, and in fact it won't even slow such searches down. All a cop has to do is claim that they were unaware of the SC ruling, and they'll get to search cars to their heart's content.

So long as police can rely on the 'Good faith exception', they don't have to pay the slightest bit of lip service to what the law actually says, so long as they think they're within the law when they do something(or are willing to lie and claim as such). If anything, the 'good faith exception' provides incentives for cops not knowing the law, as the less they know, the more they can get away with.

For cops, 'Ignorance of the law' is not only a valid excuse in court, it's a desired state.

Over on the funny side, first place goes to a response to Apple's refusal of a court order to decrypt messages for the DOJ. Ben suggested a rephrasing of the reply:

Apple should respond to the DOJ:

No messages were found responsive to your request

(to paraphrase the DOJ's seemingly favorite response to a FOIA request)
... and since they don't have any decrypted iMessages, it would actually be true.

For second place, we head to our post about Getty Images and its disastrous anti-penguin copyright crusade. One commenter suggested we dub the meme-penguin's successor "Getty Streisand" in honor of the debacle, but an anonymous reply provided an even better moniker:

I prefer Petty Images.

For editor's choice on the funny side, just for fun, we've got a double-serving of Star Trek references of varying obscurity thrown out by our commenters this week. First, after someone invoked a paradox on our post about confidential informants, one anonymous commenter harkened back to the original series episode I, Mudd:

Every cop in Tampa is now standing still, head listing to the left, repeatedly muttering 'Norman, coordinate'.

Next, on a DailyDirt post about the many challenges involved in space elevators, another anonymous commenter showed off his even more encyclopaedic Trek knowledge with an obscure reference to the Voyager episode Ride:

yeah, like spending time with Neelix in a enclosed space for hours. No thanks, I would rather listen to Harry's latest recital.

That's all for this week, folks!

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