Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

This week there was a lot of reaction to the DNC's creation of a Cybersecurity Board that doesn't include a single cybersecurity expert, and both our first place comments (as well as a couple editor's choices) came in response to that post. On the insightful side, the top comment came from an anonymous commenter who asserts some personal experience in the DNC's failure to consider the right candidates:

Yes, there are. I'm one of them. (30+ years experience at multiple Fortune 500 companies and several major universities. Spent the last eight years building and defending a medical database system that grew from 10's of gigabytes to half a petabyte. And so on.) I applied for the open security expert position at the DNC and heard nothing back. Not even a "no thank you". Nothing.

And with all due respect to these folks: now is not the time to craft policy. That's a lengthy and careful debate. Now is the time to deploy systems that are as secure as possible given time constraints -- noting that there's an election in three months and that something that solves 90% of the problems for 90 days is better than something that solves 99% of the problems but won't be operational until 2018.

In second place on the insightful side we've got another anonymous comment, this time in response to the fact that there may be a third Oracle/Google copyright trial over the Java API:

At this point, why would anyone use Java or Oracle for any project?

Seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen.

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start with a comment from John Fenderson, who brought up an excellent semantic point that explains Comcast's "Premium" offerings:

You're just reading the wrong definition. "Premium" meaning "high quality" is the third definition in my dictionary. The first is "An amount paid over and above the regular price".

I think Comcast is going with the first.

Next, we head back to the DNC's Cybersecurity Board, where CanadianByChoice suggested the lack of expertise was by design:

This was the only way they could be reasonably certain that the Advisory Board would give the advice they want to hear.

Over on the funny side, Blaine took first place with his own encouraging message for the DNC:

I'm sure they can do it.

The politicians just need to politician harder!

For second place, we head to our post about the news that PayPal blocked a payment simply because the memo included the word "Cuba", which made one anonymous commenter wonder who suffered the most:

Cuba Gooding Jr. must HATE PayPal.

I mean, way more than the average person does.

For editor's choice on the funny side, we start out on our post about DirecTV's latest dirty dealings, where YakkoWarner knew the real solution was all that wonderful consumer choice:

Yeah, they'd be much better off signing up with one of their many competi-- um....

Finally, we return one last time to the DNC's Cybersecurity Board, where one final anonymous commenter saw the silver lining in a cybersecurity board with no cybersecurity:

Well, perhaps its better this way. It leads to a more transparent government body...

That's all for this week, folks!

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