Click on Picture to go to Audio link
A-hole Senator Ted Stevens explains why he’s against network neutrality, and in the process, demonstrates why we’re all screwed. God, you’d think he’d have staff members who could understand and brief him on this stuff! Here are a few choice quotes:
I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?
Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.
So you want to talk about the consumer? Let’s talk about you and me. We use this internet to communicate and we aren’t using it for commercial purposes.
They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck.
It’s a series of tubes.
And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
Again the audio link is here. Please listen. It’s incredible. Fans of Professor Irwin Corey will love this guy.
Wires is a more similar technology, but it doesn’t strike me as a clearer analogy. Electricity wires involve resistors, capacitors, inductance, and current, and the issue of limited bandwidth doesn’t appear to correlate as easily.
“Wires is a more similar technology, but it doesn’t strike me as a clearer analogy.”
When did Stevens say anylthing about an analogy?! He said “It’s a series of tubes.” I would agree if he would have said “it’s like a series of tubes,” but he didn’t.
Well, this was inevitable:
http://www.cafepress.com/internettubes
Kudos to Jon Stewart
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iMDRVzMfEM
Flippancy aside, “tubes” are one man’s metaphor to perceive a technology far beyond his perception. It has been opined any sufficiently advanced mechanism will be seen as magic so kudos to the Senator for not confusing the Internet with cargo planes. I believe the analogy most accurate for him (as has been suggested) is to the department store communication system of yesteryear. While totally inappropriate, it is all that is within the Senator’s comprehension.
Why should we be shocked at ignorance in high office?
Does anyone with intelligence actually believe “the jury is still out of Global Warming”?
Is there a credible scientist in the world who seriously questions the theory of evolution?
How can a sane person actually believe there was any intelligent design in the invasion of Iraq?
“Yo Blair”, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” and then there is “Harriet Meyers for the highest court in the land.”
Of the Middle East, Korea and the oil economy… is it wise of US citizens to sit silently watching while a child plays with matches and awaits the rapture?
Ignorance is too kind a word. Aptly Ted Stevens is from Alaska yet he merely displays the tip of the iceberg.