Posted on 07/15/2006 7:46:33 AM PDT by jwalburg
WASHINGTON -- Sen. Ted Stevens is enduring no end of ridicule in the blogosphere for his recent explanation, in a Commerce Committee debate, of how the Internet works.
"The Internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck. It's a series of tubes," he said during a June 28 committee session.
"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 it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material."
At another point in his 11-minute discourse, he said he'd seen these delays firsthand:
(Excerpt) Read more at adn.com ...
Yeah, those tubes are clogged full of Algore.
Call Roto Rooter, they can dislodge all kinds of sh*t.
Gore's fault!
"...enormous amounts of material..."
Poop = material = Stevens.
ROFL...
I use lipitor and my postings through the tube to FR are never clogged. Sometimes, my tube gets clogged, but, I just point it downhill and the data gets through faster. He a short nitwit, that happens to be a senator and like all senators, think that they know everything.
It seems like the honorable senator has mixed up Unix sockets and TCP/IP sockets.
Perhaps he should reread Stevens's book. Here you go, senator:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/013490012X/103-2551614-7129451?v=glance&n=283155
There's nothing wrong with saying you don't know squat about something. But when you create nonsense out of thin air (tubes?), that's when others know they are dealing with someone dangerously incompentent -- and possibly dangerous.
When this person is a Senator however, you try not to be too shocked.
Many years ago, I worked at a very large company where one of the employees had been caught with kiddie porn on his pc. A very senior management person sent an email to the entire company, several thousand people in offices across the US, saying that an outside firm was going to be hired to go desk-to-desk at every branch and remove every bmp, jpg, and tif from every computer in the company. Talk about displaying computer ignorance! It never happened, of course, but no retraction or explanation was ever sent.
The trouble with this is that Stevens, by looking like an imbecile, has done damage to those opposing net "neutrality". It's a legit point that regulating internet traffic so that all content providers have a "right" to as much bandwidth as they can consume with no extra cost involved will actually hinder development of new services and capacity. Unfortunately, Stevens has made himself the spokesidiot for this side of the argument.
Just another old Geezer named Stevens (SCOTUS) that badly needs to retire already. Another of the Senate's finest on disply.
TERM LIMITS for these DC shmucks already. Tubed out moron and his billion dollar bridge to nowhere.
I dont know what he is talking about,. I get my spam every day right on time. Itsjust too bad we cannot send an answer to these spammers , maybe if enough of us could answer them we could fill their tubes up.
Well, although I generally think Stevens is a blithering idiot (not unlike most of our Senators), I'll point out that his notorious "tubes" comment happened because most techies (myself included) refer to our Internet connections as "pipes" (as in: "That T1 is only 1500kbps, we need a fatter pipe.")
So... transliterating "pipes" to "tubes" is dumb, but not it's not entirely out of thin air.
OTOH, I agree that Stevens is dangerously incompetent for other reasons.
I thought it was little messenger pixies, witches, imps, gnomes, and stuff like that.
Also, is senator one of those jobs where they let you drink as much as you want?
Alas, not true. 98% of the spam nowadays is sent from "spam-bots" -- hundreds of thousands of privately-owned Windows computers that have been infected by viruses that cause them to be the "senders" of the spam you get. Your spam comes from your neighbors, across the country and around the world. They generally don't realize it, either.
Selling access to networks of spam-bots is big business. It's unholy, and it's illegal, and as long as Microsoft sells an operating system that's as secure as swiss cheese, it will continue unabated.
Unfortunately, as with much good comedy, there's a tragic element to all this in that Stevens is playing a key role in how the internet will be regulated. Not only does he not know what he's talking about, the legislation is bad.
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