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How The Internet Works - With Tubes
Chardish writes "In an attempt to explain his reasons for voting against a Net Neutrality bill this past Thursday, Alaska Senator Ted Stevens delivered a jaw-dropping attempt to explain how the Internet works. Said Stevens: '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.'"
Isn't it bizarre having sub-literate legislators who determine the future of our livelihood: the internet?
Poor guy, doesn't even know his head from his tube.
... or you would at least Google it.
I read the whole thing in hopes that he was addressing why the government & pentagon use their own equipment and lines for communications but he wasn't.
One would hope that if you were planning on giving a speech about the internet that you would either pay an aide to sit you down and brief you on it
Hopefully this will be somewhat of a wake-up call for politicians to educate themselves on the topic of the internet before they start passing legislation on net neutrality. I doubt it though.
I can laugh at this guy, but if I think of any member of my immediate family they probably think of the internet as a "magic tube" just as much as Senator Ted Stevens. I could go through the frustrating process of trying to explain it to them but that's not so enticing.
My work here is dung.
Senator Ted Stevens,
Your ignorant words accomplish nothing except make you look like an idiot. Just save your breath, shut up, vote against net neutrality, and take your bribe money like a good little corrupt politician.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
Internet?!? That bozo can't even understand Netflix:
I'm calling Netflix in the morning to ask where my other 7 DVDs are... and argue that I shouldn't be charged for changing my Queue. I'll also ask them where their non-internet website is at. My other 7 DVDs better arrive when I get home!
CSPAN is sometimes indistinguishable from Comedy Central. I can't believe this guy is the President pro Tempore of the senate (third in line of presidential succession). He also chairs the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. If you voted for this asshat, do the rest of us a favor and please don't ever vote again.US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
Network engineers talk about 'pipes' all the time when it comes to internet links. Tubes, pipes, same thing no?
Sounds like a good analogy to me.
Sparks:Gadget:Beer Maker
Dammit! I was sure it had SOMETHING to do with trucks! Grrr!
Oh, and that whole thing about pipes - was anyone else thinking about their intestines at that bit? No? Not even when he says they are filled with an "enormous amount of material" ??
PHP
Here's something else Stevens said about the Internet... Apparently, he's having trouble receiving it from his staff.
"...I just the other day got Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o' clock the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things that are going on the Internet commercially."
Guess he took it too literally... Pipes became tubes
Lets all hope the internet doesn't decide to get a vasectomy :\
I think we can all agree, there are a lot of tubes on the Internet.
This is the same guy the threatened to quit the senate if funds for building a brige that led to nowhere in alaska was used for relief after hurricane Katrina. He is mindbogginly isnane, he is. Who the fuck votes for these guys?
Proof is, most emails I get are along those lines :
If the internet consists of tubes, why not just add some tubes for personal use, or tubes for p0rn..! Or something like that... err.. (??)
:(
Just call a expert and get informed a little bit sigh... This is how our precious internet is going down, canned, filtered, banned
My blog: http://www.redcode.nl
...we've now proven that stupidity and ignorance runs rampant through the political arena. Is there any hope for the vast [policital] space in between (his ears)? God help him the next time he hears the words "snake a tube down his throat" at the hospital. Might think he's getting an Internet connection installed.
in my country we use transistors ....
...the quote in the summary is actually the most accurate thing he said.
"I don't have to have the type of speed they're introducing, but the people who are streaming through 10-12 movies at a time or a whole book at a time... for consumers use, those are not you and me, they're not the consumers, those are providers."
Is it just me, or do your Senators have a habit of spouting off the most garbled nonsense on subjects they have no understanding about? This seems to be a strange quirk of U.S. politics, voting idiots into congress.
"We aren't earning anything by going on that internet."
Speak for yourself buddy.
!sig
Stevens made this speech DAYS ago -- yet it's just getting to slashdot TODAY???? Those damned tubes must be clogged again!
I'm guessing he was drunk at the time. I mean, come on, he couldn't form full sentances!
I don't understand what it is about."
Politicians can't know everything, but they could have the decency to let others do the talking (and voting) when they themselves have no clue. The funny (sad funny) thing is that Stevens argues one shouldn't regulate without understanding if network neutrality is really needed, and then he goes on and gives these stupid, wrong and incoherent arguments why network neutrality is bad. It's bizarre.
Not only does the guy talk crap, he talks totally ungrammatical and repetitive crap. All it needs is a few end-shifted verbs and it Yoda would sound like.
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
"Now we have a separate Department of Defense internet now, did you know that?"
Really...? You dont say...... Are they calling it Milnet?
I love humanity, it is people I hate
When they mention families, duct tape your ass cheeks together.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
Judging by the almost complete lack of any real grasp of the English language or how the internet works, could it be that his email was delayed by the fact that he had no idea what the internet was until one of his staff had asked why he hadn't replyed to his emails?
If this were really happening, what would you think?
You can get the internet delivered in tubes? I hope that's not on the CCNA exam, I don't remember that part...
I've been trying to get an interent for years, but all I can get is everybody else's.
A majority of the US population seem to have taken variations of this advice already.
Besides, this is a variantion of the whole 'only the intelligent know they're stupid'-problem.. if you have everybody who realise they're wrong withdraw because of their own perceived stupidity, you'll just be left with the people who weren't capable of realising their errors. Learning is doing mistakes; people who never do mistakes are just good at shifting blame.
"" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
There are places in my country where it it is a big advantage for a politician to appear to have a funny name, funny voice or minor mental imparement. Any one of these things are worth votes, and votes are worth money.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I'm Alaskan. I don't claim the guy, even though I'm Republican. Murkowski/Stevens are doing more harm than good these days, both are old men, and both are worn out old drunks that are pushing their incapable children on us.
The "Bridge to nowhere" isn't that. It's a bridge from Anchorage to Wasilla. Real estate in Anchorage is expensive and you don't get much for your dollar. House on a postage stamp type of thing. Wasilla, there's good value for the dollar, but the commute to Anchorage sucks. 1+hour one way, which would be a fraction of that with a bridge, not to mention massively reduced costs for agriculture, and the whole deal is a good thing...IF Stevens/Murkowski didn't have their mitts in it. Of their children, one is crooked, the other inept.
But yeah, Ted is just a worn out old drunk that needs to go.
My explanation to my mother was about the same speed. If he's trying to boil down the Internet to the clueless, I wish he'd said pipes instead of tubes but the concept is the same. He did okay with a rudementary explanation of QoS as well. Until we get a CCIE or JNCIE elected this is going to happen, so who's the geek out there willing to start running for office?
"I have a new personal crusade. I'm going to hunt down the people who have strong opinions on subjects they dont understand. Then I'll bop them with this cardboard tube."
Never knew the tube consisted of the power of the internet. It makes sense though, cardboard on the outside, a lot of hot air on the inside.
Well, now I know how to clean up after a DoS attack. Use a plunger!
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices. -Theodor Adorno
I mean, I can see why a politician can't express himself in a way to be understandable, but as far as I get it it is:
Without net neutrality, the internet goes down the tubes.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
He has obviously been reading Slashdot.
Internet Access Via Pneumatic Tubes -- Whooosh!
Who the fuck votes for these guys?
Uh, their constituents?
Stevens is one of the biggest pigs at the public spending trough, despite being a Republican*. He gets votes because he brings home the bacon.
*There used to be a time once when Republicans were the fiscally responsible party. Seriously.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
This guy voted for the war too. If he is that ignorant about the single biggest technological breakthrough in history, do you think he knows his shit about middle east politics?
What amazes me about every argument against network neutrality is this belief that clearly, their traffic will be given priority. This is clearly nonsense. The traffic from the people with the most money will be given priority, and I have a feeling the people complaining about latency aren't the people paying the most for Internet access...
Seriously -- do you expect him to hand out copies of a few dozen RFCs and a map of the backbone sites and say "here, read this, and everything will be crystal clear." Politicians have better things to do than try to understand BGP.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
After listening to the audio, I have come to the conclusion that the Senator from Alaska is drunk. I've made about as much sense when I'm drunk, too. I wish I could remember my explaination of Windows using smurfs, but...I don't really remember much of that night anyway.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
If Sen. Stevens is having difficulty understanding how the Internet works, he should just talk to former Sen. Gore, who should know exactly how it works, on account of being its inventor and all.
He will be furious when he finds out his Senate homepage seems to be down.
I just tried going to it, and I got a error page.
So much for his internets!
Dear Slashdot Community,e _on_Commerce,_Science_and_Transportation). It will only take you a few more minutes than crafting the "perfect" slashdot comment, and it will make much more of a difference.
I know that the very structure of this site lends itself to keeping your comments and opinions contained within the slashdot community. However, in this case, it's not a great time to be so inward. You can take just a couple of extra seconds and make a difference with your opinions on Net Neutrality--go to http://stevens.senate.gov/contact.cfm. Write Senator Stevens a short message expressing your concerns about his lack of expertise on the subject (even his fundamental lack of understanding about what the internet is and how it works). Don't do it by calling him an idiot or otherwise insulting him. Give him a quick summary of how things actually work. Tell him what Net Neutrality *really* is and why it is important--especially to the average consumer. Then take a couple more seconds to go to http://thomas.loc.gov/, find out how to contact your House rep or your favorite senator from your state, and write a similar message explaining that you were concerned with the views Senator Stevens expressed to the Senate Commerce Committee about his lack of support for even the most basic Net Neutrality legislation. Again explain why you feel Net Neutrality is an important issue for the average consumer. This is particularly important if the Senator to whom you write is one of the other 10 members of the Senate Commerce Committee who voted against adding this minor Net Neutrality amendment to a recent telecom bill (presumably, a Republican from this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Senate_Committe
Best,
Chris
tubes !!!, spluttered the wifi lobby spokesman, its radio signals today silly, many wifi companies are going to aim thought control radio programs at the senators office, tubes are so 1960's
He should really get somebody else to write for him. I had to read this through a few times before I could read the awfull English he was using. Oh and Internet has a BIG I in it, dude. Plus I think he's talking a load of bollocks. *Sheesh*
Just make the tubes large enough to fit trucks in.
...do not welcome our old clueless overlords...
As for the issue at hand, he isn't far off the mark although I think Congress is totally ill-equipped to address the issue just as they were ill-equipped to address the SPAM issue. Frankly I think the market should decide. If the telecomm providers try to double-tap the content providers they will more than likely get a very rude shock when the large content providers purchase, if they don't already have it (Google}, dark fiber, fire it up, and do an end run around the telecomms industry. It wouldn't be hard for the larger providers to do so and with cross-trading capacity agreements, they could probably do a better job, cheaper, actually. Then the telecomms providers wouldn't have a basis for complaint at all. All that excess capacity they already have to handle peak traffic would just sit there, not earning them a dime on their capital investment. Couldn't happen to nicer people (SBC anyone?).
"[I]t is a wise man who admits the limits of his knowledge or skill, and that pretending either causes harm." --Terry Go
Internet Tubes.
Be the first to own one!
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
I thought the Internet was the Information Highway..
but the analogy isn't as bad as it may seem and anyone who's called a network connection a "pipe" has no room to talk.
He didn't say he was opposed to net neutrality on principle. He said he was opposed to regulation until there was a sufficient case of abuse to demonstrate the need for regulation.
I disagree. I think this is one of those cases where the government should be proactive, but I can understand not wanting to regulate something until we know how it's going to be abused (so that can be written into the legislation).
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..
Thanks for clearing up that bit, Mr. Senator... I was wondering why I couldn't get any internet over the weekend!
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
And don't forget the definite article teh. That's teh intarwebs, sir.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
he'd better get some new tubes
u be_one_free.gif
http://plaines.com/site/images/library/site/one_t
he should just talk to former Sen. Gore, who should know exactly how it works, on account of being its inventor and all.
Har dee har har, you hear that joke on "Hee Haw" or Rush?
But Gore did have an understanding of how the Internet worked, he made it his business to be informed on relevant subjects when he was a congresscritter. He talked to and listened to subject matter experts, and he wrote position papers and popular articles that clearly showed an understanding of the basic concepts.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
Internet is made of copper and fiber wires (longish circular things) and some 'magic glue' that binds them (routers, gateways, servers etc.). If I would like to explain the principles of Internet to a child, what better analogy is than tubes which carry information in form of electrons or light like water pipes carry water to the tap?
OK, I admit the guy is clueless about the technology, but this is the wrong thing you all got hooked on.
A few weeks ago, I saw this an ad for this flash cartoon on slashdot:
http://www.internetofthefuture.org/
I was curious, seeing it was a big banner saying "the FUTURE of the INTERNET." Not your normal banner asking you to buy stuff. So I clicked it.
Turns out its a whole lot of propaganda from the ISPs. However, it explains the whole net neutrality in a way which kinda is total bullshit. For one, it uses the same traffic jam analogy that the senator used. And while it does use trucks and cars, it also does call "net neutrality" a "dumb pipe", which would also explain how this guy got the idea of tubes. Hes probably knows more about plumbing than networking, which would explain how he would equate the two.
I seriosuly reckon this guy has watched that movie... it would explain where he got his warped ideas from. The question begs tho, if him trying to explain what he saw in that movie creates sparks, why doesn't that movie itself create sparks? Why on earth was slashdot accepting money for showing that movie? I'm not trying to defend the senator here... hes a dumbass for trying to explain something based on a flash propaganda movie when he is in his position. However, he is a good representative of the majority of people.
I know that realistically it doesn't matter what the people think, but theoretically American politics is based on the people's ideas (at least as far as I know, I could be an ignorant Australian). However, with movies like that being made by the telco industry, it would seem to me that even *if* the senator knew what he was talking about, the people would probably make the same decision as him anyhow - not many people are tech saavy enough to see where that movie goes wrong. Writing to politicians is always a good idea, but maybe an even better course of action in this case would be to figure out a way to pwn the telco industry for their deceiving propaganda?
Looks like this tube is clogged. Pass the plunger.
This reminds me a lot of how ancient cultures would witness natural phenomena and make up elaborate mythologies to explain them. The Greeks And Romans had their pantheons, the Native Americans had earth spirits, etc, etc...
It seems that to this otherwise well-educated lawmaker, the internet is quite literally such a mystical place that he has concocted an elaborate, entirely false explanation for how it works to appease his human desire to explain things. It's fascinating really.
Of course, I'm sure he's not the only lawmaker who happens to be this far removed from the realities of the tech that we are all so familiar with. This leads to simply ridiculous laws regarding this tech (**AA's, the whole net neutrality thing, etc), and should clearly illustrate the fact that someone needs to educate these people or tell them to sit down and stop putting their nose into grown up business.
Servlet v2.4 container in a single 161KB jar file ? Try Winstone
"There is no congestion, clogging, or lack of bandwidth."
So in other words, in your technical opinion the internet can't have any of those issues.
... by all the stamps for my E-mails.
that send the internet signals across a network of roots.
:)
It's funny, laugh
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Next he needs to explain how Solaronite works.
"Take a can of your gasoline. Say this can of gasoline is the sun. Now, you spread a thin line of it to a ball, representing the earth. Now, the gasoline represents the sunlight, the sun particles. Here we saturate the ball with the gasoline, the sunlight. Then we put a flame to the ball. The flame will speedily travel around the earth, back along the line of gasoline to the can, or the sun itself. It will explode this source and spread to every place that gasoline, our sunlight, touches. Explode the sunlight here, gentlemen, you explode the universe."
Perhaps so, but he'll beat you hands down in a spelling bee.
Back to topic.
Stevens is known to be very powerful in the Senate ("Dances with Bottomless War Chest"). Despite Alaska's low population (let alone population density), it makes you wonder how it happens...unless you know about this:
I don't know if this is still the practice, but in college (early 80s), my roommate and his brother were from Juneau|Douglas, AK.[1] When it came time to memorialize the Sinking of the Titanic (IRS - April 15), it turned out they didn't have to pay state taxes. Instead, they were the recipients of oil rebate checks; in essence, profit-sharing. I think they were receiving [at least] $1'500/year [each]. One would think there would have to be graduated degrees of monies received considering how much money+oil is flowing up there. And where there's money passed around...there are politicians.
Because there aren't many voters up there, it doesn't take all that many votes to elect someone, e.g., to the Senate. With a well-oiled machine, why stop?
As far as N^2 goes, I think it's a foregone conclusion as to what the outcome will be but that doesn't mean everyone has to give in without a fight. It took awhile for taxation to grasp an inevitable hold. (I suppose they could assess some fixed Internet tax against all who have the ability to shop online, encouraging them to shop online as much as possible. That obviously wouldn't help the brick & mortar stores.)
If he was going to get up & deal with Internet-related stuff, why not disassemble the 2003 U-CAN-SPAM act which the DMA (Direct Marketing Association) wrote and Congress rubber stamped? That would have shown true insight into how the Internet works. And if it's going to seem like too much work (despite the fact those Congress Critters who have been willing to chat about it have admitted it was a mistake), then add something to it: make it illegal to hire a spammer and illegal to solicit someone for the purpose of spamming. That stops spammers from having a reason to send anything: people can't hire them. That leaves them with spamming everyone for the purpose of solicitation to be a customer of their services, and I just covered that.
_______________________________
[1]
We slept with the windows open every night with a 24" fan for white noise. (They weren't the only polar bears.) But imagine what it was like for someone who answered a floor-common phone walking into our room in single digit temperatures whilst in nothing but their boxers to get me up to function as one of three EMTs within a twenty minute drive of the nearest hospital.
Now, if they really were in control it'd be quite important that they weren't complete morons. However the evidence is very often the contrary, the evidence is that they don't determine anything, indeed the evidence is that they simply follow orders and do what they're told, that doesn't require them to be literate or intelligent.
So who is in control? Well that's obvious. The money is in control. At a guess that'd be the Waltons and friends.
Deleted
Place left hand on mouse. ...few minutes later....
Place right hand on 'tube'.
Internet solution!
I can't believe this guy is the President pro Tempore of the senate (third in line of presidential succession).
Why not? He's not much dumber than the first in line, and less scary than number two.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
So close! If he'd said that you need a fat pipe rather than a tube, he would have been 3L33T.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Sound like Yoda it would, mean you do.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
Arrrrr.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I suppose it's possible that he was dumbing this down for his audience. Maybe, within a roomful of politicians, his speech was understood perfectly. 'Sending an internet' could have been just a freudian slip too. Not real comfortable if this is the level of education it takes to make laws in this country though - it would give insight to why things are so fucked up with patents and lawsuits.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Sucking. And you know what sucking is about don't you? Yes, blow-jobs. And you know who got a blow-job don't you? Yes, Bill Clinton. And you know who Bill Clinton's vice-president was don't you? Yes, Al Gore. And you know what Al Gore did don't you? Yes, he invented the internet. Now you know why I'm against it. -Ted Stevens Stupid ass.
"enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material."?
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.
And, personally, I don't give a damn about all of that. The truth is, some people offered me buttloads of money for my vote and I sold it!
Suddenly, the name "youtube" makes a lot more sense...
~Renegade
By his argument, my ISP should chop bandwidth to your site unless you or your ISP coughs up extra money, because ones and zeroes to and from your site should somehow be more expensive than ones and zeros to and from sites on my ISP's subnets... That is, unless you pay EXTRA. See, paying for bandwidth only ONCE isn't enough, and to ensure that this senator's internets (I think he meant email but he could mean pRoN) isn't held up a few minutes by me browsing your site once or twice a day, ones and zeroes passing along the public funding subsidized internet should pass through various tollbooths, with each carrier charging whatever they can get on top of the network access and bandwidth fees I personally pay.
.45 ammo and bottled water, but it's clear that the telecom mob is pulling strings here. Pay up or get cut off is the message, no different than the moonshiners back during prohibition, and congress is dancing like the drunken bought-off puppets they are.
Most places call this extortion, and the mob made quite a living doing this. Apparently the mob has gotten to congress in a big way, since approx 50% of the senate commerce committee seems to have been bought off (plus/minus the ones who are simply ignorant). I'm not sure whether to send a letter to my congressman or stockpile
Over the top? Maybe. But read the distinguished Senator's attempt to explain how the internet is made up of "tubes", and you'll realize why I'm convinced they're dipping at both the cash and booze troughs. A 2nd grader sopping full of Jack Daniels could come up with a better explanation of how the internet works...
He even claims that net neutrality has caused the DoD to create it's own "separate internet". What a load of crap. This guy is either stupid, amazingly ignorant, chemically imbalanced, flat-out-drunk, or, since we assume senators don't fit into those categories, bought off by someone. He's so wrong that as a citizen I'd like to believe that he's merely ignorant, but it's not POSSIBLE to be that wrong about the structure of the internet. What part of DARPAnet and the relationship between NIPR and SIPR nets, and the fact that the "internet" is merely ones and zeros running around wires and glass, is he unable to understand?
There is so much excess capacity laying around that Google is buying up so-called "dark fiber" (unused fiber optic cable) by the hundreds of miles. How long until these corrupt senators figure out a way to blackmail google into halting their purchases? I give it a year, because net neutrality is big money, the mob never backs off of money this big, and senators need their cut because it's going to be a tough election cycle and campaigns are expensive.
There was a time when you could just put your package at one end of the tube and have it picked up at the other end. Then the politicians said there was too much stuff in the tubes and people were stuffing too much in to the tubes without paying for it. Now you go to Kinkos and pay for all your pakets in iFedex and iUPS delivers it. And thats how the iDelivary was born!
Hahahahahaha! Aha! Ha! Oh man! *wipes away tear*
qntm.org
Slashdot has moderation. The Senate doesn't. On Slashdot, Sen. Stevens would be moderated "-1 Troll" in about 10 seconds.
- Robin
Wow I am reminded of al gore and his famous "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet" which everyone misquoted after that saying he invented the internet. Anyway I digress the point is this guy obviously has no idea how the internet works and yet for some reason we let people like this run our country. I say we start a new law where we can impeach anyone of any office for being clinically retarded if you have an IQ of 70 or below your gone but then again where would that leave bush? And I love this "I want people to understand my position" does anyone here have a better understanding of his position after reading this hmmmmm.
TheADDkid.com
It's a terrible analogy. It's suitable for a introducing a complete beginner to how their email gets sent or something, should they ask. But when you're deciding on how the technology will be governed in future, a much higher level of understanding (and indeed a much more diligent effort to understand) is required. The internet is not about pipes. It's a packet-based, switching network, with smart routers, quality of service, etc. Moreover, it's a new frontier for social communications, like writing, phones, radio and TV, with every decision having vast social implications. No one without a deep understanding of ALL of these concepts should be making decisions on the future of the net. In the absence of such people in government (which may be the case for a generation or more), I'd rather have politicians stay out of it. Given the presence of greedy corporations trying to manipulate the lack of government expertise however, neutrality seems like a good stop-gap measure.
Hey, maybe if we just explain to these hicks that MP3s are like moonshine, and the RIAA are like Revenuers, they'll finally get them off our backs! "Make fer th' county line, Jeb! Them RIAA won't be able to follow us there!"
Or maybe we could explain that internet porn is like barnyard animals... taking it out on them is better than doing it with your sister?
And Slashdot is like a Klan rally, except we hate Microsoft instead of black people!
and the argument continued... "Now if we look at how prostitues work, they dont let you put your internet in their tubes without having to pay of it. Just imagine what would happen if they allowed you to put all sort of internets in the tube and not pay for it? This would not only be anarchy, but every one will just just stuff all their internet in it just because they can because its free. And it will clog up the tubes and nobody else will be able to put their internet in it! When I want to put my internet in the tube, I will have to wait in a long line and by that time the effects of Viagra will be worn out!" This is why I think we should have to pay for it. It will keep out a lot of internets in their pants, and not be exposed just because its free!
It's as if toll booths were being put up on interstate freeways... We already paid for those roads and we keep paying for them through income and gasoline taxes, so the local govts have no right to collect additional tolls. But that's what's being threatened here, and it needs to be fought tooth and nail. Another example is if cities started charging extra phone fees for incoming calls because they originated outside the city limits. The govt absolutely forbids that kind of gouging, but it's exactly what they're trying to do with internet bandwidth.
2 examples of why we need govt regulation to ensure network neutrality. It's become an essential national resource just like the phone system or the telegraph before that, so what's different this time? Oh yea, it's congress who has changed course 180 degrees from protecting national resources to ensuring that more money gets into a select group of hands. That's all that's changed.
We used to be able to trust congress to at least pretend to act in the national interest, but the DMCA, the repeated MPAA/RIAA copyright modification attempts, and now this make it pretty clear who congress is working for.
Oh wait, the countries that have large degrees of economic freedom are the RICH ones, moron.
Wow, get a clue about History 101. Then move to North Korea and live up to your ideology.
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Stop talking about this like it has anything to do with video. This has nothing to do with video, and everything to do with them turning off telecommuting (indeed, any encrypted communication) by default.
I think that quote "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic;" requires one other caveat... sufficiently advanced relative to your experience. If you'd never seen or understood how a butane lighter before, that looks like magic. To Ted Stevens, clearly the internet is beyond his level of technical understanding... I can just see the publicist standing just off-camera wildly making the "CUT" sign as he spewed this stuff!
stuff |
Yup it is like the /. editors. Some of the articles they post Are just plain trolls. Sometimes it is even clear they did not read the article at all. SO it is like shashdot at the end, for the important people it is allowed to post trolls.
I blame these guys.
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
Did anyone download and listen to the audio?
Man, I thought Bush was a bad speaker.
I don't understand the Net Neutrality bill, and this guy is a tooooool. Internet Bill of Rights? Um, since when is a technological nicety a basic right? Sounds like he is just pissed because an email of his took a day to get where it was supposed to go... and he blames "consumers" that are downloading movies. Whatever dude!
It's not so hard to understand:
1) Learn what a computer is, figure out why it's good for what it does.
2) Think of two networked computers and what that could be good for.
3) Scale it up.
Maybe the lack of "PROFIT!!!11" at the end is a deterrent for these people. But MAN that guy's stupid anyhow.
IMPEACH XENU
You've been lied to by Karl Rove once again. (Karl Rove is "Bush's Brain".)
A lot of things Senator Gore says sound very wooden and otherwise poorly expressed. However, Gore delivers. In a private email message, Vint Cerf told me that it was true that Al Gore was instrumental in the development of the Internet. Before Mr. Gore's involvement, it was a semi-private utility known as ArpaNet and NSFNet. Mr. Gore championed the development of the private network as a public utility. This was years before Bill Gates, for example, recognized its importance.
No, Vint Cerf is not a friend of mine; that's not the point. The point is that Senator Al Gore has a brain of his own, and a very good one.
Republican Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska is known as someone who supports destructive causes. So, those who want corruption in the U.S. government go to him. Many people on Slashdot suppose that he views his ignorance as bad; on the contrary, he is openly advertising his ignorance so the corrupters will know to find him when they want someone who will help them corrupt.
The second part of that statement was not describing Netflix, but a fictional Netflix that delivered movies via the internet. You can see at the beginning he says that Netflix charges you for delivery (not strictly true, but we'll leave that point untouched). Then he inserts that 'But' to start his next sentence, describing a service that depends not upon the postal system (with its series of fees for delivery) but upon the Internet (which I guess he sees as being free from bandwidth charges).
Netflix, as he understands it, doesn't deliver ten movies to you because it would be too costly to pay for all the shipping. Over the Internet, however, he sees no cost and hence no reason NOT to ship ten movies at a time. He woefully misunderstands how the internet works, but he's at least partially right about Netflix.
--
RumorsDaily
Lordy - who votes for people like this?
Someone ought to suggest he uses a "pipecleaner" to "unclog" his "tubes". Or tell him that dial-up is not the best way to stream those "specialist" movies he is trying to watch.
o hai
Gore did have an understanding of how the Internet worked, he made it his business to be informed on relevant subjects when he was a congresscritter.
Those facts and their damn liberal bias! You aren't being truthy!
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
So I guess slashdotting is the parallel of a massive sticky dump?
too bad Gore did push for the funding of the internet while a senator. Bush on the other hand pushes for funding for something that isn't benefitting us at all, and infact costing us dearly.
Automation? Hahaha. No, in a modern Senator's office the emails would be sent (via tubes!) to a dot-matrix printer, printed on reams of butterfly paper, and read by an intern. Then they are MANUALLY delivered to the circular file.
Reviewing the transcript, I see a rough analogy that can be grasped in a few minutes by many people. My bank uses vacuum tubes to conduct transactions. The Internet is made up of millions of vacuum tubes, each carrying deposits of requests and withdrawals of results. This analogy is more effective than many of my attempted explanations. The speaker states that mail should be the highest priority of the tubes. Neutral pipes are essential to the development of new architectures. I agree that some email should be delivered with more urgency than non-streaming media downloads.
Were the pros of neutrality reported in terms easily grasped by politicians?
Is the chosen analogy flawed beyond any hope of effectiveness?
Was every word of speech written ahead of time by someone else?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Strangely, the Senator has elegantly illustrated one of his points.
If the point is that law makers have no business legislating things they know nothing about, this guy is the poster child. Ironically, this is one of the party lines against Net Neutrality and he's now a shining example.
On the flip side, if the congressmen actually understood the issue, and the way they should be rightfully eviscerated for corporate toadyism come next reelection campaign, they'd leave it alone.
So, yes, we all know this guy doesn't know what he's talking about, ha ha ha, but has anyone bothered to write a calm, reasonable letter explaining to him how the internet really works, or told him why it took so long for him to receive his "internet"? How about picking up the phone and calling his office and offering a bit of help?
Yes, it's fun to laugh at this garbage, but if all we do is laugh then nothing in government ever has a chance to improve. Individuals can make a difference.
RTFM; please, I beg you.
Well, there you go.
Is it real?
Isn't it just a paranoic fear?
And yet, right now, that's not looking too unappealing.
a world in progress...
Har dee har har, you hear that joke on "Hee Haw" or Rush?
Actually, I heard it on slashdot. About two thousand times now.
"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?"
...
...
why u ask? maybe u're staff is lying
alice: "bob did u fire of that report to teh senator?"
bob: "damn! i'll do it first thing tomorrow morning"
senator calling: "were's that report, damnit!" (calling using skype by the way).
bob looks around nervous
alice whispers something to bob.
bob: "sir, it's stuck in teh internet, u should get it tomorrow at the very latest..."
Yes, but that was the problem.
People don't want to be well-informed, they want to be told that the politician is well-informed, and that they don't need to know the details about it because the politician will take care of it. If you know what you're talking about on a complex subject (networking, evolution, global warming, terrorism), you're usually talking over most people's heads so you get painted as an elitist who doesn't understand the common man's needs and fears. It doesn't pay to be informed, it pays to pretend your informed and just never actually say anything that would betray this image.
The Republicans aren't really idiots, they're just the party that figured this out. The real problem lies in the fact that regardless of who's in charge, the people in this country have somehow become so complacent and ignorant that they just want to hear that everything will be okay so they can completely ignore what's really going on.
Stevens is known to be very powerful in the Senate
If anyone remembers the "Bridge to No Where" contorversy you can thank Ted Stevens for trying to sneak it in. There's an interesting article titled Others respect Stevens' fury from the Anchorage Daily News that profiles him. It's lengthy but it helps explain why this guy is pretty powerful.
If you read the ADN article, they reference a meltdown that was featured in a memorable Jon Stewart piece on a coot off between Stevens and Senator Robert Byrd from West Virginia. Brilliantly funny.
the best thing you can say about some congresscritters is that they STAY bought.
I'm sure there's some other fine quality somebody can bring up about ol' Ted, I think he used to be a fair fisherman years ago.
contest? anybody have anything else?
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
There is not only one but there are two military nets. NIPPERnet and SIPPERnet. Wach out that might blow his mind.
But on to my main responce. This whole net neutrality arguement should be a non issue. The main basis for the verizon and Bell's claim is that they own the "last mile". Which they don't. The last mile was largly constructed not by the present Bells, but the Bell System. When it was a government regulated monoploy, that wouldn't have been able to build that "last mile" without that government protection. Sence the break up of the Bells this is all shared property and can't be resold. The present Bells are stretching on a limb for ownership.
Over the years the government has poured money it to the telecoms through Tax breaks and partnerships. The ISP's should be giving me 45 MB/s before they ask for more. *SEE* http://muniwireless.com/community/1023
The government needs to stop taking it up the butt from the telcos. The U.S. is far behind other countries in bandwidth and it's not due to a lack of funding. Everytime I hear how the Telcos want to double or triple tap the costomer for money, it just makes me sick.
Write your representative... hopefully they know how to open an e-mail. Tell them to say no to the telcoms stealing more money from the American people.
HTC EVO 4G LTE w/ CM 10.2 | NookColor w/ CM 10.2 | Samsung Epic 4G w/ CM 10.1
This fella also earmarked many millions for building unnecessary bridges. Just google it.
Why the internets are so slow in the mornings when I first turn on my computer. The tubes must be warming up...
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Seriously people, get over it.
They guy was just trying to say that transmitting data is a FIFO operation. Not necessarily true, but it is in many cases.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
this rather sounds like a particularly inept attempt to rehash an argument I've heard before from... somebody...
http://www.internetofthefuture.org/
mmm... pipes... tubes... somebody used a crib sheet and still failed the quiz.
"If you voted for this asshat, do the rest of us a favor and please don't ever vote again."
Or breed.
So now, if you are a pinko commie wealth-hater, you are supposed to go to North Korea. Used to be Communist China, 'till they became best buddies with GOP. Before that, Russia.
My, how times change. In irrelevant ways.
What he appears to be saying is "Trucks, unlike the internet, have infinite capacity. You can continue to dump things into them forever, and everything will still arrive on time."
Which, of course, we have all known since the usenet days. "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of backup tapes."
(Score:5, America in a Nutshell)
This guy's the limit!
Hardly. Ever heard of whips, chairs, majority and minority leaders, and select committees?
/., certain "senators" are given more weight and moderation when very little insight or information is actually given. Yes, it is an exclusive club here as well, where tenure or mob ideology will grant you a louder voice.
/. elitists probably rail against current government bureacracy as well. Hello kettle, meet pot. The mob does rule; in both Congress and slashdot...
And just like on
And these same
Learning is doing mistakes; people who never do mistakes are just good at shifting blame.
That may be so, but all of my alaska friends (about a dozen) would tell me that this man hasn't learned a thing in all the mistakes he's made. He's just as arrogant, self-serving, an opportunistic today as the day he arrived in D.C. He's been in the Senate since 1968! The person in that transcipt did not come across as an elder statesman, thoughtful with the accumulated wisdom of his years - he came across as an ignorant putz. So, in that sense, I agree with the grandparent-post: please, Alaska, don't vote this guy back again.
The problem is, he is very good for Alaska, an extremely effective representative for them.
"No more smog, no more pollution or ocean dumpage.
From now on, we'll all travel in TUBES!"
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Did you say Senator Osama? Egad, call the NSF!
Wouldn't that just be a riot, if we found out that all this time, Osama has actually been hiding out here on US soil? With as much luck as our government had finding witnesses for gitmo detainees when one of the witnesses was even IN Washington DC, I wouldn't be the slightest bit surprised.
Nothing to see here
...because Senator Ted Stevens just demonstrated an artful execution of the Chewbacca Defense.
Mr. Stevens, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
Senator Stevens doesn't sound stupid to me at all. It sounds like a technical staffer explained things to him with the pipe analogy, and the Senator understood the analogy perfectly well. I see no sign in the article that he thinks there are literal tubes or pipes. Internet connections really do have limited bandwidth - but just like with physical pipes, it's all a question of where the 'bottle neck' is.
It is obvious to me that the Telcos are trying for the big scam, but that doesn't make Senator Stevens stupid, or the Net Neutrality bill a good idea. Personally, I disliked the NetNeutrality bill as much as the Telco scams. Rather than goverment regulating the internet, I would like to see more broadband provider choices at the consumer level so that I can thumb my nose at Telcos that try to abuse QOS technology. The only reason Telcos can get away with this crap is because they are an effective monopoly for too many customers.
Actually, the Internet is like New Coke, it'll be around forever!
Hehh hehh hehh!
(Y'See, the kids, they listen to the rap, which gives them the brain damage!)
Hm. I wonder how difficult it would be to run a campaign to simply lower the average age of the senate. I mean, yes, stupidity is kinda global, but technology in general is understood better by those who grew up with it (or, at least, have kids who grew up with it to school them in how policy should be run - remember, we're talking about the senate; these kids could be up to 30 years old and still qualify).
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"Dear reader, suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself. " --Mark Twain.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
You forgot to point out his incredible time management skills. How he was able to co-invent the Internet while at the same time championing his wife's attempt at censoring music she didn't like is a marvel.
It's a shame the guy has more or less fallen out of poilitics. The innovation needed to create a global information sharing network and the moral authority to head censorship committees is a very rare combination indeed.
The point of the bridge was to allow two populations to commute easily. The Ketchikan International Airport (yes, international-- I think they can fly to Canada from Ketchikan) is on Gravina. Currently, commuting between Ketchikan and the airport requires taking one of two ferries, which are limited in capacity. During the summer when all the rich tourists are up catching their salmon, the ferries are somewhat packed.
That's the idea for the "bridge to nowhere." It's really the bridge between Ketchikan and its airport, so that rich tourists can get to the airport with all their damned salmon.
Believe me. I know. I was born in Ketchikan. I grew up in a logging camp near Ketchikan. I lived and worked in Ketchikan for a time. There *is* a need for a bridge between the two. It just ain't worth the cost.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Sounds like a cross-quote I heard that pretty much sums up this entire situation:
"Heinlein said: 'Technology, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic.' Similarly, comedy, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from politics." - my English 103 professor.
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The big store where I grew up in the 60's used this modern internet technology:
Pneumatic Tubes
Most Modern stores also had this technology
Fluoroscopes
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
The problem isn't that he thinks of the Internet as tubes. It's not as bad an analogy as I've heard before. And he's right that the tubes do get clogged.
What's wrong here is that they DIDN'T get clogged such that the slowed down that email of his. And he misunderstands what keeps those tubes wide and flowing.
These problems go together. The internet has a lot of capactity, and works pretty darn well (unlike his the mail/dns/anti-virus servers that delayed his email). It got that way because providing a good pipe was profitable to the companies involved. Allowing them to double bill makes it unnecessary for them to maintain this capacity for anyone but double paying customers. It takes the profit away from providing a good service and puts it into... well, a protection scheme, really, but let's come up with a better word. How about "a monopolistic pricing scheme."
His email (if it really had been delayed in clogged tubes) will take longer to arrive, in the future.
So this is either bad thinking or newspeak.
"Al Gore has a brain of his own,"
h eRichCorpsWhichWillBenefit)
that is exactly why he cannot become a President of the US. Nor will he last long in Politics in the Land of the Free. A politician has to be able to echo $opinionOfTheRichCorpsWhichWillBenefit(opinionOfT
"Mr. Gore championed the development of the private network as a public utility. This was years before Bill Gates, for example, recognized its importance. "
Really? Before 2001?
Y'know, with all of these horrid policies of net neutrality, legally-backed DRM on everything, and so on; we should make two "rooms" somewhere close enough to DC to bring policymakers to. In one room, you get access to a peer-supported free-for-all system, with (realistic) economic forecasts of how a free-media culture supports its artists, citing real world examples. In the other room, you get the DRM'ed, Net-traffic-law world, which resembles AOL, where you have to constantly pay for every piddly service, and all the media is essentially content-less, as it's entirely corporate, without any resampling, covers of classic songs, usage of old film clips, etc. All with another ecomomic forecast that reveals the reality of this world - oligopoly and monopoly-like businesses able to extract a huge percentage of consumer surplus, with actual lower payments to artists than the "free" model, and encouraging an increasingly unequal society.
We'd have to set up a list of tasks to do in each. e.g.
- you got called in to the office to do sign some papers, and will miss The Big Game. Can you - watch it over the Internet? record it at home for later? If possible, for how much?
- you heard a song on the radio that you liked, but didn't catch the artist's name. You called in to the radio station, but couldn't get ahold of anyone who could help. You remember some distinctive lyrics; can you "google" it?
-You bought a DVD movie. Your DVD player seems to be broken, can you watch it on your computer?
and so on.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
http://stevens.senate.gov/contact.cfm
Here's my letter:
-------------
Dear Senator Stevens,
I was shocked by your lack of understanding in regards to the functioning of the Internet when you spoke this past Thursday, June 29th on the issue of so-called "Net Neutrality". The fact that you voted against "Net Neutrality" based on an opinion that was born of this fatally flawed understanding is a real problem.
Please read the following article for an intelligent pro/con analysis of the "Net Neutrality". Also included in this message is an article on how the Internet works in general. Please don't vote on things you don't understand, and remember that more knowledge is *always* good.
Thanks very much,
Dale Cooper
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Neutrality
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet
Yeah, that's what I want. I don't want anyone but me hooked up to it then I won't have to worry about getting virusses or slashdotted or my internets (short for packets, I guess) bogged down behind your internets.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
Stevens presided over this hearing. He knows the facts of the matter quite well. This is not a case of ignorance but of deception. Sorry, it just is.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
The point is that Senator Al Gore has a brain of his own, and a very good one.
You've got to be kidding right!? Seriously, who in the hell takes this guy seriously when he makes statements about "We've got 10 years left on the enviroment". No sir, Gore has lost credibility with me. Then again, so have most/all other politicians out there too. So do us all a favor and put away your cowbell. We need less cheering and more critical thinking here on Slashdot.
Life is not for the lazy.
The implication of this article is a little smug and condescending. The guy may not have mastered the bucking bronco of grammar, but what he's saying isn't wrong. A fiber connection is indeed like a tube for which traffic has to queue for access, and not like a truck where you can add more or less cargo and it still gets there at the same time. I know that, and you know that, but my grandmother might find his explanation a lot clearer than how some /. readers would put it. If you were Alaskan, and he was talking about an arcane tax bill that affected you, you might even appreciate this kind of simplified language. I'm not saying you wouldn't laugh at him but you'd be grateful for the info.
Nothing in the article contributes to the actual debate on net neutrality. Some voters actually need the issues explained to them on a basic level-- if those people read this /. article they would feel like it was mocking them, and they'd pretty much be right. That's not how you get people on your side. Believe it or not, there are even smart people who don't know a stream from a datagram.
If this were a democracy then congress wouldn't have the incumbent retention rate of the politburo. Wake up. The joke's on YOU!
Politicus
In some ways, this is the dark side of democracy. Voting itself is something that would work better if the people with strong opinions were only those who were informed. In some ways, democracy itself -- by allowing people to vote without a credential -- encourages the notion that having an opinion does not require a credential.
I'm not saying that voting should be limited to only a certain group. But the reason I'm not saying that is not that I don't think there's a group that could do better--it's that there's no obvious way to correctly determine who that set is. We all protect ourselves from being politically excluded by politically including each other, and yet the enlightened among us surely know that some of those we include in the name of not being ourselves excluded, are less qualified than others ... unless you live in Lake Wobegon, where
all the children are above-average. [That Wikipedia entry, which I cited just to reference Lake
Wobegon at all, is suprisingly apropos to this discussion as it discusses the "Lake Wobegon effect".]
And so with people of differing abilities to discern truth serving as the voters who choose our politicians, it's little surprising that politicians don't target their campaigns to the most intellectual among us--why should they? The votes at the non-intellectual end of the spectrum have the same weight and are probably easier marks since they don't require careful science to persuade--indeed, careful science and actual facts are probably just an impediment. So it's little wonder we get this kind of politician. It's what sells--assuming you've made an honest understanding of who's in charge of buying.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
So the Senator thinks his e-mail is slow because it's stuck in some tube?
Maybe the NSA needs faster servers?
As you may recall, said Alaska nitwit has been pushing a bridge to nowhere for quite awhile. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2005/10/20/AR2005102001931.html
no, it's not funny, it is sad when what should be minimum requirements for doing a job seem ridiculous to you and those in office.
If a student didn't go to class and couldn't keep up with his reading assignments, either he's irresponsible or too much reading is being assigned.
I don't see why it should be any different for these people who are supposed to understand issues well enough to have an informed opinion and cast meaningful votes.
In the case of Congress, too much legislation is being introduced with voting happening too soon for even a very intelligent person to stay on top of every bill. Of course, this gives the parties a purpose, since legislators can't figure out for themselves which way to vote, they just vote the way the party tells them to on issues they don't understand.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
You can take just a couple of extra seconds and make a difference with your opinions on Net Neutrality
Here's another option as well: Donate money to Pete Ashdown who is a candidate for Orrin Hatch's US Senate seat in Utah.
Pete is the owner and founder of XMission, Utah's oldest ISP, and still one of its best. He understands the Internet thoroughly. Not only that:
Ashdown's biggest problem is money. He can beat Hatch, but he needs the funding to run an aggessive campaign, and he's not going to get it from the traditional democratic funding sources, because they long ago decided that Hatch is unbeatable. But if he can gather nationwide geek donations, demonstrating his ability to raise funds and mount a solid campaign, the democratic party will jump on board, and other major campaign contributors in Utah will as well.
Send the guy some cash and help jump-start a campaign that eliminates Hatch, puts a technically-savvy guy in the senate and shows how the Internet can change -- and improve! -- the way democracy works in the USA.
Seriously. He takes paypal. Send him $5.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
"Write Senator Stevens a short message expressing your concerns about his lack of expertise on the subject."
But, if everyone on slashdot does this, his tubes will be clogged till next Thursday!
The summary needs to spell "Internet" correctly. It's a proper noun and in English, proper nouns are capitalized. It's just plain gay to use all lower case for names.
In that situation, Enron pushed and pushed to let free markets dictate the price of power. Under a banner of "deregulation" they wanted to take control of the energy market to maximize their own profits.
Is this not what the telcos are asking for? They seem to be arguing that more government regulation will harm the consumer, when in fact, it appears that more government regulation is necessary to protect the consumer.
I think that if the telcos get their way, and are allowed to start "trading" on bandwidth, then we're headed for another enron. I don't mean that the telcos will start Enron's sketchy accounting practices, but rather that they will start manipulating the bandwidth market the way that Enron was manipulating California's energy market.
burrocrisy
and that would be what? Ruling by jackasses? Never has a slashdot misspelling been more apropos
It sure it a big relief to know that we are being so well represented by such well informed congressmen
Of course, the fact that these were seperated by decades has nothing to do with anything.
Perhaps more important is the fact that so many in the neo-cons wish to outlaw what they consider objectionable material whereas tipper wanted a rating system (games, music, tv using the v-chip). And yes, there some who were pushing censorship, but IIRC, she was not one of them. But I do not mind a rating system, whereas censorsip is a whole different animal.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Something that is shoved into the system without much thought or design can eventually be replaced if it continues to remain ill-fitting and generates too much friction. The system just gives a bumpy ride until then.
= 9J =
Wow, that's a interesting way to misread what he's been saying, though awful convenient if one would rather attack the man rather than actually address his message.
He didn't say that "We've got 10 years left on the enviroment", he's saying that there's a high probability that we have about a 10 year window available to us to get our global greenhouse emmisions under control before the changes become irrevocable. Since the changes due to warming tend to reinforce one another, once the cycle gets too far along our ability to influence and ameliorate it largely goes away.
Stevens, and others in Congress, are what the great comedy troup Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie called 12 o'clock flashers. Every electronic device in their house is always flashing 12:00. It is physically impossible, no matter how much you dumb down the terms, to explain the concept of the internet to the feeble brain of a 12 o'clock flasher. You might as well read them the writings of Stephen Hawking in Dutch. No matter how simply you dumb down the concept of email, they are still receiving an "internet", they boot to "Microsoft", Windows are what line the walls of their office, and rebooting involves kicking more than once. These are the same guys who break their "cupholders" and scream at tech support for their incompetence when they don't realize they have the program minimized. I know there are many here in this august body who have greying hair as a result of these lusers and can attest to Mr. Stevens incompetence just by hearing about his reciept of an "internet". He probably asked his secretary to download the "internet" to a floppy so he could read it in his spare time.
No animals were harmed in the making of this sig.
Well, there was that one puppy, but he is all better now.
This is very true - people who were there in the early days all know Gore was our champion on the Hill. He "got it" before a lot of alleged visionaries did (Bill Gates being the prime example) and he did more for the internet than any other politician. Al Gore knows he didn't invent the internet, his political enemies know he never actually claimed to have invented the internet, but if any politician can be credited with responsibility for participating in creating the internet it is Al Gore.
> and argue that I shouldn't be charged for changing my Queue.
If you did that, Senetor Stevens wouldn't vote for you either...
The reason being, he's actually saying here, in his quaint little way, two things
1. You can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service.
2. You can change your order but you pay for that.
So, he's aware that if he changes his order, he will pay for that. He seems to be prepared to accept this.
But then he goes on;
..."[on the internet] you can order ten of them delivered to you
..."Those pipes can be filled. Your message is going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material."
and the delivery charge is free"
which does appear to be a fairly cogent argument about why things such as movies are (or should be) cheaper to watch online. It's good that he can grasp this concept (I wonder if he's taken advantage of that particular "service" himself?), but then he goes on to say;
"Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?"
Which, I believe, is related to the next bit, where he complains about his - no, wait -looks like he got a bit confused here, no, welll, that's only to be expected, he's not a technician, after all...his EMAIL was delayed by, by, by - what?* By all this "commercial" stuff..
"So you want to talk about the consumer?"
OK, sure...
"Let's talk about you and me." Not following you there, Stevie boy, are you (and well, I supposed I'll consider myself here - just for the sake of argument, even though I'm fairly certain we don't have a lot in common...) - Are you talking about US (that's a commonly used contraction of "you and me" for all you grammar geeks out there) - "Us" as consumers, or "us" as...
"We use this internet to communicate and we aren't using it for commercial purposes."
Hmmmm...Well, he's right there, for most consumers. They don't actually use the internet to produce anything commercially. But then a lot of consumers of an Inetnet Service Providers's services do produce stuff commercially...Still not clear, then. Let's read on and see what we can see...
So, we don't have to discriminate against people that want to exploit the internet for commercial gain (possibly raising the idea that we can discriminate against them if we want to?) and then says that the bill was an attempt to pass a law saying "No one can charge anyone for massively invading this world of the internet, filling up our tubes and slowing down our email"
"Now I think these people [that] are arguing whether they should be able to dump all that stuff on the internet ought to consider if they should develop a system themselves. Maybe there is a place for a commercial net but it's not using what consumers use every day. It's not using the messaging service that is essential to small businesses, to our operation of families."
Which could be saying that if commercial interests want to make a system such as video-on-demand or IPTV, they might want to consider building a network of their own to do that on. An..."internet", if you will...But don't expect to go using "our" internet if it means that "our" emails will be late. Well, yes, that sound like it could have possibilities...
Then he gets to the bit about pipes, only, oh dear he gets the name wrong, the man must be a total jackass...Let's continue with our translation, so;
Which seems to indicate that he has at least grasped an understanding of why his email was slow the other day. This may also be construed as a good thing.
So, three good basic concepts floating around in that loose agglomeration of hazy conceptualisation that serves most people when it comes to any of that "technical bullshit" that they don't want to have to wo
For those who don't know about Senator Stevens, he is a senior member of the Senate and has lots of power. He is the chair of the commerce committee. I only follow the Senate now and then, but to me he seems to be the model of what's wrong with American government. When the government need to cut down the budget, he refused to cut a $400 million bridge project in Alaska. To many, the bridge was a pork barrel project that connected the main part of Alaska to a remote village of 300 people. Currently the village uses ferries. Those dealing with the situation didn't want to remove it completely but rather postpone it or at least fund it in phases.
When Big Oil execs testified in front of Congress last year, he refused to swear them under oath as is the custom. Time and time again Stevens seems to be doing what is in the lobbyist's best interest like right now with the net netruality bill.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Some one should tell him we stoped using tubes years ago, now we use transistors.
I read the article, I was just trying to add some humor to a desperate situation.
Faith_Healer -- The antethsis to almost everything, and the worlds worst speller.
Senator Stevens, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
Insert witty comment here
Sorry if someone already said this, but I don't have time to read all the comments. What really bothered me is how much he mentioned "the consumer". Numerous times he says that the internet is "there for the consumer". Yeah, people buy stuff online, but there's a LOT more going on in that wacky thing they call the intarwe... internet. The net neutrality bill concerns tiered services and content providers. Content providers are NOT consumers -- they're companies. Maybe I'm misinformed (if so, someone tell me), but this guy doesn't have a clue. Sounds like he had too much vodka for breakfast.
Stevens, like other senators, is bought and paid for. There is no chance of changing his mind unless you come up with more money.
Where the focus needs to be on, is our own senators. They need to be educated about this. Keep in mind that most are bought and paid for by some indisutry, but no industry controls a majority.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Like the ol' Libertarian saying goes:
Those who can, do. Those who can't govern.
I dunno, might make a good bumper sticker.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fidonet
However, this doesn't generate enough revenue for the Telcos, so they come up with an even "better" idea. They install traffic lights at the freeway entrance ramps, which allows cars onto the road at timed intervals, keeping the freeway nice and empty. They also install reserved on ramps which are available only to cars with special passes.
it's not that we want to insult them, it's that we need to educate them as to the earthly nature of the magic they call the interweb!
They're using their grammar skills there.
"I want twenty copies of the internet sent to me by this afternoon?"
"What?"
"You listen to what I tell you, Im a Senator."
(from somethingawful.com)
You mean the fact that Arpanet was already moving from research to deployment when Gore was still in college, right? Because the time discrepancy in my own rambling was caused by the fact that I followed along with the original poster's (aka Cerf's Close Buddy) lies.
is no worse than the car analogies used around here.
[Shake is being held hostage by the Plutonians.]
Shake: This ship is great! You guys got these amazing space- age tubes runnin' every which way!
Oglethorpe: Ya, they're called *pipes*.
Shake: You guys are great... Well, not you guys, but the stuff you guys have is just..
Could you expand your critique into something meaningful for the majority of us who don't know what the fuck you're on about?
Bush seems to defy this logic. I have met crazy bums on the street who spoke more intelligently and eloquently.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
He got the whole Internet in his "In" box. That would surely eat up a lot of bandwidth.
Just the other day, someone e-mailed me Usenet, but fortunately my Spam filter discarded 98% of it.
This is the part that reveals how little he knows about the internet and technology in general:
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?
It's a series of tubes.
Dear Mr. Stevens,
Yes, Mr. Stevens it is. We engineers call those tubes "wires". They are very similar to the tubes or "wires" connecting your light switch to your lamp. The information in those tubes travels very fast: A message sent on 10:00 Friday and received on 10:00 Monday, it could have gone entirely around the Earth over 1,000,000 times.
So why did your message take so long? That is a good question and one that I suggest you have your staff investigate. You see, there are a few possiblities and several of them represent threats to National Security. To start with, let me explain how email works. It works a lot like regular mail: you write the message and put it in an "outbox". Eventually an aide comes along and collects it and send it to the mailbox down the hall. From there, someone else collects it and drives it down to the depot. On it goes until it ends up in the destination inbox. Due to the fact that the email is moved through "tubes", it gets moved to the next stop automatically as soon as the next stop says it can receive it. Each stop only handles emails: videos, parcels, web browsing and finance all use a different set of stations (same "tubes" though because they are so darn fast).
The only delay is at the "stations." Contrary to what others might have told you, there is no way your email could have taken several days due to network congestion. Remember how fast those tubes are? Imagine if someone who ordinarily had a 1 hour commute was 8.75 billion years late for work. Would you accept their explanation that "traffic was bit heavy"?
Now those stations can introduce a delay. At each station, they need to look at the outside of the envelope and sort your mail to know what tube to put it in next...that can take a second or two (enough time for your email to go around the world a few dozen times). Some stations might check to see that your mail doesn't contain anything harmful or annoying to you such as viruses and spam...obviously that takes a bit longer. (say 2 to 5 minutes). In your part of the world there might even be stations that check to see that your email doesn't contain anything "interesting" such as major changes to the funding landscape, strong constituent opinion or personal indiscretions.
All of this adds up to a few minutes tops. The only (I repeat ONLY) time an email can take more than an hour or so to go through is if a human is involved. Ordinarily that means one of: 1) your aide left the email on the counter; 2) you forgot to check your mail; 3) one of the intermediate stations was "closed" for some reason; 4) your email got stopped at a "checkpoint" somewhere where it had to wait for a human (who may have been away for the weekend) had to read it.
I'm going to assume that you and your staff are savvy enough that (1) or (2) didn't apply. My best guess is that something went wrong in an internal government server (in the business we call those "outages") which nobody could or did fix for three days. Now I realize that you and I work for very different organizations but a three day outage without any notification on one of our servers would result in more than one person being fired AND would trigger a full security audit. Since no-one appears to have seen fit to notify you about this outage and it appears that you've had smoke blown up your aide with respect to the cause, I would suggest that you request an investigation. Even after applying the maxim of "never ascribe to malice what can be explained by stupidity", I cannot think of an innocent reason for such a long unexplained outage.
Yours Most Sincerely,
AC.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2005/10/20/AR2005102001931.html
This guy wanted to build 3 bridges in Alaska to tiny islands where nobody lives with more funds than it would've taken to give those people speedboats and gas for the boats for life! He's an idiotic moron!
-Palal
The original quote comes from an interview with Wolf Blitzer back in 1999 and is a poorly worded, self serving attempt to show he is helping foster innovation in this country. His exact quote (emphasis added to illustrate where the "I created the internet" came from):
Interpret that as you will.
No animals were harmed in the making of this sig.
Well, there was that one puppy, but he is all better now.
You don't understand how politics works.
"Bridge to Nowhere" isn't even a good criticism of this project, you fell for that hook, line, and sinker like everyone else who parrots the same.
"Bridge to Nowhere" is a lot better criticism than, some 30 sentence rant which I am too bored to read.
The key to his rambling was that if a content provider is sending something via internet instead of by post, that content provider should have to pay for it. He must think that commercial entities like google and slashdot sign up for $30/month at their local cable company in order to dump "enourmous amounts of information" into his tubes. What he is arguing has absolutely nothing to do with net neutrality. The market already does what he thinks it should do, it rations out bandwidth to those willing to pay for it. The anti-neutrality lobby has sold him and everyone else a bill of goods when they frame the argument this way.
*There used to be a time once when Republicans were the fiscally responsible party. Seriously.
That ended when Ronald Reagan came to realize people love tax cuts, and hate spending cuts... and it's a lot easier politically to rack up a huge deficit than try to be responsible.
So you can blame Reagan.
But really the fault lies with the stupidity of the electorate for falling for his rhetoric.
It took days because the tubes were clogged. If you supported his Netocracy bill, then you'd be able to send your internet over the Marie Antionette Memorial Super Information Highway at a cost of 10 cents per interbit and it would arrive in minutes rather than days.
You don't have to wait for the incredibly slow MP3 download anymore. Thankfully, Google has a bigger tube, and can push it faster.
3 6203209658
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-56823722
-- Mark Lyon http://www.marklyon.org
.. in reading this that's what I think about..
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
I agree that there is a problem here, but your solution is just clueless. How do you suggest that representitives determine the opinions of his constituents? Do you suggest Americans "vote" on every issue like we vote on our representitives? If not, then are you suggesting the Representitive rely on polling? What if there are two polls that show different results? What if the poll is within the margin of error?
And what are you going to do when it's a vote to raise the debt ceiling or override a veto or ratify a treaty? If you think it's bad to have 535 people vote on something that they don't understand, why would you want 300 million?
And if you think we have low turnout now, just wait to see how low it gets when we have to vote a dozen times every single day.
The idea is to elect someone that agrees with you on MOST things. Or at least the most important things.
You too can download the internet right here: http://www.onzin.nl/internetdownload/
And besides the taxes paying for them, the private car drivers, and the commercial truck drivers are already paying their monthly fees to use the roads.
Net neutrality is about not allowing them to artificially slow down those paying customers, on those public roads, who refuse to pay EVEN MORE on top of that.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
That doesn't sound much better as far as credibility goes. Is there any scientific evidence to back up his assertion?
The free market is not about charging a fair price based on supply and demand; It's about charging the maximum price that the market will bare. Fairness never enters into the equation.
Free markets don't require this condition, though they generally should allow it. The problem is that if enough actors get caught up in the philosophy that maximized self-interest is the ultimate good, it will inevitably reach such a condition.
And this is a strong reason why markets can't be trusted as the sole arbiting type of social institution, or even, probably, the most ascendant one.
Tweet, tweet.
I'm not usually one to defend Gore, I certainly never voted for him, but if you're going to quote someone you better make sure it is accurate. Just as bad to falsely criticize politicians for things they didn't say as to not criticize them for things they did say.
And, he never said we have ten years left on the environment, he said that he believed scientists who said that it was likely that in 10 years we'd be crossing the point of no return. That is, we hit the point where global warming runs out of our ability to fix.
A blog about stuff.
Audio avalaible here:
3
http://media.publicknowledge.org/stevens-on-nn.mp
Big mistake. Arpanet was DEFINITELY not the Internet. The entire purpose of DARPA is to learn more efficient ways of killing people and destroying their property. The U.S. government is dominated by people who make a huge profit from "defense"-related sales (like the Bush family and Dick Cheney); they have helped make killing people the U.S. government's primary way of relating to situations it doesn't like.
Eventually, some universities and defense-related companies (like Tektronix) were allowed access to Arpanet. There were MANY people at the time, maybe most of the users, who were extremely opposed to making the Inter-network open to everyone.
Al Gore decided that the Inter-network should become a public utility, and provided the funding to make that happen. Vint Cerf says that it is doubtful that would have happened, at least when it did, without Al Gore's understanding and support.
Without people like Al Gore, Slashdot would be a BBS.
Ah, The Honorable Senator from my home state. Why, it seems like just yesterday that he earmarked over $20M to buy a Cray Y-MP for the University of Alaska Fairbanks in order to help researchers learn to "harness the power of the aurora borealis".
/wish I was kidding.
//but I'm not.
//"oh god, you're posting on slashdot?" - officemate
You see the Internet is just a bunch of Tubes, kinda like how Georgej pgt ube.png
e s-amy.png
Jetson gets around.
Like this:
http://www.levysoft.it/images/p576_futurama_tube.
Or this:
http://tfp.killbots.com/xpicons/fug91/tn/063_amy-
And when the Internet gets full, well its kinda like this:
http://tfp.killbots.com/xpicons/fug91/tn/033_herm
You dont want your Internet to be like THAT do ya?
-JP
"self serving attempt to show he is helping foster innovation in this country"
Oh no! He is attempting to show he is helping foster innovation in this country!
How awful. He ought to be telling us about how strong and proud he is to be a strong proud proud strong or how much he likes cutting brush on his brand new ranch.
Gore was running for president. It is a JOB INTERVIEW! I am not going to bother to look up exactly the question Blitzer asked but it was something along the lines of "what good stuff did you do in congress?". Being a guy who actually did things to be proud of in congress he listed one.
Al Gore was the number one guy in congress on the internet as was stated by republican congressmen when the right wing media machine was going nuts with thier paraphrasing of an out of context partial sentence quotation working thier asses off to turn a positive for Gore into a negative by relying on the fact that thier domination of the media megaphone can outweigh the facts of the matter.
"That doesn't sound much better as far as credibility goes. Is there any scientific evidence to back up his assertion?"
Translation: "I don't know what's happening, and I didn't bother to read the comments in this thread, but I'm still skeptical."
Al Gore is a movie star: An Inconvenient Truth (2006). Read the IMDB comments, such as this one: "Fact-laden, straightforward documentary with some comic insertions".
RottenTomatoes rates the movie 92% positive.
Watch the movie advertisement on YouTube. " The most terrifying movie of the summer. You owe it to the planet to see the truth. Pledge to see An Inconvenient Truth opening weekend."
"It's a mind-boggling disaster epic that draws its special power from the fact that we are both the villains and victims of the story." -- William Arnold, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
Wow! Did a nun beat you as a child?
if you have everybody who realise they're wrong withdraw because of their own perceived stupidity, you'll just be left with the people who weren't capable of realising their errors. Learning is doing mistakes; people who never do mistakes are just good at shifting blame.
Which leaves us with people like Tuttle Oklahoma's City Manager, Jerry Taylor.
Stevens is powerful in the Senate because he has been there a LONG time (37 years). Former Senator Frank Murkowski was in office for 21 years (then he effectively claimed the Govenorship, and apponted his daughter to his Senate seat). Representitive Don Young has been in office for 33. It has nothing to do with oil revenue, and all to do with term in office.
The fourth result on a Google search for "alaska oil money" would get you to http://www.apfc.org/theapfc/faq.cfm, where you could read all about these "oil" checks" (it's called the Permanent Fund Dividend), how it was created and how much is distributed on a yearly basis. FWIW, oil revenues are a very small part of the Fund any more, and only five of the 23 dividend checks have breached $1,500 (1998-2002). In the early 80's they were closer to $500 (not counting the first, at $1,000).
Whether you agree with his position on net neutrality or not, his metaphor is accurate and his description of the problem is correct.
The internet is like a bunch of tubes and only so much data can only be pushed through them. If you allow spammers to send as much as they want, it prevents other information from passing through the tube.
He's right in his quantification too. The internet will not support video. Not on a universal level. One out of a million people watching a two inch square, low resolution, low budget video filmed in the San Fernando valley is doable. But three out of four people watching reality TV at the same time is a physical impossibility with the network infrastructure for at least decades to come.
I support net neutrality.
Yeah, this is the person you'd want to have design your network, the guy behind the proposed Bridge to Nowhere. A $223 million, mile-long bridge to connect Ketchikan, Alaska (pop 8000) to Gravina Island (pop 50). The intent of the bridge, it seems, is to put the local ferry boat operator out of business.
He obviously has watched the informative tutorial on internet functionality from the most recent sbemail. Here we can clearly see that the internet is indeed made of helium filled tubes.
Stevens is a total, complete, asshole of the very brownest kind. Alaska actually gives money to its' tax "payers" every year from all the income they get from oil kickbacks...sorry, "usage fees"...yet Alaska is still consistantly the 2nd or 3rd in the country for Federal revenue payments. Stevens (and I am NOT making this up) is the same genius who stood up at the podium in the Senate and screamed "NO!" when someone suggested they give up some of their Federal - not state, not oil, just Federal, and not all of them by any means - funds to help cover the disaster in New Orleans. And he did keep them from cutting a single dime from the bushels of money earmarked for Alaska.
The man is an unmitigated disgrace. In a sane government he would have been tossed into prison years ago.
If that's the case, where did his bogoscience global warming movies come from?
Listening to what he has to say, I find it far more plausible that he was always like this; he just hid it better before. Now that he's no longer an office holder and probably never will be again, he's letting it all hang out.
i live in fairbanks and as far as im concerned all the bridges are pointless. the city of anchorage doesn't need to grow any more its plenty big enough imho. Is it really that much extra work to just drive around the inlet instead of having to endure all the political crap thats going to come with the development of a project like this? theres no reason to build that stupid bridge or any of those bridges and the only reason they are being considered is because teddy here is on (chairing?) the board of science and transportation ( or something to that affect) the whole thing is a pointless moneypit and in fact despite what a lot of you might think its not something a lot of the residents here want.
"and thats all i have to say about THAT" -2 the ranting gryphon
As a former Alaskan resident, I feel more than enough standing to complain about this evil yahoo.
During hearings on oil industry price gouging, Sen. Cantwell wanted to put those testifying under oath. Stevens arrogantly refused. The oil execs promptly and obviously lied throughout the hearings. Stevens made it possible. They basically pissed on the face of the Congress, and by extension, on the American people, and Stevens held their dicks.
How's this:
1. Phone conversations trasvel from your phone to the telco through wires or optical cable. This is called "data."
2. Big Company down the street (which includes the mall, your electricity provider, and other companies you do business with) sends more data through the wires than individual users like you, so the telcos want to charge them more.
3. If they do this, your cost for goods and services will go up because Big Company must extend its increased phone costs to its customers.
4. Although Big Company sends more data than you, they already pay more for it in the number of lines coming into the building, taxes, and special service fees.
5. Each time you call Big Company, it will cost them and you more money, from which the telco profits.
6. Data is data, whether voice or computer data on the internet (it all travels over the same wires and cables, and voice data gets converted to computer/digital data at some point, anyway).
7. "Net neutrality" means the telco cannot disctiminate between Big Company data and your data and charge more or less accordingly.
8. Vote for me 'cause I'm smart, I make things go, and I look for things.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
We need less cheering and more critical thinking here on Slashdot.
Then go away. We don't need your jeering either.
--For Immediate Release--
From the Office of US Senator Ted Stevens:::
My fellow citizens, the internets is made up of carbon-fiber nanotubes, which grow only in permafrost and are harvested mainly from the arctic tundra at the wildlife refuge. Now, we must slow down the internets because, as you know, that tundra will soon be given over to oil recovery and we soon will no longer harvest carbon-fiber nanotubes.
Also, as you know, the Russians have a vast area of arctic tundra on which to grow carbon-fiber nanotubes, and before we suffer a carbon-fiber nanotube gap which will give strength and fortitude to the vital bodily fluids of corrupt, former-communists, the oil we recover from Alaska will be burnt to warm the globe to a temperature where Russian permafrost becomes unsuitable for growing carbon-fiber nanotubes.
If Americans everywhere can reduce their use of the internets, we can move forward with these plans today.
A few pages about the people from whom Stevens has been taking bribes.
1 News Corp $47,250
2 Boeing Co $41,900
3 Verizon Communications $36,550
4 Veco Corp $31,750
5 Viacom Inc $23,000
6 AT&T Inc $22,500
7 General Electric $20,000
7 Walt Disney Co $20,000
9 BAE Systems $19,000
10 Northrop Grumman $18,000
11 Cubic Corp $17,250
12 Mantech International $16,500
13 Intergraph Corp $15,600
14 Cassidy & Assoc/Interpublic Group $15,569
15 General Dynamics $15,000
15 Lockheed Martin $15,000
15 Northern Lights PAC $15,000
15 Teamsters Union $15,000
19 Science Applications International Corp $14,500
19 Sprint Nextel $14,500
Has all this corruption and ineptitude in our government caused anybody else to come to the conclusion that gun control is a bad idea?
No one said "self serving = bad". I use self serving phrasiology every day to show my boss that Slashdot keeps me on the cutting edge and I deserve a raise for staying so savvy.
No animals were harmed in the making of this sig.
Well, there was that one puppy, but he is all better now.
Not sure where you live, but there are several tolls built across I-95 here in the northeast. New Hampshire has one, and Maine has several. The cheapest one to go through is the toll for I-95 in Hampton, NH at $1. The ones in Maine are even higher. I think the I-95 York toll booth is almost $2 now!
I am willing to pay. People pirating things left and right have pretty much demonstrated that they are not. This crap is a huge fraction of all of the data on the system now.
Now, if you want to subscribe to a premium porn-site that gives you ultra-quick downloads of horse-spanking pictures, you can be right up at the front of the line with me. I don't mind.
basic rights such as freedom of association, property rights, and a civil society. However, even limiting oneself to the very small subset of countries with truly democratic societies, the rich ones are the ones with less restrictive economic laws.
ffs, I mod (the interesting/insightful) parent up on a 0 post, and get -1 offtopic.
The parent post actually ends up +5 insightful.
Perhaps I am indeed 'off-topic', but I would also suggest that I am pretty fucking +5 insightful myself for sugeesting a 0 rated post is actually itself interesting/insightful.
{erhaps you are the dick that also moderated the parent offtopic. Yes, a post which in its entirity discusses the fucking topic - "I know, I'll mark that off-topic!"
You'll never read this. What do I care. I'm angry. And also probably being given -1 Troll/Flamebait right now. The karma system shat on me from the start so I don't care. Fuck you.
Invaders must die
Food, Shelter, Clothing:
The Internet allows us to buy different versions of the same, but it doesn't provide, or really do a lot to produce the things that are really important. Maybe there is an automated watering system out there, but most cornfields don't need IP addresses.
Family, Religion, Education:
The Internet can be useful for these things, but they all were available, and would still be available if the whole 'net shut down right now.
Police, Fire Fighters, Medical care:
In some ways, these things are complicated by the Internet, 911 over VOIP is a problem, as well as quack devices/drugs bought online.
I'd be perfectly happy if the government never passed any laws specifically for the Internet. it's fun and all that, but I could live without it.
amazing aint it? and there are a bunch of gnomes and mices sitting
around and spin the wheel so the data can go across those tube!!
Yuk Yuk Yuk , what do you expect from some GOP senator from Alaska ??
Imagine you live in Venice, but a Venice in which everybody has to live in apartment blocks owned by real estate developers. And the imagine that everybody in this imaginary venice communicates by ... uh... homing fish. Like homing pigeons, but they're fish, right?
The homing fish are quite small; they can only carry a very short letter's worth of information. If you have a long letter, it's split up and put on two, three or even more pieces and put on separate fish. But it doesn't matter because taking it apart and putting it back together again is done for you. The fish are quite smart, if one canal is congested or closed, they will take the next one, or even backtrack and find a completely different route.
Now some people have figured out can... uh... split up a video tape and attach the bits to a sequence of fish. In fact the pieces of the tape are put back together again and fed into your VCR before the entire tape is received. Of course sometimes a piece doesn't arrive on time, and then your video "skips".
Now what net neutrality is this: you order up whatever you want, and the fish takes the shortest, least congested route. On average, it actually works pretty well.
Companies who are against net neutrality are like large landlords who want to cordon off part of the canals that run by their building to create special fishways for their fish. The idea is that if you live on their block, you will have to order videos from them. You can still order videos from a different provider, but it won't work as well.
---
And that, my friends, is what this is all about. It's about turning the Internet into Cable TV. Welcome to the world of choosing between "Basic Internet" and different packages of "Premium Channels". If your service doesn't include "The Sci-Fi" channel, and you want it, prepare to pay for a service upgrade, switch providers, or do without.
I live on the border of two towns. My cable TV service comes in, not through my town, but through the other town. So, my choices of cable channels and whatnot are what are provided to the other town, not mine. I can't get my town's programming, including school committee meetings and other community access programming. My fate, as a cable TV subscriber, is determined by who I can get to provide my hookup.
If net neutrality ends, then we will not be in charge of who we buy content from any more. It will be determined by our ISP. If I have cable broadband and not DSL, or vice versa, I might have no choice at all.
ISPs will no longer be incented to compete on the quality of their service and network. They will be in the content business. Rather than improving their network overall, they will instead focus on delivering the content they think most of their customers will pay premiums for. If you want content outside their network, prepare for it not to work.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If ever there was an underrated troll post...
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Bottom line is, Gore isn't a dumbass and "Bridge to Nowhere" Stevens is. And many people aren't capable of distinguishing this.
If that's the case, where did his bogoscience global warming movies come from?
...
Huh? What does this have to do with it? His knowledge of the internet and his knowledge of global warming are completely unrelated.
I find it far more plausible
Right - you're trusting your gut to tell you the truthiness of the situation when the only thing GPP has is some historical fact.
Last post!
Stevens is known to be very powerful in the Senate ("Dances with Bottomless War Chest"). Despite Alaska's low population (let alone population density), it makes you wonder how it happens...unless you know about this:
The fact that Stevens is an idiot about technology doesn't detract from the fact that the Senate was designed for state representation, not population representation. In those terms, Alaska is the largest state with the most coastline, with a lot more resources than some very populous states. Pure democracy never does take that sort of thing into account, which is one reason we have a split Congress.
The dividend checks are really a small chunk of change compared to annual income. Usually $1000 a year or so, basically what would fall below IRS reporting if it was your only income. The dividend checks are just a portion of dividends paid on the permanent fund, a chunk of money set aside for growing dividends eternally. I'd say $1000 a year is equitable for having to deal with 7 months of snow and ~3 months with less than 8 hours of daylight.
The Senate has moderation; it's called the people who vote the Senators into office
Are you really gullible enough to believe your system is working? You have to be a fucking rich bastard to run for office in your gerrymandered district designed to keep you in office if the rigged closed source voting machines happen to fail you. Yeah, "Mr. Smith goes to Washington" alright. Everything is DC is bought and paid for by multinational corporations, and that is why America will fall. It's illegal to receive funds from Buddhist nuns, but from a corporation like Sony, oh yeah, that's fine. Just let Japan and China dictate policy through their corporations. That's how you get staggering trade deficits, an insane national debt, and "free trade" which is only free in one direction with a communist dictatorship that publicly slaughtered thousands of unarmed civilians less than two decades ago. America the free? America the doomed.
Seven of Stevens' top 20 campaign contributors were Telecommunications and Media/Cable Companies.
I'd love to change the world but I can't find the source code.
Why be all socialist and get someone else who will never use it to pay for it?
See, this is the funny thing: I'm discovering I have a socialist bent. I don't know why. I guess I'm just getting disillusioned with the perverted form of capitalism practiced by the USA. (Hey, at least I know it's not real capitalism. I just think communism and capitalism have one thing in common: human nature will not allow them to work in practice.)
Anyway, so I have a socialist bent. And I think it's a stupid bridge. They've been charging US$4 for the ferry ride for about a billion years, hoping to raise enough money to build the bridge. Okay, that's cool. But the money never goes to a fucking bridge. It always goes somewhere else, like helping absorb the cost of the pulp mill shutting down because it won't pay for the upgrades required to come in to compliance with anti-pollution laws.
It's not smart, no matter what social or economic or political band to which you think you belong. And yet it was a serious thing, that got serious funding.
This all just goes to show that it doesn't matter whether you believe in capitalism or socialism, democracy or fascism, it's always fucked up.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
I'm from here alright. I'd like to impeach the current President, and am working to elect candidates who will vote to impeach in 2006. What are you doing? Besides posting smarmy putdowns, that is.
And how did you come to come to this mistaken conclusion, anyway? Sheesh...
"Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair" - George Washington
While I love Wired, Public Knowledge actually broke this story. The Wired blogger even credits Art Brodsky for the tip. The original blog post, with the MP3 (to which Wired hotlinked), is available here: Stevens on Network Neutrality. Maybe this detail got lost in the tubes, which are all stopped up with video.
Anyway, do listen to the MP3! It's very funny.
(Full disclosure: I'm a PK intern this summer.)
Both sides are lying, somewhat, although one is indeed a lot worse than the other. The (relatively) good guys want enhanced QOS to be free. The bad guys want to use the legitimate need to charge for enhanced QOS as an excuse to turn the whole Internet into AOL.
I propose calling the bluffs of both sides, via Tariff Rebate Passthrough. The essence of the idea is:
Discussion of this idea can be found at http://www.monashreport.com/category/public-policy -and-privacy/net-neutrality/
To err is human. To forgive is good system design.
http://www.savetheinternet.com/
There are 2 other sites that host this misinformational video. If you watch it you'll see the "tubes" that the senator talks about.
"Right - you're trusting your gut to tell you the truthiness of the situation when the only thing GPP has is some historical fact."
He got your number on that one, buddy.
OMG! OMG! This guy said something that wasn't straight from the looney leftie kookosphere!!! OMG! OMG! Mod him Flamebait, QUICK!!!!