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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.'"
Napoleon Bonaparte
"Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence."
I think people really need to take that to heart more.
Do you really expect every lawmaker to be an expert on everything?
Only the important thing right? But what's important to you isn't important to a farmer in Nebraska.
Our system is a bunch of stupid idiots who have few opinions. They are bombarded with lobbists MORE then we are with advertising. People PAYED to explain to them one side of an issue the don't have the first clue about.
This is why letters to your congressmen are important. You educated them and show them an issue is important to their constiuents. Look up the numbers, it takes very few people swing a district election or even a senate seat. They can't afford to have someone back home start seriously networking against there campaign.
One person actively dragging people out and mobilizing them can kill their next bid surer then a scandal.
People don't have power in this country only because they think they don't.
"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
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.
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.]
The fancy term for this phenomenon is metacognitive miscalibration - which basically means thinking that you know more than you do.
Apropos in an amazing array of situations - this being an outstanding example.
Thank you for your message.
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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.
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.
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.
FWIW, ISPs in Europe commonly offer TV (including HD —no idea of the resolution though) and VOIP bundled in with the network connectivity.
Of course this typically currently only works in reasonably densly populated areas where ADSL2+ can be deployed (distance contraints from the user to the telco equipment) although it gradually starts to cover the countryside as well.
Of course in this configuration, video is only streamed from the ISP to its users, no through the Internet. So called "last mile" bandwidth can't possibly a problem. It could theoretically be possible that the backbones lacked bandwidth at some point. Isn't there still lots of dark fiber lying around though ?
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
Huh? No they really are not. Did you ever hear about something call truncating and load-sharing? If there ever comes a time when your ISP (or any in the line between you and your data), they can and will simply upgrade their connection. You see, they are actually be PAID to transmit/carry that data. The more data that flows through their "pipes", the more they can "bill" OTHER ISP's that connect through them. So whenever they have an edge router that starts hitting its limits, it is always in their own best interests to replace/upgrade/load-share/truncate that connection so that they can bill even more money to the people around them. Maybe there are vast amount of data going through those pipe because of porn and p2p applications, but you know what that means to the compaines? They have more data to BILL other companies with to get more money for the service they provide by allowing that data to use the network infrastructure.
In the meantime, all the legit stuff is in threat of getting caught up in a porn jam.
I say "huh?" and "what?" again. You are under the misconception that some data is more important then other data. You see you are falling into the biggest trap there is when dealing with an entity like the internet. You will almost always be "biased" toward what you want to use the internet for. So your particular "types" of data you feel should get priority. Well the problem is that the person next to you will have a completely different set of priorities, and the next one, and the next, and so on and so forth. There are probably thousands of people out there who feel that their NTP traffic should have "realtime" priority over everything. Now imagine if we actually started to try and do things like this. Well, your ISP will because you are so happy to pay extra for it, will prioritize on http traffic, email, and maybe VOIP (assuming you use "their" VOIP and not someone elses). But the people you wish to connect to are not using your same ISP, instead they are using one that results in your traffic crossing, lets say "three" other ISP's inbetween yours and theirs. Let us also greatly assume that because you are not on those other 3 ISP's, they will most likely NOT have the exact same priorities. Why? Because you aren't the one paying them directly. One their network, they have paying customers that want different things, so they prioritize differently as a result. Now, back to my case here, ISP "A" has a priority of http, email and ftp, but VOIP is not considered a priority because they also own a POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) network, so VOIP is a direct competition to their phone services, and they do not want anything to do with it. ISP "B" has a priority of http, ftp, and VOIP. Email is not high priority on ISP "B" because they feel that email should be handled the way it was origionally intended, as a simple, unreliable delivery mechanism. ISP "C" prioritizes p2p, ftp, and VOIP because their main business is "content" delivery. They have a major customer who has a p2p video delivery system which uses ftp connections to get the data out first to several servers and then uses them to seed the data into a custom p2p network.
Now your problem is that you want to connect to someone else, and your network connection path goes through all those other ISPs, well, your optimized connection inside your ISP, just have every one of your critical uses degraded and and relegated to transmittion only when there was nothing else occuring through those other ISP networks. This is what WILL happen. Your money isn't enough to change the immediate priorities of every ISP in the world or even the immediate world around your ISP.
You know what? My legitimate downloads or VoIP should get priority over your illegal
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.