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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.'"
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.]
Huh? No, the "bridge to nowhere" would go from Ketchikan (population 8,000) to Gravina Island (population less than 50). If agriculture on Gravina Island has anything to do with it, that's news to me; the officially defined need says nothing about farming the island's mountain ranges. What probably is related is that your governor's wife owns 33 acres on that island. I can understand why you might be unaware of that fact -- he failed to disclose it as required by state law.
Alaskan politicians may be working on a useless Anchorage-Wasilla bridge also, but that's not that famous "bridge to nowhere."
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.
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.
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
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"
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?