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.'"

Comments

Subliterate Legislators

[(1 -sqrt(5))*(2**-1)]

Quoth Ted Stevens, from TFA:

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.

Arthur Clarke once said: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic;” and indeed, our senators conceive of the internet as a mysterious metaphysical entity. Ted Stevens seems to have “recieved an internet,” after all, sometime yesterday.

Isn't it bizarre having sub-literate legislators who determine the future of our livelihood: the internet?

Re:Subliterate Legislators

[Anonymous Coward]

The sad part here is that this guy feels qualified to stand up and lecture everyone on why he voted like he did, despite the fact that he knows nothing about the subject.

I understand that not every legislator can understand every nuance of every issue being voted on, but this guy seems to have developed a strong opinion on the subject. To my way of thinking he needs to have some basic understanding of the subject under discussion to hold a strong opinion.

Re:Subliterate Legislators

[shobadobs]

If you do that, somebody smarter than you will come along and make the test too difficult for you. By the way, this was already tried. In the South. Guess why.

Re:Subliterate Legislators

[rmckeethen]

Since when has a lack of understanding ever stopped a politician from meddling in someone else's affairs?

Re:Subliterate Legislators

[eraser.cpp]

You and Senator Stevens are falling for one of the lies the telcos are pushing: that there actually is a capacity problem. The telcos would like everybody to believe that they don't have enough bandwidth at the last mile to allow for widespread use of VoIP and video, but this simply isn't true. Using modern compression techniques VoIP traffic is very small, and for video there are numerous streaming media protocols that successfully send at rates exceeding real time over today's broadband lines. The proposed amendment would have resolved the only legitimate concern I can think of, which would be network jitter (variable delay between packet arrival). To more directly address your concern, it's important to remember that the people who would be charged money aren't actually even customers to these telcos. Google and Amazon would end up paying people who aren't even their upstream carriers. In fact they would need to spend presumably very large sums of money to each of the telcos just to reach their customers at a reasonable speed (or at all, it would be entirely up to the telco). While this is quite bad for the big guy, it completely shuts out the little guy. A website like YouTube would not be capable of paying the money for this access like Google can for their video services. And I believe YouTube is a good example of how popularity can be won even in a crowded market just by putting in the work to make your service better. Disrupting the ability for anyone but large corporations to innovate real-time applications would in my opinion be very costly for a society that is in reality still new to this technology.

Re:Subliterate Legislators

[CastrTroy]

It's not all about supply and demand when talking about net neutrality. I pay for my bandwidth with a bill at the end of each month. Google also pays for their own bandwidth with a slightly :) larger bill at the end of each month (or however often they pay their bill). All the networks in between Google and my house have struck a deal saying that they will carry traffic between eachother's networks. But now some of the in between or end user networks want to charge more to certain companies because they feel that they use a lot of bandwidth. Ah ha, but they are already paying for their bandwidth. What they actually want to do is charge a premium to companies they feel have a lot of money. They want to charge the carwash more money per litre on the water they use, because they are making better use of that water, and making a huge profit. Imagine going to the gas pumps, and having to pay more for gas, because you're a pizza delivery guy, and you're making money off of that gas. Or because you're Walmart, and you make gobs of money, we're going to charge you 10x the amount we'd charge a regular person for gas. They are doing the exact opposite of supply and demand. They want to charge you more, simply because they feel you have more money. Not because there's only so much bandwidth to go around. Everyone is already paying for their bandwidth.

Re:Geek clique

[macadamia_harold]

So the guy says tubes when he really means pipes. Given that his generation didn't even have an internet, at least he got somewhere in the ballpark.

Except that this isn't your clueless uncle we're talking about. We're talking about someone who will be deciding the future of something he doesn't understand. Understanding basic concepts like this is this man's entire job.

So, yes, it is a problem. The man's not doing his job, and we're all going to suffer for it.

No, not like Slashdot!

[Roblimo]

Slashdot has moderation. The Senate doesn't. On Slashdot, Sen. Stevens would be moderated "-1 Troll" in about 10 seconds.

- Robin

12 O'clock flasher

[DesertWolf0132]

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.