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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
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 :
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."
Stevens made this speech DAYS ago -- yet it's just getting to slashdot TODAY???? Those damned tubes must be clogged again!
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?
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? """
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.
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!
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?
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
...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
You probably were asleep. It came right after the chapter on IP over Avian Carriers (RFC 2549).
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.]
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
Maybe I should have bolded the part you ignored:
without consideration for others
If this were not true, then murder would be perfectly acceptable method to accumulate wealth.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I disagree. It's the new method to assure nothing happens to the President -- morons all the way down.
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."
...because Senator Ted Stevens just demonstrated an artful execution of the Chewbacca Defense.
Yes, we call it the Quayle Shield...
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
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.
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.
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.
Like the ol' Libertarian saying goes:
Those who can, do. Those who can't govern.
I dunno, might make a good bumper sticker.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
--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?
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.
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.