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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
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?
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!
When they mention families, duct tape your ass cheeks together.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
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? """
Actually A truck is a bit better analogy than a tube. The truck been a packet of at most some amount. And the capacity of the roads are the bandwidth. and the need to go through a series of junctions, to get from one place to another. And the main roads, and the back roads. Only that the time on the line is negligible and the only thing that matter is the load on the junction (and the junction speed maybe) and that when the junction/(line) gets over capacity the truck is destroyed and another identical truck gets sent it its place, doubling the average amount of trucks on the road. So it comes down to only kill the trucks with the ugly face driver.
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
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.]
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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"
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?