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Sen. Ted "Tubes" Stevens Is Indicted
Many readers are letting us know about the indictment of Sen. Ted Stevens on seven counts of making false statements on his financial disclosure forms. We discussed the raid on the senator's house a while back. Everyone's favorite technologically challenged senator is the longest-serving Republican in the history of the upper house. An Alaskan paper gives deep background on the probe that has ensnared Stevens and a number of other Alaska political figures.
Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) offered up this bizarre explanation for why he voted against net neutrality laws. In it, he explains how the internet works...
"There's one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.
But this service isn't going to go through the internet and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.
Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?
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. Why?
Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.
So you want to talk about the consumer? Let's talk about you and me. We use this internet to communicate and we aren't using it for commercial purposes.
We aren't earning anything by going on that internet. Now I'm not saying you have to or you want to discriminate against those people [...]
The regulatory approach is wrong. Your approach is regulatory in the sense that it says "No one can charge anyone for massively invading this world of the internet". No, I'm not finished. I want people to understand my position, I'm not going to take a lot of time.
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.
Now we have a separate Department of Defense internet now, did you know that?
Do you know why?
Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can't afford getting delayed by other people.
[...]
Now I think these people are arguing whether they should be able to dump all that stuff on the internet ought to consider if they should develop a system themselves.
Maybe there is a place for a commercial net but it's not using what consumers use every day.
It's not using the messaging service that is essential to small businesses, to our operation of families.
The whole concept is that we should not go into this until someone shows that there is something that has been done that really is a violation of net neutrality that hits you and me."
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
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. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.
:x
If he simply said "the Internet is like a series of tubes and if too much stuff is going through it, it will slow down", then he might have been right, generally speaking.
However, his speaking style was garbled and it frequently looked like he was trying to make a point, didn't know what it was, and was confused about technical details that shouldn't confuse someone basically in charge of setting Internet policies for the USA. Here are a few gems (thanks to the previous poster who posted this text):
Ok, talking about Netflix here. So far, so good. You order movies online and they arrive at your door.
Now he, all of a sudden, leaps from movies delivered to your door to movies streamed online. He seems to think that: 1) you would order ten movies at once, 2) you would stream those ten movies at the same time, and 3) you would be surprised when your connection speeds dropped into the basement.
Obvious misuse of terminology. I might be nitpicking if the person in question was an 80 year old grandmother who just got online, but this guy was in charge of setting Internet policies in the US. Can't he call it an "e-mail" and not an "Internet." (Unless his staff really was sending him an interconnected network of computers. I'd like to see the shipping charges on that!)
Or because the mail server was slow. These things happen and they're almost never due to commercial internet traffic slowing things down.
He seems to be of the mind that sites like YouTube just dump their content onto the Internet and it somehow clogs up the works for everyone. The reality is that YouTube, and sites like it, take up 0 content all by themselves. When you request a video from YouTube, the server responds by sending you the video and just that video, not YouTube's entire collection. If a lot of people on your network are viewing a large number of YouTube videos, then, yes, YouTube traffic will account for a fair amount of the total traffic going over the network. However, this traffic is initiated by the user, not the site.
Or, more likely, because the DOD isn't dumb and doesn't want to deliver sensitive and classified information over a public network.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Nixon was piss-poor until well after his becoming vice-president, as his voluntarily disclosed tax returns show.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
The simple truth is that Ted Stevens has been sent back repeatedly because he is effective at ensuring that Alaskans get overrun as little as possible by the Will of the People (who live SOMEWHERE ELSE), and that when they must bow to the Will of the People From Somewhere Else, that those peolpe pay mightily for the privilege. Ted Stevens has never pretended to have any other mission in the Senate, in fact.
Dear old Ted has been an Alaskan senator for a long time, during which Federal control over Alaska has escalated. He's good at telling you he fights for Alaskan autonomy, not actually doing it.
Incidentally: most of the charges in this case are bullshit, as anybody who thinks about it for a minute can tell you; in a state that is "sparsely populated", exactly how many choices of company do you have for things like home construction? Very few. Who benefits from legislation? Likewise very few people. There are not that many people in these circles; it's difficult to avoid "benefiting" one of them.
The charges revolve around Ted getting tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of goods and services for free. Is that normal? Does that sound legal to you?
Incidentally, I live in another state where people from the rest of the country are called "outsiders," and I've come to find that use of the term correlates very strongly to an inability to see things from other perspectives and think flexibly. The more you recognize that you live in a small part of a large continuum of geographical and cultural diversity, the less you'll fall into the sad trap of dividing the world into Us and Them.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Here's an obnoxiously laid out page that shows many dollars a state received per dollar paid out in 2005. I'm sure you can find a red state/blue state map somewhere and do the comparison yourself.
http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/266.html
Actually, if you would compare that to the 2004 election and post red/blue totals, that would be great.
Fnord.
Check the federal funds report (latest data is 2006, published early July). Note that Louisiana and Mississippi figures are abnormal compared to historical data due to Katrina, and this only covers expenditures, not federal taxes paid from the state in question.
If you want to see balance of payment figures, check this link out. New Jersey (my home state), for example, only receives $0.61 for every dollar remitted to the federal government.
Here's a nice slideshow that shows 25 years of historical BOP rankings for each state (flash required).
The correlation between "red state" and "high ranking in funds received vs. remitted" is extremely strong... I'd seen a map of red/blue states where the data was plugged in that made it ridiculously apparent, but couldn't find the link quickly & can't be bothered to do the same myself right now. I'm sure it's around somewhere if you care to spend some time googling.
Funny, though, how it's primarily due to the higher incomes in the blue states and the progressive tax system... and the Republicans are the ones against a progressive tax system that benefits their states. Just goes to confirm that the rural poor in the US vote against their own economic interests.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Didn't that "bridge to nowhere" actually go to the town's AIRPORT? Yep.
Sounds like a legitimate need to me.