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.

Comments

Re:Series of Tubes

[Random Destruction]

While the series of tubes analogy works, its the speech that surrounds that quote that is hilarious. for example:

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.

Re:Series of Tubes

[Jason Levine]

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):

"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.

Ok, talking about Netflix here. So far, so good. You order movies online and they arrive at your door.

Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?

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.

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?

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!)

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.

Or because the mail server was slow. These things happen and they're almost never due to commercial internet traffic slowing things down.

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 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.

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.

Or, more likely, because the DOD isn't dumb and doesn't want to deliver sensitive and classified information over a public network.

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 develo