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Ted Stevens and Sean O'Keefe In Plane Crash
necro81 writes "The NY Times is reporting that former Senator Ted Stevens was aboard a small plane with eight others that crashed in remote southwest Alaska Monday night. Some news outlets are reporting that he died, along with at least four others. Meanwhile, the North American CEO of aerospace firm EADS and former NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe was was also reported in the crash. Rescue crews from the Alaska Air National Guard reached the site about ten hours after the initial crash."
For whatever reason, it is an American custom to eulogize dead politicians essentially without regard for quality. I'm not sure why.
I mean for one, the "series of tubes" thing just sounds funny. It was not an eloquent way of putting it. Second, it is a rather large oversimplification. Ok I'm fine with it for children since you are trying to really simplify it, but it is a bad way to describe it overall. The relationship between my plumbing (an actual series of tubes) and my net connection is tenuous at best despite the Internet connection begin called a "pipe" in some contexts.
However the biggest reason was because from the entire explanation, it is clear he has no idea what the fuck he is talking about. What he said was:
"Ten movies streaming across that, 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. I got it yesterday [Tuesday]. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.
[...] They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big 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 it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material."
It is clear the man understands nothing about the net. More or less he's bitching that has staffer sent him an e-mail which he calls "an Internet", and it was delayed for some reason. That he blames on people watching movies online. The amount of shit incorrect about that is just legendary.
Had it been said as part of a competent explanation, it probably wouldn't have been picked up on. However his halting, improper explanation made it seem that he probably really did think of the Internet as being just like a sewer system, which is not at all correct.