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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."
was there a second crash?
RIP
.. to make friends and memories. Its a shame he and the other unlucky ones aboard that plane didn't have a chance to say a few words to their loved ones before their end. May their souls rest in peace. Condolences to their families.
Just remember, you're an asshole and will probably always be an asshole. Maybe someday you will also be old, and there will be things that are new to you, and hopefully the new generation will heap the same kinds of derision on you.
Pretty much every network textbook in existence uses the analogy of "pipes" when describing latency and bandwidth. "Tubes" and "pipes" are essentially the same thing, so if Stevens was wrong, then so are all the major network experts who write the textbooks. And "clogged tubes" is a pretty good analogy for congestion along a route.
Big Ted
Big Ted
Every morning at the senate, you could see him arrive.
He stood 5 foot 6, weighed 145.
Kind of broad at the hips and narrow of mind.
And everybody knew you had to pay to play with Big Ted.
Big Ted
Big Ted
Big Bad Ted
Actually, if you listen to what he said, he wasn't really that far off, especially when you consider that a good portion of his audience had (and probably still has) no idea quite what the internet really is. Never understood all the flak he got for it.
The stories and info posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood.
Only fools would take it as fact.
It is a fricken series of tubes, or at least it's a decent enough analogy.
Honestly, the guy gave a long and completely hopeless explanation of how the internet works and geeks focus on the one part that he actually got right!
If only he had traveled by tube!
But really, as much as I dislike the guy, and as poor at his job as he was, if he's really dead then these comments are going to be in poor taste and my heart goes out to his family. Hopefully everyone is ok.
the guy's dead, show some sensitivity
hating his politics should not be about forgetting your humanity. then perhaps you are worse than whatever you ridicule about ted stevens
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
At our local children's museum, there's a model of the Internet as a series of transparent, flexible tubes. Each packet is represented by a ball, and they each take a different path to the destination. I have no idea why he gets so much flak for his tubes explanation of the Internet. He deserves flak for his infamous bridge to nowhere and felony indictment.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I'm not sad because these particular guys died. I'm sad because my first thought when I heard that some former lawmakers and corporate executives died is, "Good, probably served them right."
I guess this says a lot about me, but I'm afraid it says even more about the overall state of our country.
Or you could stop worrying about your karma on a news site.
Or they were just going fishing because they were friends with the CEO of GCI.
GCI doesn't have the clout to lobby as a "telecom" on the national scale, but perhaps they were going to push for that cable around Alaska to get high speed data to the Bush.
But using Stevens to lobby against a Democratic majority right now seems ill timed.
Alaska, due to the massive standard deviation in topograpy, frequently abysmal weather, and the necessity of covering its vast area for which there is almost no infrastructure, is the nation's (and possibly the world's) epicenter for aircraft incidents, per capita (California has more total from 2008 to 2010, Texas just barely fewer, but neither comes close per citizen).
Throw in the sort of personality that likes living and flying airplanes there, and you get more excursions into any envelope of safety. Even when reducing risktaking deliberately they reduce it less than most people would.
The numbers aren't quite up to where you can expect to crash in an aircraft at least once in your life if you live all of it in Alaska, but there's probably an actuary somewhere who has it as a trigger for an extra calculation in his database.
Apart from the fact that he seemed to think that the long delay in delivering "an Internet" [email] was due to those tubes being clogged, rather than the more likely explanation of a mail server being overloaded or offline.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Perhaps because, though he was a dipshit, he was a) human and b) may not have actively revelled in his own evil. So it seems kind of odd to be all happy that he's dead. Personally, I won't miss the guy, but I'm also not really going to say 'Good riddance.' Something about the latter is a little cold blooded for my tastes.
words, words, words, lemur, words, words words
"Funny" doesn't count for positive karma.
Plus, seeing as how you want someone dead who you simply dislike a bit, you are an asshole. It's called "Karma" for a reason, the choices you made are reflecting on your karma. Hence the name.
Would you find it as hilarious if Maxine Waters died and someone posted "GOOD RIDDANCE?" Even a political thief like Stevens or Waters doesn't deserve to die.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Worse than that, I have news for people. The internet is about 90% tubes. Little plastic tubes, with copper wire running through them for the most part. Also, some slightly larger tubes with more glass tubes inside. The other 10% is mostly computers.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Civility has long since gone down the tubes, as so many comments here demonstrate. A guy makes an analogy that isn't entirely congruent with the more popular analogy. Somebody with a job that encompasses interacting with people from every walk of life is criticised for failing to be an expert in our particular walk of life. His opinions were, I assume, not in line with the majority of Slashdotters regarding some issue pertaining to the Internet. Do we even know what his opinions are, or do we just know that he was a stupid poo-poo head becasue all the other kindergardners called him that?
I feel ashamed to have anything to do with this site on a day like today.
RIP Sen. Stevens, and GWS to those who survived.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Pretty much every network textbook in existence uses the analogy of "pipes" when describing latency and bandwidth. "Tubes" and "pipes" are essentially the same thing, so if Stevens was wrong, then so are all the major network experts who write the textbooks. And "clogged tubes" is a pretty good analogy for congestion along a route.
Right. If this is how an average pay person, even a senator views the internet its not the end of the world.
Part of his comments included this sentence: "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." refering to an email message. Its ok for *MY* grand father to say he received an "internet", or to have a view of the internet strictly in terms of tubes.
However, its not really forgivable that the man responsible for authoring legislation like the "Communications, Consumer's Choice, and Broadband Deployment Act of 2006" to not be clear on the difference between an email and the internet to have such a lay understanding of the subject.
Like someone mentioned above, I don't think its his analogy per se so much as "the rambling old-man-time's way of describing his point of view that he used".
And he stated that "one of his staff sent [him] an internet".
To prevent this day from getting worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD TH
For whatever reason, it is an American custom to eulogize dead politicians essentially without regard for quality. I'm not sure why.
It is American custom to regret needless death, even if you don't agree with, or like, the victims.
It is American custom to regret needless death, even if you don't agree with, or like, the victims.
... as long as they're famous and/or rich. Otherwise, whatever.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
It wasn't what he said, it was the way he said it, and the irony of this old, clueless man, who held an extremely important committee seat, blathering on about something he clearly didn't understand. It sounded like he was repeating an explanation some slick lobbyist had used to explain it to him, that he only half remembered. I have yet to see a single piece of evidence that Ted Stevens was not a 100%, bought and paid for shill to industry, with no ethics or redeeming value. He treated congress like a smash and grab for money for his supporters. I'm sad he died in a plane crash instead of prison where he would have been if it weren't for the ineptitude of the prosecutors of his corruption investigation.
We all die, so __only__ the loss by death of the good is cause for mourning.
GOOD FUCKING RIDDANCE.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Is not an overloaded server (or router, or any other stop along the way) a "clog"?
I still don't see how he was ever that far off.
Young people just made fun of him because he was old, basically, and he didn't have a technical understanding of the internet (then again, most who think they do are wrong on most of what they think they know).
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Two things:
1) Most people have no positive connection to this guy, at all. They don't know him and don't care about him. Don't pretend like you care about every person who dies, if you did you'd be in a continual state of massive grief. To the extent he touched their lives it was to try and restrict Internet access and through criminally misappropriating tax dollars. Why the hell should they feel bad about his passing? Yes, he was a person and I'm sure had redeeming qualities and people who cared about him. Nobody here knew him in that context.
2) Humour is a great way of coping with disaster. If you can't see that, it is because you are too damn uptight. Joking about things is a way of integrating bad things in to life and moving on.
So knock it the fuck off. I hate the veneration of the dead, where suddenly because someone has died nobody can make fun of them anymore, nobody can talk about them as a real human anymore. They have to be sainted, remembered in an idealized fashion. I hope when I die, if there's anyone around that gives a shit, they talk about me as I really was, remember my flaws, have some laughs at my expense. I hope they don't turn me in to some saint I'm not and refuse to say anything about me that isn't praise. It isn't that way when I'm alive, when I actually care what is being said about me, why should it change when I die?
Aside from a few universally hated people like Hitler, we have a tendency to focus on the good in people when they die. I think there are a couple of reasons why we do this:
a.) Except in the case of the universally reviled, we tend to think of people when they die as more...human, and not so much as whatever caricature of them we've built up in our minds over the years. Death is the ultimate equalizer. When someone dies, it's easier to think of them as having been just like us, with all of our foibles and vulnerabilities, and it becomes easier to forget, or at least minimize, their bad qualities.
b.) In most cases, people leave behind mourners when they die, and it's seen as in poor taste to be overtly negative about the dead and risk causing further grief to people who are already grieving. This is probably related to the whole idea of the sins of the father not being visited upon the sons.
c.) In the immediate aftermath of a person's death, criticism of them really serves no purpose. After all, they're dead, and are therefore presumably not actively doing anything to harm anyone anymore. After the initial shock wears off, and we begin to think of that person's place in history, we tend to start criticizing again. However, even then the criticism tends to be more tempered than it likely was when they were alive.
Having said all that, I think people do tend to get unnecessarily sensitive about these things after the death of a public figure. It's to be expected after a death of this type that people are going to make jokes and snide remarks, especially while cloaked in the pseudo (or sometimes total) anonymity of the Internet. Criticizing that or seeking to stop it in any way is pointless.
Think of it this way: 1) they are dead, so they can no longer continue their idiotic policies. Therefore, there is no use continuing to sling vitriol. Bury your animosity with the dead. 2) because like them or not, they are people, and therefore they have family members that (presumably) love them despite their flaws. Out of respect for their survivors, put on a kind face.
IMHO, this is a good thing, and brings out the best in people. I really don't see the reason why people have to continue to hate so much on someone simply because they disagreed with their political stance while they were alive.*
*Yes, I live in Alaska, and no, I did not vote for Stevens since...I don't remember how long, but it's been well over a decade. I felt he was corrupt and needed to be thrown out, but (too) many of my peers disagreed with me until the last election.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
It's got aquatic landing gear capability, can carry a large payload, and it works as long as it's well maintained. It's Alaska so you need the older aircraft with those specifications. Given that this one was owned by a company that deals with power or cable in the state they need something that can be converted from passenger to cargo, and land on water in remote areas.
Old plane models are perfectly fine if they are well maintained, why else do you still see WWII fighters still flying?
As for this crash it could have been a mechanical failure, but given the fact weather prevented rescue for so long it may be weather related.
Dont you mean...
It is American custom to regret needless American death, even if you don't agree with, or like, the victims.
GCI is a large (the largest?) local cable/wireless/internet provider in Alaska.
GCI is the largest cable provider, but they are definitely not the largest wireless/internet/telecom company. That would be ACS.
Your lobbying idea is ludicrous though, GCI serves about 300,000 people, and being a local company, have very little stake in national politics. They might lobby the state senate (in fact they almost certainly do), but it's a far cry from anything national, and using Stevens for the state senate is a bit of overkill.
The more likely explanation is that, after 50 years as a major name in politics, Stevens has made a number of big-name (locally speaking) friends himself - enough that a high level GCI manager would send him out to a private lodge from time to time when he wanted.
I suppose GCI was grooming the CEO of EADS North America (a much larger company, btw) for a lobbying gig too, eh? Maybe GCI is going to be going into space sometime, eh?
Frankly, you're an idiot.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
I'm here for the commentary, not news.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Well that's just what people remembered most. His whole speech showed a clear misunderstanding of either English or how the internet works. Here are some other gems from that speech:
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.
Now, he is either trying to severely dumb things down to ...bring things down to the level of education of the senate... or he is really butchering the English language, or he has no understanding of what he is talking about. Occam's razor points to him just not understanding. There are no "clogs" on the internet, except in the case of broadcast storms on localized networks or otherwise sophisticated and abnormal edge cases. The flow through the pipes is the same, how much stuff you get to throw through that pipe might be reduced if many others are, but its not clogged. The analogy doesn't make sense. If he went with a truck and highway metaphor, where each truck is a packet, that *might* have actually been closer.
And he might get a pass if he was my uncle trying to explain the internet to my family at a BBQ. But he is a senator addressing the senate, and with it the entire nation. The potential ramifications of spewing incorrect information to 100 of the most powerful men in the entire world are enormous. Can you imagine if your CEO got in front of the company's shareholders and just started spewing nonsense like this about how his company operates? He would be out the door the next day. The stakes are way higher when you address the senate.
Only in the same sense in which the Grand Canyon is a "ditch".
No, because use used his misunderstanding in an attempt to end network neutrality. He actually argued that the reason his "internet" got delayed was because non-email traffic for which "content providers" weren't getting paid, had somehow deprioritized his email, and that if only Google had to pay royalties to his telco-lobby bankrollers (as opposed to, say, transit/peering that they already pay), his emails would go through faster.
The fact that the Internet really is just series of tubes (a stupid network) is a feature, not a bug. Stevens argued the other way around: he wanted an Internet made of "smart" connections, where there are no MP3s or videos clogging the tubes other than from the telco/cableco's ringtone/pay-per-view services.
His speech was along the lines of alleging his local network outage could only be prevented if all that user-generated-but-nobody-pays-royalties traffic (P2P, Youtube videos, etc) could be removed and replaced with content-provider-generated/subsidized content. That's bullshit. Your 8MB DSL link is going to be just as saturated if everyone in your house is watching the "AT&T's Funniest Home Videos Channel In HD!", or if everyone's watching Youtube videos. (And conversely, the presence of a billion botnets and spammers still doesn't stop Youtube from coming through, because Google pays its ISPs for peering/transit, and built up enough fiber to actually provide its viewers with all those bits. Only thing is, AT&T, having not built up enough fiber to host something like Youtube, wants a cut of every viewing, especially when it's trying to rebrand itself as a content provider.)
We didn't make fun of him because he was stupid. We made fun of him because he was wrong.
Politics aside, if the Internet was being compared with pneumatic tubes in the pre-email era, then it actually seems like a fairly sound analogy to me. Could someone please explain what I'm missing here?
I'm pretty sure that if someone you knew died you'd be upset about it.
I probably wouldn't know them, so I wouldn't be particularly upset, as I probably wouldn't even know they were dead.
Famous people are people that a lot of people know. Lot's of people find out that they are dead and feel sorry for the loss of life.
Unless of course you're just an uncaring bastard.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
The guy died in a plane paid for by Alaska's largest telcom, who he had helped to defeat a net neutrality amendment when he was a Senator (this was his famous "series of tubes" speech, whose nasty purpose people tend to forget because of its general silliness). And, had he have lived, he would have *continued* to help them fight net neutrality. So it's not like his evil crap was done with.
One way or another, he would have been doing bad shit until the day he died (and he was). So with someone like that, I don't think it's mean-spirited to wish that day comes sooner rather than later.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
What do you know. All this time I thought you didn't have a shift key on your keyboard.
As far as the rant goes, why should we think any better of him now that he is dead then we did when he was still alive? Other than the fact that he can do us no further harm.
Respect is earned.
RESPECT.
IS.
EARNED.
(or not, as the case may be)
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Even ALL CAPS can't make that vile criminal worthy of any more dignity in death than he was in life.
We have never had the mythical world of respect that you allude to, and we never will. For reference, read the newspapers of 50 years ago. Or 100. Or 150. Or 200. The "uncivil" argument is a canard sometimes thrown around by hypocrites to fool idiots.
I'll take an honest man over a polite one any day of the week, and twice on Sunday.
In comparison with you, good sir, who actually tried to paint a critical slashdot poster as a bigger "problem for the country" than one of America's most notoriously corrupt senators.
This is such a breathtaking demonstration of lack of clarity in public discourse that I can actually make a case that it is, in fact, YOU
THAT
ARE
THE
PROBLEM
WITH
THIS
COUNTRY.
(CAPS for demonstration purposes, so the poster can see how silly the textual shouting thing is, and how utterly irrelevant it is to the point being made.)
Tired of Political Trolls? Opt Out!
I don't think anyone of us would have cared if he hadn't been the chair of the committee that was in charge of telecom regulation.
If my grandpa had that understanding of the internet, it'd be fine. For Ted Stevens to have it? Fuck no! It was a big part of his job, and the best he can come up with is "a series of tubes"? I don't think so!
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Which is respectful and commendable, when the death is needless.
I submit that a corrupt politicians death is not needless. It removes rot that is harming everyone across the country, thus making the death not needless. Such corruption, as is alleged against Stevens, is viewable as treason, which is punishable by death.
We need not behave disrespectfully, but neither should we eulogize someone simply because they died. Death makes saints (or even respectable people) of no one. We should respond to his death (or anyone's) as their actions in life accord them.
1) US politics has NEVER had dignity. We have had founding fathers duel with pistols. We have had a politician beaten to within an inch of ttheir life ON THE FLOOR OF THE SENATE. Dignity my ass.
2) This man did evil. Yes, I use the word intentionally. He abused power granted to him for his own gain and that of others around him, regardless of the harm he was doing to others. Just because he is dead, does not redeem him in my eyes. He still hurt every single US citizen in some way or another. 300 million paper cuts is still a lot of pain and suffering.
3) I dont know his family. I dont feel happy that they are hurting, but I do feel happy that this man can no longer harm this country.
You mean the judge with entrenched republican roots that got the prosecutors tossed out on baseless rumor and then set aside the verdict?
Please, he was guilty.
"Motion of The United States To Set Aside The Verdict And Dismiss The Indictment With Prejudice"
is not the same as exonerated.
Contrary to what he claims, we was found guilty.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
That and the fact that his rambling was his justification to block the addition of net neutrality language to the telecom bill that he himself had 'authored' as head of the commerce committee. By demonstrating his rather poor grasp of the workings of the internet he also demonstrated that he really wasn't qualified to have so much control over it.
People laugh at Gore for saying "he invented the internet" when he really didn't say that, but Stevens has only gummed it up since then. Plus, it's ironic that, at least according to Wikipedia, Declan McCullough is an apologist for Stevens's "tubes" comment but was the first to exaggerate what Gore said for comedic effect.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
YOU. RESPECT. THE. RECENTLY. DEPARTED.
RESPECT. MUST. BE. EARNED.
It is not given freely to anyone, I don't care how or when they depart this world.
Everyone and everything dies. All that's left is their legacy of their actions. Judge a person on those actions, nothing else, and expect to be judged on yours.
"Geekoid", Nice try at repeating a lie and then spinning it. But you're lying flat out.
Try the truth per the Washington Post:
Judge Orders Probe of Attorneys in Stevens Case; Prosecutor Misconduct Alleged In Former Senator's Trial
Pretty much he was railroaded by an overzealous and lying Bush Administration US Justice Department (and corrected by the Obama Administration, nice irony). Righty or Lefty, everyone deserves a fair trial. Get that into your overly-partisan thick head. You on the left are as bad as the rightist when it comes to hating your political enemies so much you'd screw up our justice system to punish them whether they deserved it or not -- and lying and smearing people in public without regard to the truth. Liars like you, left and right, are so damnably stupid they think they can get away with it. There was serious prosecutor misconduct, not "baseless rumor" - nice try but you lied and are busted. See the part in italics in the quote above? It was the federal prosecutors (under Holder/Obama) that asked the conviction to be overturned (RTFA linked), not the judge. Care to retract your post as the lie that it is?
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
That was a splendid post, but I wanted to point one thing out:
We didn't make fun of him because he was stupid. We made fun of him because he was wrong.
We made fun of him because he was wrong and stupid.
The thing is, the speech sounded like it came directly from a lobbyist's press release. Okay, lots of speeches sound like that, but Stevens, in attempting to get the gist of the argument, changed things that no one who actually knew anything about the topic would ever say.
So, yes, he was wrong with what he was trying to say, as he was a mouthpiece for AT&T or some other company. He was stupid because he was speaking confidently from a position of obvious ignorance.
All this said, I was happy when Stevens lost his final campaign, but I find only sadness in his dying unnaturally. If he had lived longer, well, maybe he would have learned more about the internet and changed his position.
It is American custom to regret needless death, even if you don't agree with, or like, the victims.
Unless they're Iraqi or Afghani women, children, and other innocent victims in the way of glorious American imperialist liberators creating puppet regimes that support Amerika.
I'm normally one to defend people who take inscrutable flak for using perfectly valid terms, but ...
1) When people mock him, the "series of tubes" thing is just to refer to the whole speech, which had some howlers. Very few are criticizing him for the analogy to tubes specifically.
2) Mail sent by his staff would have come from the same intranet, and so couldn't be explained by general overloading of the internet, which would make a big difference for his point (to the extent he had one).
3) In giving his explanation, he obviously was trying to pass of a lobbyist pep talk as genuine understanding, which is pretty dangerous for someone having such authority over the internet and attempting to pass legislation thereon. It revealed that, "Whoa, is this their understanding on *other* issues?" See 1)
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.