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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."
.. 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.
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.
Or you could stop worrying about your karma on a news site.
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
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.
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
I disagree. Do you show the same regard for people like Hitler? Mussolini? Stalin? No? Where's YOUR humanity? Granted Ted Stevens isn't as close to evil as those people, but he certainly did his part to increase the idiocy of congress as a whole.
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?
Dont you mean...
It is American custom to regret needless American death, even if you don't agree with, or like, the victims.
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.
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.
"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?
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