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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."
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.