Click on Picture to go to Audio link
A-hole Senator Ted Stevens explains why he’s against network neutrality, and in the process, demonstrates why we’re all screwed. God, you’d think he’d have staff members who could understand and brief him on this stuff! Here are a few choice quotes:
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.
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.
Again the audio link is here. Please listen. It’s incredible. Fans of Professor Irwin Corey will love this guy.
Someone (a Republican, IIRC) once said that “listening to Bush speak is like watching a drunk walk down an icy sidewalk”. But Stevens is simply incoherent.
Baud Stupid. You are living up to your name. What you suggest is what UNREGULATED internet is all about. That is NOT net neutrality.
That provides for regulating the content of the internet by the carriers. If there was competition then this wouldn’t be a problem, however, over the last six years the telecommunication industry has consolidated into four (soon to be three) regional companies.
I don’t want some faceless conglomerate / government to control what I might read in a newspaper, say on a telephone, or do on the internet.
Net Neutrality would keep the status quo. The carriers would not be allowed to discriminate or charge extra fees to specific companies. They wouldn’t be able to censure sites they don’t like or agree with.
Amazing all the NON-TECH persons that think they have a handle on WHATS WHAT. Being fed Tech knowledge by those who AINT seen the NET, or know that much about it, except, FORMAT REBOOT kills most everything.
Regulating the Adverts would be nice.
Regulating the net speed?? We are already 4-6th in the Internet speed race, running on OLD lines, that havent been touched in 40 years.
FIX IT, then lets discuss what can be done.
that interent he got is probaly 98% porn hes gonna be busy for a while…………
So… the guy doesn’t know a thing about the internet. Ya think he has ever heard of an oligopoly? Where the market is turned over to a close knit group of companies that will control price and level of service to be funded by………you got it………….us.
More tubes, don’t bend over their on the way.
Geez, how would you like to have to produce a transcript from such halting speech? I don’t envy the Senate transcriber at all. Also, if Stevens thinks his email is going to travel faster with a non-neutral, tiered system, he’s got another thing coming. Email will travel in the slow lane.
His talk of internet “tubes” reminds me that maybe Stevens’ mother should have had her own tubes tied.
I don’t see much of a problem with his tubes comment. That’s probably how someone explained it to him, and it’s not that bad an analogy, though how are trucks infinite capacity?
Umm,
ARNT federal employees SUPPOSED TO either DIE, or retire at 65-67…
Why is this 120 year old, FOG, sitting around.
“I don’t see much of a problem with his tubes comment. That’s probably how someone explained it to him”
The fact that a moron explained it to him that way doesn’t make it any less of a problem. Tubes aren’t even a close analogy. Why not wires?! Is the guy so old he doesn’t even understand how electricity works?!
And all these new fangled pushbutton phones you people are using is what is causing the Senator to get busy signals with his trusty old dial telephone.
Wires is a more similar technology, but it doesn’t strike me as a clearer analogy. Electricity wires involve resistors, capacitors, inductance, and current, and the issue of limited bandwidth doesn’t appear to correlate as easily.
“Wires is a more similar technology, but it doesn’t strike me as a clearer analogy.”
When did Stevens say anylthing about an analogy?! He said “It’s a series of tubes.” I would agree if he would have said “it’s like a series of tubes,” but he didn’t.
Well, this was inevitable:
http://www.cafepress.com/internettubes
Kudos to Jon Stewart
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iMDRVzMfEM
Flippancy aside, “tubes” are one man’s metaphor to perceive a technology far beyond his perception. It has been opined any sufficiently advanced mechanism will be seen as magic so kudos to the Senator for not confusing the Internet with cargo planes. I believe the analogy most accurate for him (as has been suggested) is to the department store communication system of yesteryear. While totally inappropriate, it is all that is within the Senator’s comprehension.
Why should we be shocked at ignorance in high office?
Does anyone with intelligence actually believe “the jury is still out of Global Warming”?
Is there a credible scientist in the world who seriously questions the theory of evolution?
How can a sane person actually believe there was any intelligent design in the invasion of Iraq?
“Yo Blair”, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” and then there is “Harriet Meyers for the highest court in the land.”
Of the Middle East, Korea and the oil economy… is it wise of US citizens to sit silently watching while a child plays with matches and awaits the rapture?
Ignorance is too kind a word. Aptly Ted Stevens is from Alaska yet he merely displays the tip of the iceberg.