How The Internet Works - With Tubes 664
Chardish writes "In an attempt to explain his reasons for voting against a Net Neutrality bill this past Thursday, Alaska Senator Ted Stevens delivered a jaw-dropping attempt to explain how the Internet works. Said Stevens: '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.'"
Re:Just shut up and take your bribe money (Score:2, Informative)
"Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence."
I think people really need to take that to heart more.
Do you really expect every lawmaker to be an expert on everything?
Only the important thing right? But what's important to you isn't important to a farmer in Nebraska.
Our system is a bunch of stupid idiots who have few opinions. They are bombarded with lobbists MORE then we are with advertising. People PAYED to explain to them one side of an issue the don't have the first clue about.
This is why letters to your congressmen are important. You educated them and show them an issue is important to their constiuents. Look up the numbers, it takes very few people swing a district election or even a senate seat. They can't afford to have someone back home start seriously networking against there campaign.
One person actively dragging people out and mobilizing them can kill their next bid surer then a scandal.
People don't have power in this country only because they think they don't.
LOL-able (Score:2, Informative)
Really...? You dont say...... Are they calling it Milnet? [answers.com]
Re:Netwhat?/? You know, taht inter-movie-thingy!!1 (Score:2, Informative)
There are places [wikipedia.org] in my country where it it is a big advantage for a politician to appear to have a funny name [wikipedia.org], funny voice [wikipedia.org] or minor mental imparement [wikipedia.org]. Any one of these things are worth votes, and votes are worth money.
I'm (Score:2, Informative)
The "Bridge to nowhere" isn't that. It's a bridge from Anchorage to Wasilla. Real estate in Anchorage is expensive and you don't get much for your dollar. House on a postage stamp type of thing. Wasilla, there's good value for the dollar, but the commute to Anchorage sucks. 1+hour one way, which would be a fraction of that with a bridge, not to mention massively reduced costs for agriculture, and the whole deal is a good thing...IF Stevens/Murkowski didn't have their mitts in it. Of their children, one is crooked, the other inept.
But yeah, Ted is just a worn out old drunk that needs to go.
Re:Subliterate Legislators (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Correction (Score:5, Informative)
he should just talk to former Sen. Gore, who should know exactly how it works, on account of being its inventor and all.
Har dee har har, you hear that joke on "Hee Haw" or Rush?
But Gore did have an understanding of how the Internet worked, he made it his business to be informed on relevant subjects when he was a congresscritter. He talked to and listened to subject matter experts, and he wrote position papers and popular articles that clearly showed an understanding of the basic concepts.
Re:It's NOT a truck??!?!? (Score:1, Informative)
In the meantime, all the legit stuff is in threat of getting caught up in a porn jam.
You know what? My legitimate downloads or VoIP should get priority over your illegal download of the latest movies or fake pictures of Britney's tits - and I am willing to put my money where my mouth is. Under "net neutrality", my VoIP provider can't pay (on my behalf) to get my important and time-sensitive data to the front of the line. I WANT THIS, and unlike most slashdotters, who just want more free porn/programs/movies/music faster, I am willing to pay for it.
Re:I'm (Score:5, Informative)
Huh? No, the "bridge to nowhere" [mccarthy.vg] would go from Ketchikan (population 8,000) to Gravina Island (population less than 50). If agriculture on Gravina Island has anything to do with it, that's news to me; the officially defined need [alaska.gov] says nothing about farming the island's mountain ranges. What probably is related is that your governor's wife owns 33 acres on that island. I can understand why you might be unaware of that fact -- he failed to disclose it [anchoragepress.com] as required by state law.
Alaskan politicians may be working on a useless Anchorage-Wasilla bridge also, but that's not that famous "bridge to nowhere."
Re:Subliterate Legislators (Score:3, Informative)
Apropos in an amazing array of situations - this being an outstanding example.
This is actually about telecommuters (Score:3, Informative)
Thank you for your message.
The Comcast @Home product is, and has always been, designated as a residential service and does not allow the use of commercial applications. A VPN or Virtual Private Network is primarily used to connect Internet users to her or his work LAN from an Internet access point.
High traffic telecommuting while utilizing a VPN can adversely affect the condition of the network while disrupting the connection of our regular residential subscribers.
To accommodate the needs of our customers who do choose to operate VPN, Comcast offers the Comcast @Home Professional product. @Home Pro is designed to meet the needs of the ever growing population of small office/home office customers and telecommuters that need to take advantage of protocols such as VPN. This product will cost $95 per month, and afford you with standards which differ from the standard residential product.
If you're interested in upgrading your current Comcast @Home service to Comcast @Home Pro, please e-mail your name, address, and phone number to: sales@comcastpc.com. Prior to Sept 15th, you will be contacted by one of our Comcast @Home Pro representatives to discuss upgrading from your current Comcast @Home residential service.
While VPN is not a prohibited use of the @Home Pro product, Comcast does not provide support for VPN technology. All inquiries regarding VPN should be directed toward your company's network administrator.
Currently, the Comcast @Work commercial services do provide VPN support. If your company pays for your internet service, or if you would like to use supported VPN or IP tunneling, please contact our commercial services at 888-638-4338 or visit www.comcastwork.com.
If there is anything else we can help you with, please contact us. Thank you for choosing Comcast@Home.
Steve Comcast@Home Email Response Specialist
Stop talking about this like it has anything to do with video. This has nothing to do with video, and everything to do with them turning off telecommuting (indeed, any encrypted communication) [computerworld.com] by default.
Gore delivered and continues to deliver good stuff (Score:5, Informative)
A lot of things Senator Gore says sound very wooden and otherwise poorly expressed. However, Gore delivers [imdb.com]. In a private email message, Vint Cerf [washingtonpost.com] told me that it was true that Al Gore was instrumental in the development of the Internet. Before Mr. Gore's involvement, it was a semi-private utility known as ArpaNet and NSFNet. Mr. Gore championed the development of the private network as a public utility. This was years before Bill Gates, for example, recognized its importance.
No, Vint Cerf is not a friend of mine; that's not the point. The point is that Senator Al Gore has a brain of his own, and a very good one.
Republican Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska [irregularnews.com] is known as someone who supports destructive causes. So, those who want corruption in the U.S. government go to him. Many people on Slashdot suppose that he views his ignorance as bad; on the contrary, he is openly advertising his ignorance so the corrupters will know to find him when they want someone who will help them corrupt.
Excellent Point! (Score:4, Informative)
If the point is that law makers have no business legislating things they know nothing about, this guy is the poster child. Ironically, this is one of the party lines against Net Neutrality and he's now a shining example.
On the flip side, if the congressmen actually understood the issue, and the way they should be rightfully eviscerated for corporate toadyism come next reelection campaign, they'd leave it alone.
Re:Subliterate Legislators (Score:5, Informative)
Of course this typically currently only works in reasonably densly populated areas where ADSL2+ can be deployed (distance contraints from the user to the telco equipment) although it gradually starts to cover the countryside as well.
Of course in this configuration, video is only streamed from the ISP to its users, no through the Internet. So called "last mile" bandwidth can't possibly a problem. It could theoretically be possible that the backbones lacked bandwidth at some point. Isn't there still lots of dark fiber lying around though ?
Bridge to nowhere (Score:3, Informative)
That's the idea for the "bridge to nowhere." It's really the bridge between Ketchikan and its airport, so that rich tourists can get to the airport with all their damned salmon.
Believe me. I know. I was born in Ketchikan. I grew up in a logging camp near Ketchikan. I lived and worked in Ketchikan for a time. There *is* a need for a bridge between the two. It just ain't worth the cost.
Future Simulation (Score:4, Informative)
We'd have to set up a list of tasks to do in each. e.g.
- you got called in to the office to do sign some papers, and will miss The Big Game. Can you - watch it over the Internet? record it at home for later? If possible, for how much?
- you heard a song on the radio that you liked, but didn't catch the artist's name. You called in to the radio station, but couldn't get ahold of anyone who could help. You remember some distinctive lyrics; can you "google" it?
-You bought a DVD movie. Your DVD player seems to be broken, can you watch it on your computer?
and so on.
I wish he were subliterate (Score:5, Informative)
Stevens presided over this hearing. He knows the facts of the matter quite well. This is not a case of ignorance but of deception. Sorry, it just is.
Re:Gore delivered and continues to deliver good st (Score:2, Informative)
He didn't say that "We've got 10 years left on the enviroment", he's saying that there's a high probability that we have about a 10 year window available to us to get our global greenhouse emmisions under control before the changes become irrevocable. Since the changes due to warming tend to reinforce one another, once the cycle gets too far along our ability to influence and ameliorate it largely goes away.
About Senator Stevens (Score:3, Informative)
For those who don't know about Senator Stevens, he is a senior member of the Senate and has lots of power. He is the chair of the commerce committee. I only follow the Senate now and then, but to me he seems to be the model of what's wrong with American government. When the government need to cut down the budget, he refused to cut a $400 million bridge project in Alaska. To many, the bridge was a pork barrel project that connected the main part of Alaska to a remote village of 300 people. Currently the village uses ferries. Those dealing with the situation didn't want to remove it completely but rather postpone it or at least fund it in phases.
When Big Oil execs testified in front of Congress last year, he refused to swear them under oath as is the custom. Time and time again Stevens seems to be doing what is in the lobbyist's best interest like right now with the net netruality bill.
Re:It's NOT a truck??!?!? (Score:5, Informative)
Huh? No they really are not. Did you ever hear about something call truncating and load-sharing? If there ever comes a time when your ISP (or any in the line between you and your data), they can and will simply upgrade their connection. You see, they are actually be PAID to transmit/carry that data. The more data that flows through their "pipes", the more they can "bill" OTHER ISP's that connect through them. So whenever they have an edge router that starts hitting its limits, it is always in their own best interests to replace/upgrade/load-share/truncate that connection so that they can bill even more money to the people around them. Maybe there are vast amount of data going through those pipe because of porn and p2p applications, but you know what that means to the compaines? They have more data to BILL other companies with to get more money for the service they provide by allowing that data to use the network infrastructure.
In the meantime, all the legit stuff is in threat of getting caught up in a porn jam.
I say "huh?" and "what?" again. You are under the misconception that some data is more important then other data. You see you are falling into the biggest trap there is when dealing with an entity like the internet. You will almost always be "biased" toward what you want to use the internet for. So your particular "types" of data you feel should get priority. Well the problem is that the person next to you will have a completely different set of priorities, and the next one, and the next, and so on and so forth. There are probably thousands of people out there who feel that their NTP traffic should have "realtime" priority over everything. Now imagine if we actually started to try and do things like this. Well, your ISP will because you are so happy to pay extra for it, will prioritize on http traffic, email, and maybe VOIP (assuming you use "their" VOIP and not someone elses). But the people you wish to connect to are not using your same ISP, instead they are using one that results in your traffic crossing, lets say "three" other ISP's inbetween yours and theirs. Let us also greatly assume that because you are not on those other 3 ISP's, they will most likely NOT have the exact same priorities. Why? Because you aren't the one paying them directly. One their network, they have paying customers that want different things, so they prioritize differently as a result. Now, back to my case here, ISP "A" has a priority of http, email and ftp, but VOIP is not considered a priority because they also own a POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) network, so VOIP is a direct competition to their phone services, and they do not want anything to do with it. ISP "B" has a priority of http, ftp, and VOIP. Email is not high priority on ISP "B" because they feel that email should be handled the way it was origionally intended, as a simple, unreliable delivery mechanism. ISP "C" prioritizes p2p, ftp, and VOIP because their main business is "content" delivery. They have a major customer who has a p2p video delivery system which uses ftp connections to get the data out first to several servers and then uses them to seed the data into a custom p2p network.
Now your problem is that you want to connect to someone else, and your network connection path goes through all those other ISPs, well, your optimized connection inside your ISP, just have every one of your critical uses degraded and and relegated to transmittion only when there was nothing else occuring through those other ISP networks. This is what WILL happen. Your money isn't enough to change the immediate priorities of every ISP in the world or even the immediate world around your ISP.
You know what? My legitimate downloads or VoIP should get priority over your illegal
Tubes (Score:1, Informative)
Dear Mr. Stevens,
Yes, Mr. Stevens it is. We engineers call those tubes "wires". They are very similar to the tubes or "wires" connecting your light switch to your lamp. The information in those tubes travels very fast: A message sent on 10:00 Friday and received on 10:00 Monday, it could have gone entirely around the Earth over 1,000,000 times.
So why did your message take so long? That is a good question and one that I suggest you have your staff investigate. You see, there are a few possiblities and several of them represent threats to National Security. To start with, let me explain how email works. It works a lot like regular mail: you write the message and put it in an "outbox". Eventually an aide comes along and collects it and send it to the mailbox down the hall. From there, someone else collects it and drives it down to the depot. On it goes until it ends up in the destination inbox. Due to the fact that the email is moved through "tubes", it gets moved to the next stop automatically as soon as the next stop says it can receive it. Each stop only handles emails: videos, parcels, web browsing and finance all use a different set of stations (same "tubes" though because they are so darn fast).
The only delay is at the "stations." Contrary to what others might have told you, there is no way your email could have taken several days due to network congestion. Remember how fast those tubes are? Imagine if someone who ordinarily had a 1 hour commute was 8.75 billion years late for work. Would you accept their explanation that "traffic was bit heavy"?
Now those stations can introduce a delay. At each station, they need to look at the outside of the envelope and sort your mail to know what tube to put it in next...that can take a second or two (enough time for your email to go around the world a few dozen times). Some stations might check to see that your mail doesn't contain anything harmful or annoying to you such as viruses and spam...obviously that takes a bit longer. (say 2 to 5 minutes). In your part of the world there might even be stations that check to see that your email doesn't contain anything "interesting" such as major changes to the funding landscape, strong constituent opinion or personal indiscretions.
All of this adds up to a few minutes tops. The only (I repeat ONLY) time an email can take more than an hour or so to go through is if a human is involved. Ordinarily that means one of: 1) your aide left the email on the counter; 2) you forgot to check your mail; 3) one of the intermediate stations was "closed" for some reason; 4) your email got stopped at a "checkpoint" somewhere where it had to wait for a human (who may have been away for the weekend) had to read it.
I'm going to assume that you and your staff are savvy enough that (1) or (2) didn't apply. My best guess is that something went wrong in an internal government server (in the business we call those "outages") which nobody could or did fix for three days. Now I realize that you and I work for very different organizations but a three day outage without any notification on one of our servers would result in more than one person being fired AND would trigger a full security audit. Since no-one appears to have seen fit to notify you about this outage and it appears that you've had smoke blown up your aide with respect to the cause, I would suggest that you request an investigation. Even after applying the maxim of "never ascribe to malice what can be explained by stupidity", I cannot think of an innocent reason for such a long unexplained outage.
Yours Most Sincerely,
AC.
Same guy who wanted bridges to nowhere in alaska (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Correction (Score:2, Informative)
The original quote comes from an interview with Wolf Blitzer back in 1999 and is a poorly worded, self serving attempt to show he is helping foster innovation in this country. His exact quote (emphasis added to illustrate where the "I created the internet" came from):
Interpret that as you will.
Re:I'm (Score:2, Informative)
Same name("Bridge to Nowhere"), different bridge. Unlike the Ketchikan bridge, the Knik bridge would serve a purpose and allow the city of Anchorage(where I currently live) to expand and grow, as all the land that the city could use is being used for the most part at the moment. The new bridge would open up a large ammount of land for the city to continue to grow and expand. I do believe the Ketchikan bridge is pointless, but the Knik Arm bridge isn't.
Re:Gore delivered and continues to deliver good st (Score:3, Informative)
And, he never said we have ten years left on the environment, he said that he believed scientists who said that it was likely that in 10 years we'd be crossing the point of no return. That is, we hit the point where global warming runs out of our ability to fix.
Stevens a corrupt scumbag, not just an idiot (Score:4, Informative)
During hearings on oil industry price gouging, Sen. Cantwell wanted to put those testifying under oath. Stevens arrogantly refused. The oil execs promptly and obviously lied throughout the hearings. Stevens made it possible. They basically pissed on the face of the Congress, and by extension, on the American people, and Stevens held their dicks.
Follow the Money (Score:4, Informative)
1 News Corp $47,250
2 Boeing Co $41,900
3 Verizon Communications $36,550
4 Veco Corp $31,750
5 Viacom Inc $23,000
6 AT&T Inc $22,500
7 General Electric $20,000
7 Walt Disney Co $20,000
9 BAE Systems $19,000
10 Northrop Grumman $18,000
11 Cubic Corp $17,250
12 Mantech International $16,500
13 Intergraph Corp $15,600
14 Cassidy & Assoc/Interpublic Group $15,569
15 General Dynamics $15,000
15 Lockheed Martin $15,000
15 Northern Lights PAC $15,000
15 Teamsters Union $15,000
19 Science Applications International Corp $14,500
19 Sprint Nextel $14,500
Has all this corruption and ineptitude in our government caused anybody else to come to the conclusion that gun control is a bad idea?
Stevens Main Campaign Contributors-- Telcos (Score:2, Informative)