How The Internet Works - With Tubes

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.'"

Subliterate Legislators

[(1+-sqrt(5))*(2**-1)]

Quoth Ted Stevens, from TFA:

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.

Arthur Clarke once said: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic;” and indeed, our senators conceive of the internet as a mysterious metaphysical entity. Ted Stevens seems to have “recieved an internet,” after all, sometime yesterday.

Isn't it bizarre having sub-literate legislators who determine the future of our livelihood: the internet?

And the humour is?

[riflemann]

Network engineers talk about 'pipes' all the time when it comes to internet links. Tubes, pipes, same thing no?

Sounds like a good analogy to me.

Re:Subliterate Legislators

[Anonymous Coward]

The sad part here is that this guy feels qualified to stand up and lecture everyone on why he voted like he did, despite the fact that he knows nothing about the subject.

I understand that not every legislator can understand every nuance of every issue being voted on, but this guy seems to have developed a strong opinion on the subject. To my way of thinking he needs to have some basic understanding of the subject under discussion to hold a strong opinion.

That's a poor choice of quote in the summary...

[vistic]

...the quote in the summary is actually the most accurate thing he said.

"I don't have to have the type of speed they're introducing, but the people who are streaming through 10-12 movies at a time or a whole book at a time... for consumers use, those are not you and me, they're not the consumers, those are providers."

"I abstain from this vote because...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand what it is about."

Politicians can't know everything, but they could have the decency to let others do the talking (and voting) when they themselves have no clue. The funny (sad funny) thing is that Stevens argues one shouldn't regulate without understanding if network neutrality is really needed, and then he goes on and gives these stupid, wrong and incoherent arguments why network neutrality is bad. It's bizarre.

Just an observation:

[carcosa30]

When they mention families, duct tape your ass cheeks together.

Are all your bloody politicians like dubya?

[Don_dumb]

Quote from TFA

"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?"

From RFTA - the apparent translation is

"The other day I just got an email that was sent by my staff a number of days before"

Judging by the almost complete lack of any real grasp of the English language or how the internet works, could it be that his email was delayed by the fact that he had no idea what the internet was until one of his staff had asked why he hadn't replyed to his emails?

Re:Netwhat?/? You know, taht inter-movie-thingy!!

[hyfe]

If you voted for this asshat, do the rest of us a favor and please don't ever vote again.

A majority of the US population seem to have taken variations of this advice already.

Besides, this is a variantion of the whole 'only the intelligent know they're stupid'-problem.. if you have everybody who realise they're wrong withdraw because of their own perceived stupidity, you'll just be left with the people who weren't capable of realising their errors. Learning is doing mistakes; people who never do mistakes are just good at shifting blame.

Give the guy a break

[i_like_spam]

He has obviously been reading Slashdot.

      Internet Access Via Pneumatic Tubes -- Whooosh! [slashdot.org]

Re:That's a poor choice of quote in the summary...

[kahei]

I especially like the 'not you and me' thing. It doesn't matter that he doesn't know what he's talking about, it doesn't matter that he's semi-literate, it doesn't matter that he is well above that threshold of wealth beyond which you simply don't have to know how things work or how to make them work; what matters is that he's on our side, the side of ordinary folks like you and me, the consumers.

I feel a warm fuzzy feeling. I'd vote for this guy.

Re:Subliterate Legislators

[10Ghz]

So, we have now established that this individual is 100% ignorant when it comes to this particular subject-matter. Instead of whining about it on /., has any of you actually contacted him and told him that he's wrong?

Re:Subliterate Legislators

[jkrise]

The sad part here is that this guy feels qualified to stand up and lecture everyone on why he voted like he did...

That's the BAD part.. not the sad part. The sad part is, he was VOTED to power by people like us, to stand up and lecture... The corrective action would be.. Have a set of tests to determine which senator(s) can lecture / vote on a given topic. Those who fail the test lose their voting rights...

this guy seems to have developed a strong opinion on the subject..

Or maybe he has been subjected to a strong influence, to lecture the way he did. Or maybe no one else listening knew enought o call the bluff. Or maybe the rest were lobbied to remain mute as well.. Or maybe all of the above.

Re:The joke's on us

[LordSnooty]

No, but understanding the difference between an "internet" and (one assumes) an "e-mail" might be a start. Also useful would be understanding the notion that the presumed delayed e-mail was not delayed because I was downloading Superman Returns, for example.

This reminds me...

[NexFlamma]

This reminds me a lot of how ancient cultures would witness natural phenomena and make up elaborate mythologies to explain them. The Greeks And Romans had their pantheons, the Native Americans had earth spirits, etc, etc...

It seems that to this otherwise well-educated lawmaker, the internet is quite literally such a mystical place that he has concocted an elaborate, entirely false explanation for how it works to appease his human desire to explain things. It's fascinating really.

Of course, I'm sure he's not the only lawmaker who happens to be this far removed from the realities of the tech that we are all so familiar with. This leads to simply ridiculous laws regarding this tech (**AA's, the whole net neutrality thing, etc), and should clearly illustrate the fact that someone needs to educate these people or tell them to sit down and stop putting their nose into grown up business.

Re:Geek clique

[macadamia_harold]

So the guy says tubes when he really means pipes. Given that his generation didn't even have an internet, at least he got somewhere in the ballpark.

Except that this isn't your clueless uncle we're talking about. We're talking about someone who will be deciding the future of something he doesn't understand. Understanding basic concepts like this is this man's entire job.

So, yes, it is a problem. The man's not doing his job, and we're all going to suffer for it.

Re:Subliterate Legislators

[gutnor]

It is so much easier to develop a strong opinion when you don't know what you are talking about!

Anyway, what do you expect from somebody elected ? You cannot win any election without an inflated ego and strong opinion.
Not saying that for trolling, but fighting to be elected is essentially a media fight. People elected are showmen and they need to believe in themself, they need to feel they know everything to look credible.

The job of the politician is to get elected. That's the job of their teams to understand the technical problems, and give their conclusions and let the politician do his show, whatever he says does not matter as long as he strongly believe in it and is ready to fight for it.

And at the end of the day, if you understand the problem, you vote for the politician that vote in the direction you want, whatever his explanation on the subject.

At least one understands

[Anonymous Coward]

Barack Obama's June 8th podcast [senate.gov] shows that at least one senator can speak thoughtfully on the subject.

Allowing the Bells and cable companies to act as gatekeepers with control over internet access would make the internet like cable. A producer-driven market with barriers to entry for website creators and preferential treatment for specific sites based not on merit, the number of hits, but on relationships with the corporate gatekeeper.

Re:Subliterate Legislators

[shobadobs]

If you do that, somebody smarter than you will come along and make the test too difficult for you. By the way, this was already tried. In the South. Guess why.

Re:Subliterate Legislators

[jkrise]

Let's make the PEOPLE pass a test in order to be granted the right to vote!

Won't work. People don't vote senators ONLY to debate on things like net neutrality. More likely, illiterate people have problems other than net neutrality... hunger, medicare, welfare etc.

My suggestion was "Those senators voting either FOR or AGAINST a particular bill should pass an aptitude test.... "

Re:Subliterate Legislators

[1iar_parad0x]

If anything, I want these legislators regulating the internet less, not more. I know the net neutrality debate is a little more complicated than that, but I look at most gov't regulation as a sort of 'gateway drug'. Once they start to regulate something, they can't stop. Heck, if they regulate it enough, they want to start taxing it too.

Re:Subliterate Legislators

[rmckeethen]

Since when has a lack of understanding ever stopped a politician from meddling in someone else's affairs?

No, not like Slashdot!

[Roblimo]

Slashdot has moderation. The Senate doesn't. On Slashdot, Sen. Stevens would be moderated "-1 Troll" in about 10 seconds.

- Robin

Re:How much pork does he get?

[Ohreally_factor]

Maybe I should have bolded the part you ignored:

without consideration for others

If this were not true, then murder would be perfectly acceptable method to accumulate wealth.

yes it is .Re:No, not like Slashdot!

[leuk_he]

Yup it is like the /. editors. Some of the articles they post Are just plain trolls. Sometimes it is even clear they did not read the article at all. SO it is like shashdot at the end, for the important people it is allowed to post trolls.

Re:Subliterate Legislators

[eraser.cpp]

You and Senator Stevens are falling for one of the lies the telcos are pushing: that there actually is a capacity problem. The telcos would like everybody to believe that they don't have enough bandwidth at the last mile to allow for widespread use of VoIP and video, but this simply isn't true. Using modern compression techniques VoIP traffic is very small, and for video there are numerous streaming media protocols that successfully send at rates exceeding real time over today's broadband lines. The proposed amendment would have resolved the only legitimate concern I can think of, which would be network jitter (variable delay between packet arrival). To more directly address your concern, it's important to remember that the people who would be charged money aren't actually even customers to these telcos. Google and Amazon would end up paying people who aren't even their upstream carriers. In fact they would need to spend presumably very large sums of money to each of the telcos just to reach their customers at a reasonable speed (or at all, it would be entirely up to the telco). While this is quite bad for the big guy, it completely shuts out the little guy. A website like YouTube would not be capable of paying the money for this access like Google can for their video services. And I believe YouTube is a good example of how popularity can be won even in a crowded market just by putting in the work to make your service better. Disrupting the ability for anyone but large corporations to innovate real-time applications would in my opinion be very costly for a society that is in reality still new to this technology.

Re:Subliterate Legislators

[CastrTroy]

It's not all about supply and demand when talking about net neutrality. I pay for my bandwidth with a bill at the end of each month. Google also pays for their own bandwidth with a slightly :) larger bill at the end of each month (or however often they pay their bill). All the networks in between Google and my house have struck a deal saying that they will carry traffic between eachother's networks. But now some of the in between or end user networks want to charge more to certain companies because they feel that they use a lot of bandwidth. Ah ha, but they are already paying for their bandwidth. What they actually want to do is charge a premium to companies they feel have a lot of money. They want to charge the carwash more money per litre on the water they use, because they are making better use of that water, and making a huge profit. Imagine going to the gas pumps, and having to pay more for gas, because you're a pizza delivery guy, and you're making money off of that gas. Or because you're Walmart, and you make gobs of money, we're going to charge you 10x the amount we'd charge a regular person for gas. They are doing the exact opposite of supply and demand. They want to charge you more, simply because they feel you have more money. Not because there's only so much bandwidth to go around. Everyone is already paying for their bandwidth.

Re:No, not like Slashdot!

[AstrumPreliator]

The Senate has moderation; it's called the people who vote the Senators into office. And just like slashdot the "moderators" are usually equally as clueless.

Re:It's NOT a truck??!?!?

[linvir]

Wow, congratulations for you on your ability to pay your way into your proposed elite circle of law-abiding rich Americans. But what of all the people who have enough trouble simply connecting to the internet in the first place? What of the rampant inaccuracy of your lame ad-hominem against apparently the entire Slashdot 'collective'? Are you so bigoted that you really think that the proponents of net neutrality are secretly just protecting their bittorrent download speeds?

What of the fact that a US implementation of this idea would harm foreign connections to/through the country so much that the rest of the world would finally be motivated to build some decent infrastructure around you? I suppose in that case, you would be right there with your wallet out, ready to pay to ameliorate your overseas connections, right?

Re:Subliterate Legislators

[AviLazar]

Those who fail the test lose their voting rights...

Unfortunately, this is not the solution either. The way it SHOULD work in our society. An issue is brought up, each congressman is given X amount of time. The congressman asks his constituants their opinion and their majority rules. The congressman then uses the majority of his constituants decision to vote. He doesn't have to debate with his other congressman, he has to debate with us.

Alas our society is not like that. We vote for a guy, and this guy can do w/e he wants for a term.

By-the-by - this isn't anything surprising....congressman vote on topics they have no clue about each and every day. From Computers, to medicine, to infrastructure. Some of these guys might have specific knowledge on a few of these issues, but for the most part they don't....they rely on their staff to do the research. This guy should have been reading a speech written by his staff memebers.

Re:Subliterate Legislators

[hamburger lady]

first we'd have to stop being idiots.

Re:Subliterate Legislators

[Fred_A]

If a mail server is down on the mail route, the mail can be delayed for whatever time it takes to get it back up (up to five days in most default configurations).

Nowadays of course very few servers will be left broken and unattended long enough for email to sit around for longer than a few minutes. So basically either the stuff is delivered in a few minutes, vanishes without a trace (getting fairly rare as well) or bounces.

Re:No, not like Slashdot!

[ZorroXXX]

The Senate has moderation; it's called the people who vote the Senators into office.

This moderation system is however much less sophisticated with only two possible moderations, "yes: +1" and "no: 0".

Re:Subliterate Legislators

[couchslug]

"he was VOTED to power by people like us"
Well, he was voted to power. Keep in mind, even allowing for some of the strange folk who post on Slashdot, that /.ers are far more clueful than the mob of illiterate, superstition-ridden, daytime-TV-watching, moronic proles that make up the rest of the public.

Re:Geek clique

[roe-roe]

God sir - It was not his use of "tubes" instead of "pipes" that was disturbing. I can even forgive (since I am such a nice guy) him saying, "He got an internet delivered..." because it was pretty clear that he meant "email". What I can't forgive is blaming significant latency on his email system to "net congestion". Taking that fact into account, the other seemingly harmless mistakes ( tubes = pipes, Internet = email) seem less like an outsider using his own terminology and more like someone who doesn't know what he is talking about.

Re:And the humour is?

[smchris]

In all fairness, the guy is a politician. He's almost certainly only saying what his aide wrote for him after his aide told him it was a good analogy.

And being a Republican from Alaska, you have to figure he has pipelines on the mind.

Pipe analogy sounds reasonable to me

[CustomDesigned]

Sure, he used the word 'tubes', but that is the same analogy as the 'pipe' jargon we use. When your T1 runs out of bandwidth, you get a 'bigger pipe'. Now you can argue about whether there is actually a capacity problem at the Telcos (and if there is, wonder where the taxpayer money they promised to use to prevent this problem went), but the analogy is valid.

Senator Stevens doesn't sound stupid to me at all. It sounds like a technical staffer explained things to him with the pipe analogy, and the Senator understood the analogy perfectly well. I see no sign in the article that he thinks there are literal tubes or pipes. Internet connections really do have limited bandwidth - but just like with physical pipes, it's all a question of where the 'bottle neck' is.

It is obvious to me that the Telcos are trying for the big scam, but that doesn't make Senator Stevens stupid, or the Net Neutrality bill a good idea. Personally, I disliked the NetNeutrality bill as much as the Telco scams. Rather than goverment regulating the internet, I would like to see more broadband provider choices at the consumer level so that I can thumb my nose at Telcos that try to abuse QOS technology. The only reason Telcos can get away with this crap is because they are an effective monopoly for too many customers.

Re:Subliterate Legislators

[Megane]

Imagine going to the gas pumps, and having to pay more for gas, because you're a pizza delivery guy, and you're making money off of that gas. Or because you're Walmart, and you make gobs of money, we're going to charge you 10x the amount we'd charge a regular person for gas.

You forgot the bit where Wal-Mart has their own pizza delivery service. I think it's more like Pizza Hut owning all the gas stations in the area and selectively charging more for gas to Domino's, Papa John's, the local Mom and Pop pizzaria, UPS, FedEx, and whoever else they think is making too much money off of it.

Re:Subliterate Legislators

[aliasptr]

The political compass questions are almost a joke in my eyes. The fact also that you get four choices for the questions is again a joke due to the broad and complex nature of the questions. I mean seriously, the world's not "Black or White". Saying "I strongly agree" to blanket statements makes no real sense.

"I'd always support my country, whether it was right or wrong." Who defines right or wrong? I mean seriously, obviously if you believe the actions to be RIGHT you'd support your country. The question presupposes that you can tell the difference between "right" and "wrong" in the first place and again something that's "right" economically could be "wrong" socially so I guess whichever you feel outweighs the other you'd say you agree or disagree to. The test was fun and all but I wouldn't say it's a very useful compass. I read the FAQ and stuff but I guess it just doesn't strike me as exceptionally useful.

Re:Geek clique

[Anonymous Coward]

"he actually did damned good in my not so humble opinion"

are you serious? this guy is a COMPLETE douche. forget the fact that he got the terminology off, he completely misunderstood how the internet works. it is so blatantly obvious he's bought and paid for.

following the tubes comment, he says:

"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.

Now we have a separate Department of Defense internet now, did you know that?

Do you know why?

Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can't afford getting delayed by other people."

Regardless of the terminology, this guy shows he didn't even bother to educate himself, or if he did, HE IS A MORON. either way, i'm sure there are many people way more qualified to be a senator than that douche. isn't that the real problem here? out of all the smart, qualified, knowledgable people in this country, bush is president, and this guy is third in line. wow.

12 O'clock flasher

[DesertWolf0132]

Stevens, and others in Congress, are what the great comedy troup Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie [deadtroll.com] called 12 o'clock flashers. Every electronic device in their house is always flashing 12:00. It is physically impossible, no matter how much you dumb down the terms, to explain the concept of the internet to the feeble brain of a 12 o'clock flasher. You might as well read them the writings of Stephen Hawking in Dutch. No matter how simply you dumb down the concept of email, they are still receiving an "internet", they boot to "Microsoft", Windows are what line the walls of their office, and rebooting involves kicking more than once. These are the same guys who break their "cupholders" and scream at tech support for their incompetence when they don't realize they have the program minimized. I know there are many here in this august body who have greying hair as a result of these lusers and can attest to Mr. Stevens incompetence just by hearing about his reciept of an "internet". He probably asked his secretary to download the "internet" to a floppy so he could read it in his spare time.

Re:Bridge to nowhere

[SydShamino]

Currently, commuting between Ketchikan and the airport requires taking one of two ferries, which are limited in capacity. During the summer when all the rich tourists are up catching their salmon, the ferries are somewhat packed.

Ahh.. so to make this somewhat on topic, Alaska simply needs to inact an anti-ferry neutrality bill. Rather than allow anyone to use the limited "pipes" (Ferry bandwidth), more "legitimate" traffic (local commuters) should get priority over junk traffic (rich tourists). Just have a special line for folks with monthly passes, and load them first before you take anyone with a day pass.

Oh wait, you want the tourists, too? How about a $1-3 surcharge on all 1, 2, and 3 day passes, put into a bank account, that will eventually pay for a bridge? That's better than me or anyone else in the rest of the United States paying for a bridge to help your tourism industry.

Re:Subliterate Legislators

[John Nowak]

The free market is not about charging a fair price based on supply and demand; It's about charging the maximum price that the market will bare. Fairness never enters into the equation.

Re:Subliterate Legislators

[QRDeNameland]

This truism speaks volumes about the current state of US political (and social) discourse - the less you know about an issue, the more likely you are to have strong opinions on it.

I remmeber reading an interview with a some media pundit (IIRC, Fred Barnes) holding up this exact quality as what was necessary to be a good media pundit. The more expertise you have on a subject, the more nuanced your understanding of it is, which leads to longer and less "black-and-white" commentary, which in modern 'Murka is b-o-o-o-ring. The more successful pundit is the one who can sound convincing knowledgeable on a subject without the slightest understanding of it, and make a good dumbed-down sound bite that of course doesn't conflict with his employer's interests.

Re:Subliterate Legislators

[TubeSteak]

Most people are more than capable of understanding a nuanced position.

Everyone knows or has met some idiot that has sports stats memorized. They know what happened in every game ever, why the coaches did or didn't draft/trade certain players, why a certain type of injury requires a longer recovery time than others, etc.

Yet that same person would be lost in a nuanced discussion about [some political issue].

Why? Not because they're incapable of understanding the issue, they just don't care to. It isn't worth it for them to sit down and figure out the details. They get no reward from doing that.

That's why we always have a BadAnalogyGuy* who turns anything into a car analogy. Everybody understands cars to some extent or another. Hence the dumbing down of a discussion.

The second that Senator said "truck" any possibility of nuance was gone.

*BadAnalogyGuy [slashdot.org]

It isn't funny, and I can't laugh...

[TaleSpinner]

Stevens is a total, complete, asshole of the very brownest kind. Alaska actually gives money to its' tax "payers" every year from all the income they get from oil kickbacks...sorry, "usage fees"...yet Alaska is still consistantly the 2nd or 3rd in the country for Federal revenue payments. Stevens (and I am NOT making this up) is the same genius who stood up at the podium in the Senate and screamed "NO!" when someone suggested they give up some of their Federal - not state, not oil, just Federal, and not all of them by any means - funds to help cover the disaster in New Orleans. And he did keep them from cutting a single dime from the bushels of money earmarked for Alaska.

The man is an unmitigated disgrace. In a sane government he would have been tossed into prison years ago.

The internet isn't that important.

[Kaenneth]

Food, Shelter, Clothing:
The Internet allows us to buy different versions of the same, but it doesn't provide, or really do a lot to produce the things that are really important. Maybe there is an automated watering system out there, but most cornfields don't need IP addresses.

Family, Religion, Education:
The Internet can be useful for these things, but they all were available, and would still be available if the whole 'net shut down right now.

Police, Fire Fighters, Medical care:
In some ways, these things are complicated by the Internet, 911 over VOIP is a problem, as well as quack devices/drugs bought online.

I'd be perfectly happy if the government never passed any laws specifically for the Internet. it's fun and all that, but I could live without it.

Re:Underrated Troll.

[HillaryWBush]

That's what happened to me. Lots of Funny and a little Troll means I now post at -1. (Yes, borking moderation mememe)