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Senator Stevens is Not As Dumb as He Sounds

mises.org — Well, aren't we all having lots of fun heaping scorn and derisive laughter on Senator Ted Stevens for his hilariously uninformed commentary on how the internet works? The audio is all over the web, writes Lew Rockwell, and doesn't he just sound ridiculous? And yet, what he says is not entirely ridiculous.

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  • Smoove, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11Even though Stevens IS as dumb as he sounds, the essay is right: bandwidth isn't infinite, and it should be rationed by the free market, not a bunch of politicians.
  • Lumiras, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9Oh, I will disagree with you on this one.

    Sentator Stevens is as dumb as he sounds...

    The author of this article believes that Stevens was speaking in metaphorical terms when he refered to the "tubes", and this is simply not the case. Senator Stevens was saying that he believes that the internet is a series of physical tubes that get paper and movies put in them.

    The evidence for this lies in the fact that after talking about the "tubes" he talks about making websites use services like FedEx or UPS to deliver their content instead of these "tubes"
  • electrichead, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6There's also this quote of his
    "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."

    Even if he meant 'email' when he said 'internet', is he suggesting that his email was floundering about till monday morning, or that the internet / web is not 'open' on weekends and stat. holidays? He may be trying to say that bandwidth is getting clogged, which is true, but it's just as probable that he doesn't know that it's been sitting there till he hit 'send/receive'.
  • kukyona, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I think you missed the comment, Lumiras, where if you replace 'tubes' with 'pipes' he would have been using the correct jargon. What is a pipe really? Dictionary.com says its a 'A hollow cylinder or tube used to conduct a liquid, gas, or finely divided solid.' A tube huh? Go figure. Granted Senator Stevens obviously is no expert in the field... he was most likely just trying to repeat how his aids and other lobbyists explained it to him.

    The simple fact that so many people in the government can be so uninformed is why we should let the private sector stay in-charge and not regulate the Internet.

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