Senator (Ted Stevens) mocked for Internet 'tube' speech

[question everything]

Senator mocked for Internet 'tube' speech

By Liz Ruskin
McCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS

July 18, 2006

WASHINGTON – Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, is enduring no end of ridicule in the blogosphere for his recent explanation, in a Commerce Committee debate, of how the Internet works.

“The Internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck. It's a series of tubes,” he said during a June 28 committee session. “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 it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.”

At another point in his 11-minute discourse, he said he'd seen these delays firsthand: “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.”

Internet pundits greeted his explanations with a nonstop snigger fest, with extra helpings of derision, on sites such as boingboing, Daily Kos, Fark, MySpace and YouTube. The transcript of his remarks, and links to the recording itself, have been circulating like crazy. Blog viewers can find a tube T-shirt design, a PowerPoint cartoon and a Ted Stevens techno remix, which has Stevens repeating “a series of tubes!” and extended umm-ing and er-ing. By Friday, the techno remix was being celebrated in a video showing all manner of vacuum tubes, pneumatic tubes and other 1950s-style technology.


(snip)

Stevens' staff director on the Commerce Committee, Lisa Sutherland, said the bloggers were making fun of Stevens for a pretty minor mistake: saying “tubes” rather than “pipes.” The latter is common slang in the telecom industry, especially when discussing the Internet carrying capacity of phone lines or cable.

(snip)


Find this article at:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20060718/news_lz1n18read.html

[bluerum]

1. His speech demonstrated complete ignorance of the subject matter.

He deserves to be roasted a million times over.

[marmar]

2. En que lengua es el hablando?

I had to read his quote three times to make sense of that fact that it makes no sense. Isn't that Mr. Bridge-to-Nowhere? He's a real kook. :crazy:

[question everything]

5. One and the same (nt)

[Redstone]

3. Oh, yeah, and he "got an internet" that took days to be delivered.

Real tech-savvy guy, there.

Redstone

[MadMaddie]

4. Sam Ceder played it a couple of weeks ago....

I nearly wrecked my car....while driving home from work...

A pretty minor mistake the whole speach was filled with errors and an utter cluelessness about the internet......if he is this misinformed about this technology.....then it does not bode well for anything else he supports.....

He said something about no one using the internet for advertising...:wtf:

<snip>
Stevens' staff director on the Commerce Committee, Lisa Sutherland, said the bloggers were making fun of Stevens for a pretty minor mistake: saying “tubes” rather than “pipes.”
<snip>

[durrrty libby]

7. Jon Stewart did a hilarious bit on Stevens and his tubes

There is also at least one youtube video floating around

Good stuff.

[unhappycamper]

6. youtube has a cute video about Stevens, the internets and tubes.

I put a thread up earlier today & it sank like a stone.

[4nic8em]

8. Yea...

you have to be extremely careful with those damned intertubes, they'll bite you in the ass every chance they get.

[question everything]

10. That's funny. Thank you

sorry about your thread, happens to me too often.

[lapfog_1]

9. Nice try at spin there Lisa

but I listened the whole speech... and to the many "remixes" (which are quite funny) that are on the "internets".

Why I just received an "internet" today that made fun of your senator.

Maybe he should author some legislation about the internets so that when he takes credit for it, we can accuse him of claiming to have "invented" the internets.

Your boss is an idiot and should have known that his level of comprehension about the "internets" is such that he shouldn't offer opinions... and he is getting what he deserves from the people that understand it much better than he does.

Signed,
Network engineer since 1976 (wrote software for once of the first IMPs).

[vixengrl]

11. His ignorance on the subject is the kind of ignorance

that doesn't even seem to know it *is* ignorance. At the least, he could have asked a "young person" what that thing you got in your inbox was called. To not immediately think- "e-mail", is really Flintstone. Some scribe totally reads his e-mail, and converts it into cuneiform for him. On a clay tablet.

I am so in agreement with his spokesperson, though--"pipes" would be better than "tubes" in a pretty minor way. Like the way "aqueduct" is better than "series of ditches."