Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), You're an idiot!

I don't know if anyone else is up to date on the tel-com struggle to prioritize Internet traffic based on the highest bidder, but obviously our good Senators are not. Basically AT&T owns much of the backbone of the Internet and currently passes all traffic through (and C.C.s the government) without question. The debate is should these companies be allowed to give preferred treatment to those that pay a premium. Say you're trying to download a movie. It's zipping along at 150K a sec, but a higher paying competitor jumps in and AT&T decides to half your bandwidth and give more to the higher paying chap. Preferential treatment.

Sounds sort of fair until you think of all the possibilities. AT&T could make life miserable for Vonage customers while trumpeting how well their service works. Now Vonage has to pay to get preferred status and passes the cost on. Now instead of paying $25 a month you might end up in the $40 range making AT&T's service look better and better. This was just a hypothetical scenario, but you really don't need to know more than this little amount of information to understand what's going on.

Enter our enlightened Senators to debate the issue. Some of these guys are either being paid off by the tel-com companies, or they actually are complete fools who have no idea how anything more complicated than a rock and chisel work. I can't believe that this type of individual is responsible for determining the fate of how the Internet is functioning in our country.

Wired - Your Own Personal Internet
Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) explained why he voted against the amendment and gave an amazing primer on how the Internet works.

one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.

But this service isn't going to go through the Internet and what you do is you just go to a place on the Internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.

Ten of them streaming across that Internet and what happens to your own personal Internet?

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.

There's even more absurdity if you keep reading. As confusing as it is to read, listening to this buffoon rant is even worse. It's like an old man arguing with his houseplants.

I think everyone can agree with me on this issue. Sen Ted Stevens is in fact, a useless idiot! As a side note Senator, if someone sent you the entire Internet as an email attachment they are email bombing you. I want to do the same to my boss, but I can't figure out how to add the entire Internet as an attachement. Must be one of those personal Internet thingys the Senator was talking about.

[edit on 3-7-2006 by dbates]

Check out his "bridge to nowhere"



Link here


He IS such a useless waste of skin.....

I forgot about that one. They should have built that bridge and then destroyed it when he travelled to the other side. Would have been justified then.

People like that make me ashamed to vote Republican. Is there some kind of entrance test or IQ examination you have to take before they let you become a Senator. Obviously not.