Senator willing to defend "tubes" on Daily Show

Stevens was referring to the pneumatic tubes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamson_tube) that were in fairly common use to transport mail in the 19th century.

That in mind, this is a perfect metaphor for what's at stake for this Net Neutrality crap. The offices at either end of one of these pneumatic tubes were responsible for looking at the address on the mail capsule and determining which tube to drop it into for the next leg of its journey. Not altogether unlike, say, a modern-day router.

And someone dumping hundreds of capsules into their tube is going to bog things down, as he said.

It's reasonable to contrast this with another common method of mail distribution, say, a truck. In a truck, your mail will be delivered to the other end of the city at the same time of day regardless of whether someone else decided to post ten thousand letters that day or not.
In a tube system, your mail will be sent out in sequence, and may have to wait until the ten thousand are gone.

THIS IS ACTUALLY HOW PACKET NETWORKS WORK.

I work with the Hands Off coalition, and I think that Stevens' appearance on TDS would further underscore exactly why Congress is the last group of people that we want regulating the internet. I think Jon said it best when informed Stevens he doesn't "seem to know jack**** about computers or the Internet. But hey, that's okay, you're just the guy incharge of regulating it."

I'd much rather hear him try to explain this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravina_Island_Bridge

$10 says that halfway through he realizes that nothing is making sense and tosses out, "gay marriage is wrong" to try and garner support.

The reason for all the ridicule wasn't solely his use of the word "tubes", it was the way he thought those "tubes" worked.

I wonder who the this big scientist was maybe the self proclaimed inventor of the interweb Al Gore....

To be fair, people often refer to internet connections which are capable of transferring large amounts of data as "fat pipes". I'm not saying his analogy was good, just not completely nonsensical.

Well, it all depends on your definition of "tube". A wire could easily be described (in a, you know, descriptive kind of way) as a tube. And Stevens was giving that speech to people who can be expected to have very little knowledge about the Internet, so the tubes metaphor seems like a good way to go.

Still, Stevens on TDS should be fun.