"Tubes" saved
Posted in Musings on April 9th, 2009 by SleepDepZombie – View CommentsThis week a major figure in internet history, Ted Stevens of Alaska, was saved from jail time because the prosecution screwed up so badly as to be potentially guilty of misconduct themselves.
Dismayed Lawyers Lay Out Reasons for Collapse of the Stevens Conviction – NYTimes.com
What did Ted Stevens ever do for the internet? It isn’t like he invented it or anything. True, however while heading the Senate committee responsible for regulating it he provided us with the image of the internet as a “series of tubes“ as part of demonstrating his grasp of the intarwebnets.
Was he guilty? Who knows, I wouldn’t be surprised. Either way it looks like there was more than enough questionable stuff done by the prosecution to ever be sure. It would have been a real shame to let a lot of legal issues overshadow his true internet fame. All the same, I’m glad he’s not still in the Senate trying to regulate the internet.
As poorly as it was presented, the Tubes isn’t a horrifyingly bad concept by itself. It really is all about the presentation. I have to admit back in my days of IT support I occasionally described my job as that of a digital plumber. The difference was, having done both networking and plumbing, that I understood what I was talking about for the most part and was using it to be humourous.
