RIP 2010

[Ghoulish Delight]

Senator Ted Stevens of "series of tubes" fame.

You know, I never quite understood the level of ridicule leveled at him for that. Long before he ever said that, the term "pipe" was used to refer to one's connection to an ISP. The term "tunneling" is a technical term referring to a specific method of connecting between two devices on a network. As an analogy, a "series of tubes" is not a horrible one. I seriously doubt he literally thought it was tubes.

Not that there weren't other things said in that speech that were utterly wrong about how the internet works, and he clearly demonstrated that, even granting the tube analogy, he had no clue how data might flow through those hypothetical tubes. I've just always been surprised that "series of tubes" was what got latched onto, as opposed to, say, "an internet".