
And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. 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.Now, Ted's analogy is not exactly accurate. To be sure, Ted was probably repeating something someone told him which he didn't quite understand. But it's nowhere near as inaccurate as people have criticized him for. It's more accurate than most similar analogies stated in similar situations by people who aren't in the techie trades. I feel bad for Ted getting ragged on so badly for saying something that actually shows probably more insight than 60% of the other people in the Senate chambers would have had that same day.
In context, the contrast between trucks and tubes is actually pretty apt as a means of illustrating the difference between throughput, bandwidth, and latency, and which one is more important for any particular issue. When you get right down to it, the Internet is a lot more like a series of tubes than it is like a bunch of trucks.
Most physical analogies break down when they fail to account for the fact that information is infinitely and perfectly copyable, while bits never are; and both the trucks and tubes analogies utterly fail on that, as do almost all the other analogies you've heard over the years, and the ones my Computer Science professors used back in college. But analogies don't have to match every point, just the points relevant to the argument being made.

Ted, by virtue of his position in the public eye (again, setting aside that he's a loathsome reptile), has earned a fair amount of jibes over his ignorance of things that he's legislating. Is it fair to expect Senators to know about everything just because they're expected to legislate everything? Maybe, maybe not: big topic, for another day. But it's certainly fair to make fun of them. But when it gets too much it starts to seem unfair, and in Ted's case, I think it got too much quite a while ago.
Anyway, let's just make fun of him for being an unscrupulous wretch. It's more satisfying, anyway.
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