Richard Schwartz pointed me to a speech recently given by Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) concerning an amendment to a telecommunications bill regarding net neutrality.  His rant demonstrates exactly how little the people making the rules understand about technology.

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.

[...]

Maybe there is a place for a commercial net but it's not using what consumers use every day.

My own personal internet?  This is just as stupid as Al Gore's "I invented the Internet" comment.  Hey Ted, there is no such thing as a personal internet.  You can personalize your experience on the Internet, but the Internet is part of the public domain, just like the highway we all drive on.  The last line above is so retarded that I don't even know how to respond to it.  Maybe he should learn what the big words like commercial and consumer mean before throwing them out in a sentence. 

And maybe if his staff used Domino to send internet (are you kidding me?) instead of Exchange, it wouldn't take multiple days for him to receive it.  Don't blame the traffic on the Internet for your staff's inability to route internal emails.  This whole speech sounds to me like something that occurred because he didn't get his email in a timely fashion, which is a shame for him because it demonstrated exactly how ignorant he is about the issues he is debating.

What I really wonder is if any one on his staff has enough guts to point out all the mistakes he made in the speech.  I would really hope that someone in his position would be smart enough to put aside his pride and take the time to learn about the things he is enacting laws about.  But then again, if he were truly able to do that, he would never have been stupid enough to go on a rant about something he obviously knows absolutely nothing about. 

If you get some time, take a second or two and listen to the full audio of the speech.  It's mesmerizing.