What’s that 2-Star doing behind him? Anyone ever heard of the Hatch Act?
this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2024
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Ehhhh ...
There was one migrant crisis during the Obama years IIRC where it was some obscure native South American Tribe that tried to cross the border illegally, like hundreds of them, and it took an anthropologist to figure out just how to communicate with that group.
Trump is fucking up the story but there's actually an element of truth here. Border patrol likely told him the story to describe the day-to-day of a border patrol agent, and then Trump misunderstood and is now telling this... New thing... But anyone who knows the border knows the nugget of truth here.
It's like when that Senator said: internet is a series of tubes (instead of pipes, because pipe is ACTUALLY a computer networking term). It's a reasonable mistake for a non-technical policy maker to say here.
Trump says a lot of shit. But this one about not understanding some languages of some migrants... Yeah, it happens every few years. There's a lot of random native American tribes who don't speak Spanish, English, or Portuguese.
No, pipe is not an actual computer networking term, don’t lie.
I mean, it is, in local networking, but not in the context that the politician was talking about so you're still somewhat right.
You mean unix pipes and they have nothing to do with computer networks
Not just Unix and yes, since they're often used as a socket-based communication tool between applications, just locally like I said, leading to a large overlap with other socket-based code. That's also why the comment that was originally responded to would still be wrong.
Except the part where you put data on one end, the data pops out on another end, and networks connect these pipes all together to move the data where they need to go.
TCP's communication model is one-to-one with unix pipes / file descriptors after they connect. And TCP is absolutely "the internet" as most people know it (HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP aka Email, etc. etc.)
They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. 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.
"Series of Tubes" describes how say... if one network has a 10Mbit "tube", then there's no way it could fit all the data from a 100Mbit tube.
Its... fine. Its poor terminology but anyone listening to Senator Stevens that day would have known what he was talking about.
The real issue with Senator Stevens was the following line:
I just the other day got... an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday.
Which is nonsense. I dunno why the "series of tubes" comment got memed when this bullshit was actually the mistake.
The debate with regards to network neutrality that Stevens was leading was about the opposite: whether or not ISPs were allowed to prioritize traffic. And who can choose those priorities when "the tubes got filled".
Anyway, I don't expect Senators to know how technical jargon works or to use technical jargon correctly. But I do expect them to get the gist of the situation so that they can have a policy debate. For all of the faults of language here, there's enough to go on to understand the issue of network prioritization in that discussion.
Similarly, I know Trump is fucking up this border issue / discussion point. But there's enough truth here. Border Patrol agents have to deal with an incredible number of language issues, especially when an obscure native American tribe crosses the border illegally. Its a known problem. In such cases, there's no nearby linguist who can even talk with the migrants.