>> you've got dinosaurs born decades before the internet was conceived trying to make critical policy decisions around it.

But weren't the people who conceived the internet born decades before the internet was conceived?

As someone born before the internet was conceived, I find that comment particularly offensive.

Edit: Now get off my lawn!

I believe that jab was aimed at organizations with no ability to adapt, not at people.

But... corporations are people.

(Un?)fortunately, the people deciding Internet policy in DC aren't quite as clueless as Stevens, or at least not as prone to gaffs. I think we've gotten all the "Series of Tubes" moments we're likely to see. The next idiotic thing out of a politician's mouth may rile the technorati, but I doubt it will be as easily and widely mockable as the Tubes.

Hard to tell. The "series of tubes" moment was a very strange one to mock, because he was right---the context of that quote is that he was saying it was more like a series of tubes than like a fleet of trucks, which for the purposes of his explanation was exactly right: he was trying to explain bandwidth limitation.

There were other things he said that day that were bad, but "series of tubes" is an analogy, and a good one.

So it's hard to say what could become a Ted Stevens moment here, or which side it'll come from; someone just has to pick some statement to mock, and get lucky that it goes viral.

>The "series of tubes" moment was a very strange one to mock, because he was right

I always felt that way as well, but the way he said it was just so mockable. In the end, that's why it went viral: not because he was a dinosaur who didn't understand the Internet, but because he appeared to be a dinosaur who didn't understand the Internet, to people who themselves did not understand it.

Representative Smith can make as many factually incorrect statements as he wants; as long as they appear reasonable to the uninformed public he'll never be called on it in the way Stevens was.

  > not because he was a dinosaur who didn't understand
  > the Internet

He may have had a good analogy, but I doubt that he understood the Internet. Comments like "my office sent me an Internet on Friday and I didn't get it until today" don't really imply good knowledge of the Internet. More likely the 'series of tubes' analogy was given to him by a staffer or lobbyist and he tried to run with it even though he didn't understand it.

While likely true, that's incidental to my point of perception mattering more than reality. I was unaware of the "sent me an Internet" comment, but I'm hardly surprised. The man was not known for verbal acuity.