tubes

[anacrucis]

Jon Stewart's graphics, with the poker chips and the race horses, are quite amusing.

But can someone with a better technical understanding of bandwidth than I apparently have explain for me the underlying flaw in Sen. Stevens' tube vs. truck metaphor?

Comments

[lietya]

I claim no special technical expertise. However, it occurs to me that trucks are not typically disassembled. :) (which is to say, the metaphor would hold up better if it were specified that you [general] could receive 48 molecules of your truck, then someone else gets 53 molecules of naked lady, then you get 100 more truck molecules.... since the internet does not really transmit huge blocks of "stuff" at once - a "packet" is really more like a "packet of soup" than a whole truck relative to the size of the tube. I think.)

[anacrucis]

I understand this - i just don't get how it's incompatible with the tube metaphor.