Now, I'm no fan of Senator Ted Stevens. But Boing Boing's continued mocking of him for saying the Internet is made of tubes -- well, it just sums up the smarmy schoolyard bully attitude of Boing Boing that I find so frequently offputting.

You know what? It is made of tubes. Steven's description is a little loopy, but it's a pretty accurate description of the way a packet switched network works (splitting up the data into little pieces that might be split through a variety of pipes on its away across the network) versus the way a dedicated circuit network works (loading it on a truck). So it comes across as pretty snotty for Boing Boing -- which is more than happy to re-spout such meaningless aphorisms as "the network routes around damage" -- to resort to argument by authority against something that in the final analysis, isn't wrong.