> I'd be much more excited about a program that genuinely understood just one concept. Red, or liberal or whatever.

I'm not sure this is an AI or programming problem. How would you explain the color red to someone who has never seen anything (say, someone who was born blind), so they would genuinely understand it? Or, how would you explain how an apple smeels, feels, and tastes when you crunch into it, in software, so that a program would genuinely understand it?

My parents live in Rural Florida (not a big city) and have DSL from a local ISP and SkyAngel, which is an IPTV provider. SkyAngel uses hardware and software from Neulion, and Neulion's stuff all seems fairly clever to me. The Discovery Channel is recently no longer available on SkyAngel. The reason for this is quite interesting!

My take on it is that the big cable and TV networks might have figured out that IPTV might be a threat to their business model and they have to try to pre-emptively put the IPTV providers out of business before they really catch on. My guess is that Discovery Channel, which makes most of its money from the big cable TV networks, was probably "told" to discontinue offering their programming on IPTV networks such as SkyAngel. I bet it was an offer they couldn't refuse, or something like that.

The official information is in press releases such as the one at http://www.skyangel.com/discovery . They paint it as a contract dispute. Of course SkyAngel has filed a complaint with the FCC or FTC or some regulatory agency. The legal battle is described on various blogs which you can find by googling "SkyAngel Discovery"

It will be interesting to see if the cable TV networks prevail on this one, and if they succeed in putting the upstart IPTV providers out of business before it catches on.

Further to that:

The perpetuation of organized religion depends on 2 things: 1. ignorance; and 2. lack of critical thinking skills. The internet is the enemy of ignorance because of the openness and availability of information. Education teaches critical thinking skills.

The pope is just doing his job. They've identified that the fully open internet is a threat to the perpetuation of the church, and they have to take steps to discourage it or encourage limits on it.

...look out! I lived in west Africa for many years and I'll never forget what it's like for one of those to hit the windshield while driving at night at 120Km/h. I was hoping to never see one again.

Could we get going on the switch to the metric system now please? It would require about the same amount of effort and consumer education. Yards, acres, miles, feet - come on people, this is not the 1800s.

H2S (hydrogen sulphide) is produced when organic material decomposes in the absence of air. It smells like rotten eggs. Actually it would be more nearly correct to say that rotten eggs smell like the H2S they produce...

If a sealed container of food was allowed to rot long enough it could produce noticeable quantities of H2S. All of the symptoms I read about were consistent with mild H2S exposure. It takes very little H2S to kill a person, so they're lucky that they only got sick!

Ask him how the premise wiring in every commercial building in the world is installed. They order patch cables from some commercial patch cable vendor for every run, riiiiiiiight.

Also, CAT5e is fine for what you are doing. I agree with the previous poster that you could practically use tin cans and a string for this.

These special dies, jacks, and connectors are called "CAT5" parts and you can buy them at Home Depot I think. Does that make them "special" ?

... and you might find out about NISTnet, which has been around for YEARS... NISTnet does the same thing as this, on Linux, and also includes a statistical latency delay model which simulates real world conditions.