Its fucking awsome. I don't care what it costs you. IMO you should stop bitching about the high cost of the program and get with the research. None of this is 'real' money anyway.

hehe

no, no, no - it's the guilty pricks that mind your conscience

...and a willfully blind one, too. You'd have to be a tool to refuse to see the single greatest technological change vector since at least Berthold Shwartz or Gutenberg. Sure it's up in the air. So is all of literature. So is his renown, fame, reputation, etc. These are all virtual, ephemeric phenomena.

The TCP/IP protocol stack has nothing whatever to do with cables.

  Yes, you can make cables with a hand held crimper that are just as good as store bought ones - a decent SLT tester set will tell you what the ACR and NEXT values are. You don't really need to make your cables as good as that for your application, a T1 is 1.5Mb/s, this is an order of magnitude ( or two) less than the switch, so regular cat5 wiring, jacks, patchcords, patchpanels, etc. You can't make your T1 any faster by having "good" cables.....

Yes, there is ageism in IT. There's ageism in just about every part of today's society. That should not stop you from getting a degree. I went back to college at about your age. Just remember that there is plenty of IT geeks with a BS degree and not a whit of experience - it's what you do with your degree that counts. BTW, it is possible to have a career without one.