I got thinking about Senator Ted Stevens. (I don't know how or why.) I think he got a bad rap about that "internet as a series of tubes" thing. The internet actually is a series of tubes if you're talking about it within the IP (or is it TCP?) model. If I remember my network engineering class --and I'm not going to get up and look at the book, I care so little-- a "stateful" or maybe stateless connection is set up between client and server. This acts as a tunnel between the two. So it's a tube. Stevens called the internet a series of tubes probably because this is how a network engineer once described it to him.
If pressed to describe the internet to a non-technical type, I would say, "The internet is a parallel collection of stateless (stateful?) connections that get created and destroyed between various clients and servers for the purpose of providing private communications channels within a common bandwidth. You could think of it as a parallel collection of tubes, one of which you would create on-demand for the purpose of yelling through it to your conversation partner, and when you don't need it anymore, the tube disappears."
So essentially, the internet is a series of tubes. You win, Senator.
