You might want to try and find someone a little more credible than Alex Jones (9/11 truther, gold bug, serial martial law predictor, etc) if you want me to take a theory at all seriously.
What the hell can you possibly hope to gain by paying off DDoSers? If you do pay them, they have literally no incentive not to just keep extorting you, and then others can do the same. Ya getting DDoS'd sucks but the good news is any sizable DDoS costs them money too, they have to rent out a botnet so they can't sustain it for very long.
This is much different than paying "protection money" to a criminal organization in the physical world. While, yes, it is still extortion at least there you have a benefit you get: They will legitimately protect you from other criminals. Organized crime is not interested in others muscling in on their business so they do actually work to protect businesses that buy them off. It is a heavy handed situation, as if you don't pay they will go after you themselves, but you can see why it would make some sense for a business to buy in. If the police are unwilling or unable to protect them, this can.
With DDoS gangs on the Internet, there's nothing of the sort. They are just saying "Pay us and we won't bother you," but they can go back on that, or double dip. They can easily pretend to be someone else and demand you pay up, and others can also demand you pay up. I think the more you pay the more likely you are to have a reputation of an easy mark who can be extorted at will.
The cost of maintaining a physical store and all the logistics thereof are pretty significant. I mean think of all the overhead: How much actual profit did you turn on that $3 rental? Most of it got eaten by operation costs.
Digital delivery is next to nothing, pennies or less to stream a movie to you. As such it should be cheaper. Same deal why people get mad about e-books costing as much or more than physical books.
One of the bad things about Valve "no management" flat structure (there are many) is that projects live and die based on if enough people think they are interesting. There isn't any kind of project management saying "This is something our consumers want, so let's devote time and resources to make it happen," instead it is whatever toys a group of geeks feel like playing with for a time, until they are bored and move elsewhere.
You see it the most in customer service. They have no CS division, since the company doesn't really have divisions due to the "flat" nature so it is something "everyone just works on." Of course CS work sucks so it gets heavily neglected unless people make noise. They have no interesting in doing more or fixing it because it isn't an interesting problem so they play around with other shit instead.
Because the majority of Apple fans cannot admit to themselves that they bought something fashionable. They have convinced themselves that the reason they got it is technical superiority, not because it is cool. Particularly Mac faithful, geeks and hipsters which are three of Apple's major sales groups. All of them are the kind that believe they are not motivated by fashion, and hence any suggestion that the product they purchased is fashionable makes them angry.
I work for a university doing IT and as with most universities, you see a big mix of ages. We have everything from students up to people in their 80s (I'm 35). The most common problem I see with older workers is the lack of willingness to keep up with new tech. IT, development, or any computer field progresses fast, of course. If you are going to be effective, you have to be open to learning new things all the time and changing how you do things. Some older workers have a lot of trouble with that. They act like things should be how they were 10 or 20 years ago, and still try and do things the same way. It leads to inefficient solutions, and inability to effectively help users with problems they have with new tech.
While I'm sure there is legitimate ageism, since there are people who will discriminate, on purpose or not, against all kinds of things, I think some of it is just older workers having a common problem that doesn't gel well with technical work. I personally have zero care about someone's age, what I care about is when someone is trying to do stupid shit from 10 years ago and refusing to get with the times.
The reason Apple can charge so much and reap such large profit margins is that they sell fashion, more than electronics. The consumer electronics market tends to be pretty price sensitive and competitive, so you need to keep price, and thus margins, down to compete. However fashion doesn't work like that. High prices can actually be seen as a good thing as they confer status, and people don't shop on price, they want the fashionable brand.
Well, Apple made their stuff stylish. It is fashionable to be seen with a shiny Mac laptop. It is fashionable to be seen with an iPod, with white visible earbuds and the cord hanging out in front of your shirt so everyone knows you have one. They are status symbols. As such, people tolerate and even embrace higher prices. That lets Apple make great margins where other companies can't.
They stash their money in tax havens for what purpose I have no idea. Seriously the amount of cash on hand they have is obscene. If I were a shareholder I'd be pissed and demanding they paid out dividends. Yes, repatriating the money to pay it out would incur tax, but I'd rather have some of it than none of it.
As it stands Apple just hoards cash so they don't have to pay taxes on it and sits on it.
Citation needed on that peak worldwide number. Also that single router is the Cisco CRS-X, when outfitted with maximum number (72) of 16-slot shelves fully populated with line cards and represents the maximum aggregate switching capacity of the system. Each shelf being an 84-inch rack and costing 6-7 figures.
Seriously, big bandwidth costs big money and requires high end ASICs. If it actually interests you, spend a bit of time looking in to it (it is really cool, I love high end networking gear). If not no biggie, but don't then cry that things should be able to be much cheaper without an understanding of some of the costs involved.
Well yes and no with bandwidth cost. The marginal cost, like per bit routed is minimal to none. However the infrastructure isn't free and the more people want to use, the more of it you need. That's where sharing and playing nice have to come in. You can't just say "Well get more capacity," because not only does that cost money, but there are limits you start to reach in terms of how much traffic a router can pass and so on. It is a lot for the really big ones, but still limited (900tbit/sec total capacity is about the most you can get in a router at this point and that's all ports aggregated).
Goes double when you are talking something like cable since you share the network with neighbours, and you share the spectrum of the wire with video. They can devote more spectrum to data, but only so much. There are limits, economic and technical, to the amount of bandwidth they can reasonably provide to a given neighbourhood and so sharing is a must if costs are going to be reasonable. Doesn't mean they have to be dicks about it, which they are, but it is not infinite.
Also the water analogy isn't a good one because that is, in fact, how it works. With utilities you pay more for a bigger hookup AND you pay for usage. The price you pay for having your little 50 psi hose-sized house hookup is much less than you'd pay for a bigass commercial hookup. No matter what the size, you pay for usage. Of course with utilities paying for usage makes sense since it is a resource you are using. Just not a good analogy for Internet.
Technically, I can get Century Link but they aren't really competition. Cox offers speeds ranging from 15/2mbps to 300/30mbps. Century Link only goes to 6mb/768k which is really not at all enough for the Interwebs these days. They could stop being retards and roll out fibre, of course, but they won't because they are a phone company and thus have a terminal case of the stupids. Also in theory there are CLECs at Century Link but I'm not sure the status these days and they can't give any higher speeds. Wireless Internet might be available too, there are a couple companies that offer it in my city not sure if they could get it to my specific location. Again though, much slower, maybe 15mbps max. Cox is the only realistic choice I have at this point. Comcast is also in the city, but it is divided by region. So there's no place where you choose Cox or Comcast, whichever one you get in a given area is the one you get. My area is thankfully Cox.
Most consumers can deal with a data cap fine... if it is reasonable. It turns out most people are reasonable Internet users: They use it to get what they want, and leave it idle otherwise so that others can share. It is only some people who really abuse it (like torrent heads who download any and everything just to have it) that would complain about any cap, no matter what it is.
However rather than use it as a tool to help network quality, ISPs get greedy and try to use it to milk extra money from consumers. That means they want to set the cop too low on purpose, so people overrun it and have to pay more.
Like I have no issue with my data cap on Cox. For one, it is quite reasonable, 2TB. That's a lot of usage, even with a high speed line. So the chances of me hitting it are very low, even if I have a month where I'm using a ton of data for whatever reason (like restoring from an online backup or something). Also it is a soft cap. If I hit it they don't shut me off, just call me and pester me (or maybe not even that if it isn't much over, I don't know I've never hit it). Only if there are repeated problems would they act.
Now compare that to my boss who's on Comcast and ends up hitting his cap every month. Part of that is because he has a family whereas I'm single but more is because it is a 300GB cap. Our line speeds are the same (or near enough) but Comcast gives 15%ish of the bandwidth and it is a hard cap, you go over you pay a ludicrous amount for more. He's really annoyed, and I would be too in that situation.
It seems when they start charging money for it, they just can't help but get greedy and stupid.
Because none of our simulations bear any resemblance to something the likes of the universe. Saying "We simulate some stuff so someone is simulating us," is just another creation myth. It is the same shit that people use to argue god: "Everything has a creator in the universe, so the universe itself must have a creator and that creator is god." Same idea, different terminology.
Because even if it is imperfect, the beings running it can work around that. They can change things, delete things, roll back things, etc. If they control the hardware and the software that comprises the simulation, then they are gods for our perspectives and can change anything they wish, including suspending or shutting down the whole thing.
Also arguing about an imperfect simulation is rather silly since there is NO evidence of such a thing. That either means it isn't a simulation, is a perfect one, or any time evidence is found things are changed. Either way it all comes down to the same thing of it doesn't matter.
Dressing it up in technology terms doesn't change shit: It is a basic god story. It is a story that some being or beings on a higher order of reality than our own created and run this reality. It is just semantics if you say it is a simulation running on some device (the nature of which we cannot comprehend) or if it is some physical system created by force of will. You are talking about superior beings that exist completely outside of our reality. Gods. Humans have had the myth in various forms for all of our existence. This is just the "geek friendly" version that somehow they've decided is different.
From a science standpoint arguing that we are living in a computer simulation is no different than arguing god created the universe. Either way you are saying "Something outside the universe, and greater than it, is responsible for its creation and upkeep." As such it is completely untestable and not science. You can't test for something literally outside of the confines of our reality, especially not presuming that thing is omnipotent as a god or creator of a simulation would be since even if you worked out a test they could change the results, change the parameters, etc.
It really annoys me how the computer simulation crap has become the creation myth for a number of science and geek types. They'll laugh at the silly Christians for believing in some omnipotent being that was able to create all reality, but be perfectly ok with the idea of some effectively omnipotent (from our perspective) being or beings that managed to create all of reality by writing a computer program in some higher order reality. Either way it is invoking a god myth.
If people want to believe in computer-god instead of religious-god ok I guess, but don't try to pretend it is any different and that it is any more than superstition.
Often x86 is used to mean any processor with an ISA descended from the original 8086, including modern 64-bit CPUs. So they mean AMD is licensing their x86-64 (or x64 or AMD64, whichever way you like to put it) technology which is not as powerful as Intel's, but is still fully current in terms of ISA. They specifically mention AMD's "Zen" processor which is the new 64-bit architecture expected to release this year.
The days of just an amplifier are pretty well long gone. The best ones do a number of things:
1) Multi-band compression. Compression is reducing the difference between the highest and lowest sounds, and a multi-band compressor does it different amounts for different frequency ranges. Basically an advanced kind f equalization that levels things out, which helps you hear quiet stuff but not get overwhelmed by loud stuff.
2) Frequency remapping. For hardcore cases of high frequency hearing loss those frequencies can be remapped to lower, still audible frequencies.
3) Microphone steering. The mics can steer in on conversation and reject background noise pretty effectively. This makes things much more audible in most situations for most people.
4) Device interfacing. Hearing aids can automatically work with most land lines and cellphones. It isn't via their mic, they do it via induction and so on.
In particular the first two are the ones you tend to need an audiologist for. You get someone to measure your hearing and see where you are deficient and how much, and then design compression curves to counteract that as best as possible.
That doesn't mean the devices couldn't and shouldn't be cheaper, but there's a reason for a professional to be involved.
He asked for an example of people who don't use their SNAP benefits to feed their kids. I wasn't forwarding a position, I was showing him that ya, this does happen, which he seemed to doubt.
When my mom was a teacher one of the fights the teachers had with the district and state was over the school breakfast program. Schools did breakfast and lunch, with prices being reduced or eliminated based on financial need. The breakfasts were only for students in need, it wasn't something most students used or could use. They wanted to cut out the breakfasts to save money. The teachers pushed back because they knew, from talking to the kids, that for most of the kids on these programs the breakfast and lunch at school was the only food they got. Their parents were absent, or in jail, or addicts, or in various other ways simply not being parents and not caring for their kids. So one of the things the school could do to help them was make sure they got at least some nutritious meals. Also helped them learn and made them more likely to want to attend.
There are a non-trivial amount of people who make shitty decisions with their money.
Because while car crash deaths are still a real big killer, the IS has made MASSIVE strides in reducing them, and that has been done in no small part by legislation of new safety features. Deaths both in terms of absolute numbers and deaths per 100 million miles driven have been dropping consistently since around 1970.
Not agreeing with this bullshit encryption bill, just that your example may not be showing what you want it to show.
A BSOD means the OS faced an error so critical, there can be no recovery. To keep data corruption from happening, the system must immediately halt. So what it does is dumps what information it can to the screen, and if possible a dump file, and then halts.
You generally see them with hardware errors (not all hardware errors manifest as BSODs but some do) but also with serious driver errors and some other things. They are rare, but they happen, and the codes they give can help you figure out what went wrong.
Dunno if they are used much though. They support EuroDOCSIS so you can in theory use them everywhere (DOCSIS is for NTSC systems, EuroDOCSIS for PAL). IT is also possible that the same firmware is on units with a different model number or brand in other countries, sometimes a product will be rebadged in different markets.
It is kinda hard to say. A simple test is to go to 192.168.100.1. If that doesn't come up, then you have nothing to worry about since that's the IP the Arris modems use. If it does come up, then it depends on the specifics of the firmware. The older ones like the SB6141 have a reboot html page you could load, the newer ones do a button click and verification which makes this not work.
Go look at your setup: It goes computer -> router -> modem -> ISP. Your computer(s) are on the LAN side wired or wireless. Your modem is on the WAN side. That's the only way your router can route assuming a standard consumer grade router.
So any traffic to anything on the WAN side, which includes your modem, passes through the router. The router can then, of course, block any of that it likes. Many routers by default block private IP spaces as specified by RFC 1918 on the WAN port since under normal circumstances you wouldn't see them on there, only on the LAN side.
I am seriously not sure why this is something that is seemingly so hard to understand on a geek oriented website.
Slashdot Mirror
You might want to try and find someone a little more credible than Alex Jones (9/11 truther, gold bug, serial martial law predictor, etc) if you want me to take a theory at all seriously.
What the hell can you possibly hope to gain by paying off DDoSers? If you do pay them, they have literally no incentive not to just keep extorting you, and then others can do the same. Ya getting DDoS'd sucks but the good news is any sizable DDoS costs them money too, they have to rent out a botnet so they can't sustain it for very long.
This is much different than paying "protection money" to a criminal organization in the physical world. While, yes, it is still extortion at least there you have a benefit you get: They will legitimately protect you from other criminals. Organized crime is not interested in others muscling in on their business so they do actually work to protect businesses that buy them off. It is a heavy handed situation, as if you don't pay they will go after you themselves, but you can see why it would make some sense for a business to buy in. If the police are unwilling or unable to protect them, this can.
With DDoS gangs on the Internet, there's nothing of the sort. They are just saying "Pay us and we won't bother you," but they can go back on that, or double dip. They can easily pretend to be someone else and demand you pay up, and others can also demand you pay up. I think the more you pay the more likely you are to have a reputation of an easy mark who can be extorted at will.
The cost of maintaining a physical store and all the logistics thereof are pretty significant. I mean think of all the overhead: How much actual profit did you turn on that $3 rental? Most of it got eaten by operation costs.
Digital delivery is next to nothing, pennies or less to stream a movie to you. As such it should be cheaper. Same deal why people get mad about e-books costing as much or more than physical books.
One of the bad things about Valve "no management" flat structure (there are many) is that projects live and die based on if enough people think they are interesting. There isn't any kind of project management saying "This is something our consumers want, so let's devote time and resources to make it happen," instead it is whatever toys a group of geeks feel like playing with for a time, until they are bored and move elsewhere.
You see it the most in customer service. They have no CS division, since the company doesn't really have divisions due to the "flat" nature so it is something "everyone just works on." Of course CS work sucks so it gets heavily neglected unless people make noise. They have no interesting in doing more or fixing it because it isn't an interesting problem so they play around with other shit instead.
Because the majority of Apple fans cannot admit to themselves that they bought something fashionable. They have convinced themselves that the reason they got it is technical superiority, not because it is cool. Particularly Mac faithful, geeks and hipsters which are three of Apple's major sales groups. All of them are the kind that believe they are not motivated by fashion, and hence any suggestion that the product they purchased is fashionable makes them angry.
I work for a university doing IT and as with most universities, you see a big mix of ages. We have everything from students up to people in their 80s (I'm 35). The most common problem I see with older workers is the lack of willingness to keep up with new tech. IT, development, or any computer field progresses fast, of course. If you are going to be effective, you have to be open to learning new things all the time and changing how you do things. Some older workers have a lot of trouble with that. They act like things should be how they were 10 or 20 years ago, and still try and do things the same way. It leads to inefficient solutions, and inability to effectively help users with problems they have with new tech.
While I'm sure there is legitimate ageism, since there are people who will discriminate, on purpose or not, against all kinds of things, I think some of it is just older workers having a common problem that doesn't gel well with technical work. I personally have zero care about someone's age, what I care about is when someone is trying to do stupid shit from 10 years ago and refusing to get with the times.
The reason Apple can charge so much and reap such large profit margins is that they sell fashion, more than electronics. The consumer electronics market tends to be pretty price sensitive and competitive, so you need to keep price, and thus margins, down to compete. However fashion doesn't work like that. High prices can actually be seen as a good thing as they confer status, and people don't shop on price, they want the fashionable brand.
Well, Apple made their stuff stylish. It is fashionable to be seen with a shiny Mac laptop. It is fashionable to be seen with an iPod, with white visible earbuds and the cord hanging out in front of your shirt so everyone knows you have one. They are status symbols. As such, people tolerate and even embrace higher prices. That lets Apple make great margins where other companies can't.
They stash their money in tax havens for what purpose I have no idea. Seriously the amount of cash on hand they have is obscene. If I were a shareholder I'd be pissed and demanding they paid out dividends. Yes, repatriating the money to pay it out would incur tax, but I'd rather have some of it than none of it.
As it stands Apple just hoards cash so they don't have to pay taxes on it and sits on it.
Citation needed on that peak worldwide number. Also that single router is the Cisco CRS-X, when outfitted with maximum number (72) of 16-slot shelves fully populated with line cards and represents the maximum aggregate switching capacity of the system. Each shelf being an 84-inch rack and costing 6-7 figures.
Seriously, big bandwidth costs big money and requires high end ASICs. If it actually interests you, spend a bit of time looking in to it (it is really cool, I love high end networking gear). If not no biggie, but don't then cry that things should be able to be much cheaper without an understanding of some of the costs involved.
Well yes and no with bandwidth cost. The marginal cost, like per bit routed is minimal to none. However the infrastructure isn't free and the more people want to use, the more of it you need. That's where sharing and playing nice have to come in. You can't just say "Well get more capacity," because not only does that cost money, but there are limits you start to reach in terms of how much traffic a router can pass and so on. It is a lot for the really big ones, but still limited (900tbit/sec total capacity is about the most you can get in a router at this point and that's all ports aggregated).
Goes double when you are talking something like cable since you share the network with neighbours, and you share the spectrum of the wire with video. They can devote more spectrum to data, but only so much. There are limits, economic and technical, to the amount of bandwidth they can reasonably provide to a given neighbourhood and so sharing is a must if costs are going to be reasonable. Doesn't mean they have to be dicks about it, which they are, but it is not infinite.
Also the water analogy isn't a good one because that is, in fact, how it works. With utilities you pay more for a bigger hookup AND you pay for usage. The price you pay for having your little 50 psi hose-sized house hookup is much less than you'd pay for a bigass commercial hookup. No matter what the size, you pay for usage. Of course with utilities paying for usage makes sense since it is a resource you are using. Just not a good analogy for Internet.
Technically, I can get Century Link but they aren't really competition. Cox offers speeds ranging from 15/2mbps to 300/30mbps. Century Link only goes to 6mb/768k which is really not at all enough for the Interwebs these days. They could stop being retards and roll out fibre, of course, but they won't because they are a phone company and thus have a terminal case of the stupids. Also in theory there are CLECs at Century Link but I'm not sure the status these days and they can't give any higher speeds. Wireless Internet might be available too, there are a couple companies that offer it in my city not sure if they could get it to my specific location. Again though, much slower, maybe 15mbps max. Cox is the only realistic choice I have at this point. Comcast is also in the city, but it is divided by region. So there's no place where you choose Cox or Comcast, whichever one you get in a given area is the one you get. My area is thankfully Cox.
Most consumers can deal with a data cap fine... if it is reasonable. It turns out most people are reasonable Internet users: They use it to get what they want, and leave it idle otherwise so that others can share. It is only some people who really abuse it (like torrent heads who download any and everything just to have it) that would complain about any cap, no matter what it is.
However rather than use it as a tool to help network quality, ISPs get greedy and try to use it to milk extra money from consumers. That means they want to set the cop too low on purpose, so people overrun it and have to pay more.
Like I have no issue with my data cap on Cox. For one, it is quite reasonable, 2TB. That's a lot of usage, even with a high speed line. So the chances of me hitting it are very low, even if I have a month where I'm using a ton of data for whatever reason (like restoring from an online backup or something). Also it is a soft cap. If I hit it they don't shut me off, just call me and pester me (or maybe not even that if it isn't much over, I don't know I've never hit it). Only if there are repeated problems would they act.
Now compare that to my boss who's on Comcast and ends up hitting his cap every month. Part of that is because he has a family whereas I'm single but more is because it is a 300GB cap. Our line speeds are the same (or near enough) but Comcast gives 15%ish of the bandwidth and it is a hard cap, you go over you pay a ludicrous amount for more. He's really annoyed, and I would be too in that situation.
It seems when they start charging money for it, they just can't help but get greedy and stupid.
Because none of our simulations bear any resemblance to something the likes of the universe. Saying "We simulate some stuff so someone is simulating us," is just another creation myth. It is the same shit that people use to argue god: "Everything has a creator in the universe, so the universe itself must have a creator and that creator is god." Same idea, different terminology.
Because even if it is imperfect, the beings running it can work around that. They can change things, delete things, roll back things, etc. If they control the hardware and the software that comprises the simulation, then they are gods for our perspectives and can change anything they wish, including suspending or shutting down the whole thing.
Also arguing about an imperfect simulation is rather silly since there is NO evidence of such a thing. That either means it isn't a simulation, is a perfect one, or any time evidence is found things are changed. Either way it all comes down to the same thing of it doesn't matter.
Dressing it up in technology terms doesn't change shit: It is a basic god story. It is a story that some being or beings on a higher order of reality than our own created and run this reality. It is just semantics if you say it is a simulation running on some device (the nature of which we cannot comprehend) or if it is some physical system created by force of will. You are talking about superior beings that exist completely outside of our reality. Gods. Humans have had the myth in various forms for all of our existence. This is just the "geek friendly" version that somehow they've decided is different.
Same shit, different terms.
From a science standpoint arguing that we are living in a computer simulation is no different than arguing god created the universe. Either way you are saying "Something outside the universe, and greater than it, is responsible for its creation and upkeep." As such it is completely untestable and not science. You can't test for something literally outside of the confines of our reality, especially not presuming that thing is omnipotent as a god or creator of a simulation would be since even if you worked out a test they could change the results, change the parameters, etc.
It really annoys me how the computer simulation crap has become the creation myth for a number of science and geek types. They'll laugh at the silly Christians for believing in some omnipotent being that was able to create all reality, but be perfectly ok with the idea of some effectively omnipotent (from our perspective) being or beings that managed to create all of reality by writing a computer program in some higher order reality. Either way it is invoking a god myth.
If people want to believe in computer-god instead of religious-god ok I guess, but don't try to pretend it is any different and that it is any more than superstition.
Their tech is not as powerful, the actual chip. They aren't just licensing the ISA, they are licensing the chip design.
Often x86 is used to mean any processor with an ISA descended from the original 8086, including modern 64-bit CPUs. So they mean AMD is licensing their x86-64 (or x64 or AMD64, whichever way you like to put it) technology which is not as powerful as Intel's, but is still fully current in terms of ISA. They specifically mention AMD's "Zen" processor which is the new 64-bit architecture expected to release this year.
The days of just an amplifier are pretty well long gone. The best ones do a number of things:
1) Multi-band compression. Compression is reducing the difference between the highest and lowest sounds, and a multi-band compressor does it different amounts for different frequency ranges. Basically an advanced kind f equalization that levels things out, which helps you hear quiet stuff but not get overwhelmed by loud stuff.
2) Frequency remapping. For hardcore cases of high frequency hearing loss those frequencies can be remapped to lower, still audible frequencies.
3) Microphone steering. The mics can steer in on conversation and reject background noise pretty effectively. This makes things much more audible in most situations for most people.
4) Device interfacing. Hearing aids can automatically work with most land lines and cellphones. It isn't via their mic, they do it via induction and so on.
In particular the first two are the ones you tend to need an audiologist for. You get someone to measure your hearing and see where you are deficient and how much, and then design compression curves to counteract that as best as possible.
That doesn't mean the devices couldn't and shouldn't be cheaper, but there's a reason for a professional to be involved.
He asked for an example of people who don't use their SNAP benefits to feed their kids. I wasn't forwarding a position, I was showing him that ya, this does happen, which he seemed to doubt.
What's your point?
At least any one with poor kids.
When my mom was a teacher one of the fights the teachers had with the district and state was over the school breakfast program. Schools did breakfast and lunch, with prices being reduced or eliminated based on financial need. The breakfasts were only for students in need, it wasn't something most students used or could use. They wanted to cut out the breakfasts to save money. The teachers pushed back because they knew, from talking to the kids, that for most of the kids on these programs the breakfast and lunch at school was the only food they got. Their parents were absent, or in jail, or addicts, or in various other ways simply not being parents and not caring for their kids. So one of the things the school could do to help them was make sure they got at least some nutritious meals. Also helped them learn and made them more likely to want to attend.
There are a non-trivial amount of people who make shitty decisions with their money.
Because while car crash deaths are still a real big killer, the IS has made MASSIVE strides in reducing them, and that has been done in no small part by legislation of new safety features. Deaths both in terms of absolute numbers and deaths per 100 million miles driven have been dropping consistently since around 1970.
Not agreeing with this bullshit encryption bill, just that your example may not be showing what you want it to show.
Sprint is now the smallest carrier in the US. T-Mobile overtook them some time ago.
A BSOD means the OS faced an error so critical, there can be no recovery. To keep data corruption from happening, the system must immediately halt. So what it does is dumps what information it can to the screen, and if possible a dump file, and then halts.
You generally see them with hardware errors (not all hardware errors manifest as BSODs but some do) but also with serious driver errors and some other things. They are rare, but they happen, and the codes they give can help you figure out what went wrong.
Dunno if they are used much though. They support EuroDOCSIS so you can in theory use them everywhere (DOCSIS is for NTSC systems, EuroDOCSIS for PAL). IT is also possible that the same firmware is on units with a different model number or brand in other countries, sometimes a product will be rebadged in different markets.
It is kinda hard to say. A simple test is to go to 192.168.100.1. If that doesn't come up, then you have nothing to worry about since that's the IP the Arris modems use. If it does come up, then it depends on the specifics of the firmware. The older ones like the SB6141 have a reboot html page you could load, the newer ones do a button click and verification which makes this not work.
Go look at your setup: It goes computer -> router -> modem -> ISP. Your computer(s) are on the LAN side wired or wireless. Your modem is on the WAN side. That's the only way your router can route assuming a standard consumer grade router.
So any traffic to anything on the WAN side, which includes your modem, passes through the router. The router can then, of course, block any of that it likes. Many routers by default block private IP spaces as specified by RFC 1918 on the WAN port since under normal circumstances you wouldn't see them on there, only on the LAN side.
I am seriously not sure why this is something that is seemingly so hard to understand on a geek oriented website.