Bismark introduced those measures because he was hoping to stave off the impending full-blown socialism that he saw coming. He was correct, and his measures were somewhat successful - it would be ~30 years before the final collapse of the German right, and it would be another 10 years after that before the emerging leader of the German left was able to step into the resulting vacuum and implement the rest of the plan that Bismark had tried to suppress.
But more to the point, there is no such thing as a pure socialist country or economy, nor is there anywhere to be found a pure free-market economy. Any example that can be found is actually a hybrid. In the west, we have modestly-free to mostly-free markets with some socialist-like features, such as the programs mentioned in the post you quoted. In places like China, they allow some free enterprise in small operations while everything large and/or important is operated by party operatives.
Can you please explain why I have three different fiber options then? According to your theory, it was impossible for the 2nd and 3rd fiber plants to get built in my area.
> I feel that we first need proof that in-person voter fraud is a big enough problem to require a solution that can potentially disenfranchise vulnerable populations.
I think that we first need proof that disenfranchisement of vulnerable populations is a big enough problem to require a solution that leaves us wide open to in-person voter fraud.
It was never about the orders, it was about orders that exceeded constitutional authority. Obama is still the reigning king of 0-9 Supreme Court losses, and will be until at least 2025.
I find it hard to believe that a human being intelligent enough to press the buttons in the right order to spell words actually thought that half of the country was upset about the form of the orders rather than their content.
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Natureâ(TM)s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. â" That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, â" That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. â" Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
The reason for me leaving are the changes in the community. The current license change discussions unfortunately bring to memory the fsf politics when I was working on gcc. That would still not be sufficient reason to leave. As with the code, llvm will still have the best license and if the only community change was the handling of the license change I would probably keep going.
The community change I cannot take is how the social injustice movement has permeated it. When I joined llvm no one asked or cared about my religion or political view. We all seemed committed to just writing a good compiler framework.
Somewhat recently a code of conduct was adopted. It says that the community tries to welcome people of all "political belief". Except those whose political belief mean that they don't agree with the code of conduct. Since agreement is required to take part in the conferences, I am no longer able to attend.
The last drop was llvm associating itself with an organization that openly discriminates based on sex and ancestry (1,2). This goes directly against my ethical views and I think I must leave the project to not be associated with this.
I'm glad you found it interesting. Before I hit Submit, I asked myself if I really thought anyone would want to read me rambling about cuneiform. I figured the answer was no, but I had already typed it all out...
Go get some graph paper and draw a full cycle sine wave. Call that 20 kHz. Calculate the time per division of the paper for 44.1 kHz sampling and mark the sample points. Measure the voltage at the three sampling points. Make a table with quantizations of those three sample points at various bit depths.
Now, draw a second full sine wave offset to the left (delayed) by 1 nanosecond. Measure that new wave at the same three times. Add those samples to your quantization table. Figure out how many bits you need to get different values from the first wave.
Congratulations, you now have a chart that shows that there indeed is a minimum phase delay that can be represented by a given sample rate and bit rate, and for a given input frequency. Feel free to repeat the exercise at different input frequencies, different sample rates and different phase offsets if you want to explore all of the dimensions of the limit.
Cuneiform texts have similar problems, and translation is a tedious process. I'm hopeful that new systems can help automate the process, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for it.
For a hint at the problems, cuneiform was used for thousands of years, across several languages.
In the early days, it was very terse, writing just the key words that would allow a literate native speaker of the language to reconstruct the real sentence. You would have a sentence written as "(picture of a man) (picture of a house) (picture of a noun that sounds like the verb to-build)". The reader would be expected to know that the intended sentence was something like "Lugale-e-mundu" or "The King built the house" and infer from the context (for example stamped on the still-wet bricks) that it meant "The king ordered the construction of these houses" or whatever.
Over time, the symbols were pared down from little drawings to simplified figures, to abstract representations, to a couple of strokes that carry very little similarity to the original drawings.
At the same time, the scribes got really inventive with the symbols. A written symbol could mean the noun that it once resembled, or it could mean a verb that sounds similar to the noun, or it could be a syllable, or it could be a marker to indicate that the next or previous stuff was a proper name, or the name of a deity.
Additionally, symbols multiplied. They ended up with dozens of symbols for the "e" sound, for example, with different meanings. So you could have two sentences with different meanings that sounded exactly the same, but they could be written with exact symbols, or with generic symbols.
To make things even more fun, Sumerian died out as a spoken language long before it faded as a written language. So, the scribes lost confidence in their writing and started gradually writing everything out longhand. This actually turned out to be fantastic for us, because it let us see the structure of the spoken language in ways that were completely hidden in older writings.
And other cultures with completely different unrelated languages started using the writing system. So you might find a tablet that you can't translate because it is Akkadian written phonetically, for example. Even worse, it could be written as if it were Sumerian, so the structure would make sense, but the names wouldn't.
That is actually how the Sumerian language was re-discovered ~1200 years after it died completely. There was a language still living enough for scholars to know what it sounded like, and ancient clay tablets written by people who had spoken that language centuries before.
The scholars noticed two things. First, there was a huge pile of those tablets that were completely incomprehensible. And second, that the ones they could read showed a writing system that was a hilariously bad fit for the written language. Like the subject, object and verb order was SVO when spoken, but SOV when written, and the written language was full of markers that were not present in the spoken language, and the markers in the spoken language were completely absent in the writing system.
Eventually, they figured out that they were looking at several different languages, and they were able to reconstruct Sumerian from that mess.
Anyhow, to process one of these tablets, you need to examine the strokes in the clay and match them to symbols. Then you take a wild guess at which language you think it might be and see if you can find a meaningful translation in that language. If not, you go back to pick a different language and try again. And again, and again.
Because of the tedium of doing this by hand, and the very short supply of people who know these languages and can do the work, our museums quite literally have tons of these tablets that have never been translated.
Other ancient writings face a similar problem. We have more of them in storage than we know what to do with. It was big news a few weeks ago that a 1500-year old C
Yes, I am familiar with them. I still mourn the loss of my original pre-soundblaster A3D card and the rumble headphones that came with it. I ganked a lot of noobs with that card.
I said "mind" specifically because audiophile robbers are absolute scum. We are talking about distances that are hard to see, much less hear. There is no way that someone could point out a 22 microsecond delay, much less a 50 nanosecond one. But that doesn't keep the scum from claiming that it is "better" in some nebulous way.
Even failing A-B testing doesn't invalidate the "more pure" theory.
For what it is worth, I don't believe that people can hear the 22 microsecond phase delay (aka quarter inch) from my initial calculation, much less a 50 nanosecond one. But I also don't think it could be comprehensively measured in the mind either way.
A lot of dubious and overpriced gear gets sold in the gap between "can't prove" and "can't disprove".
The interaural phase difference really does get thrown around as a reason to buy very expensive analog gear. My initial estimate, despite being off by a few orders of magnitude already strained credulity, and was very simple math. The overlap between "has money" and "does math" is apparently not great.
It isn't possible for there to be literally no loss of phase, but I may have overestimated the minimum increment. Thinking about it some more, I think the minimum time resolution varies with the frequency of the input wave, and inversely with the product of the sampling rate and the noise floor (bit depth).
My bad for posting while still half asleep.
He covers the whole topic of timing in about 30 seconds and does so in very scant detail, and with an infinite wave very very far from the filter frequency. It would be interesting to see the demonstration done with a precision delay line, a 20 kHz signal and various bit depths. If I'm right, and I may not be, even though I'm fully awake now, you can't accurately reproduce an 88 nanosecond phase delay on a 20 kHz signal using 8-bit PCM at 44.1 kHz.
I should hedge that a little more. I actually calculated that for a 22.05 kHz signal, right at the limit, where all of the phase information necessarily has to come from the bit depth. If we drop to 20 kHz to get under the filters, the resolving power of each bit gets a little bit stronger. 50 nanoseconds is probably too small to register digitally - but still trivially resolvable on a decent analog scope.
I hate to even say it, but there are two limitations to your (completely correct) statement:
Digital sampling is not a partial capture. It's an exact capture of the analog waveform within the frequency range (22 kHz in most cases - well beyond what most people can hear).
The first is that you need to filter the signal, stripping out any frequency components above the sampling frequency (half the sampling rate). This is a necessary condition of the exact reproduction characteristic of Nyquist-Shannon sampling.
The second is that this filtering necessarily discards some inter-track phase information from multi-track recordings. Inter-ear phasing is an important part of the way we process sounds in our brain. The difference in time it takes a sound to reach our ears and crawl through our hearing mechanisms tells us about where a sound is in three dimensions, and the difference in time taken by various reflections and echos of that sound tells us what kind of room we are in.
It turns out that none of us can hear anything over 22 kilohertz, which is why they picked that sample rate. And the minimum phase difference in a CD corresponds to roughly a quarter inch difference in the free air path of the sound (napkin math) .
I don't know if the minimum phase difference that our brain can respond to is known or even knowable. But if it is smaller than a quarter inch, I'd be amazed.
At any rate, that phasing information was lost in the recording and mastering process anyway, for nearly all recordings.
Even better idea, in addition to not giving away your data, why not also practice good operational security habits? Pick secure answers to those retarded questions. You are storing your password in an encrypted password safe, right? Add some more fields...
Site X thinks my first car was a "eterverinkipen43", but site Y thinks it was a "trocklencaterm39". Some people think my mother's maiden name was "metablersilippe8", but others think it is "glytenclegratio3".
There is absolutely no reason why any two sites or entities should have the same "secret", and none of those "secrets" should be things that your whole family and your entire school class knows. If you go to the "security" page of a site and it shows your answers to these questions, they are stored in plaintext and you absolutely positively must not use that same "secret" elsewhere.
And if a secret can be used as a password (or worse - can reset a password) it needs to be at least as strong as your password and protected as well as your password. Scratch that, it should be protected even better than your password because it will probably never be expired or changed.
I'm not sure that I should need to explain this here, but...
Each device connected directly to the modem uses DHCP to get an IP address from your ISP's servers. They didn't get the information from snooping on you - your devices deliberately and intentionally contacted them to check in.
If the top executives are doing unskilled light office work for huge salaries, why isn't there a bidding war for those jobs? Why doesn't someone offer to do the same plagiarism for less money?
Letting them starve may be the Libertarian position - I'm not one, so I can't say - but it certainly isn't the libertarian position.
The libertarian position is that people are happy to help their neighbors who need help, and we really need to stop using our government to interfere in that process.
Slashdot Mirror
Bismark introduced those measures because he was hoping to stave off the impending full-blown socialism that he saw coming. He was correct, and his measures were somewhat successful - it would be ~30 years before the final collapse of the German right, and it would be another 10 years after that before the emerging leader of the German left was able to step into the resulting vacuum and implement the rest of the plan that Bismark had tried to suppress.
But more to the point, there is no such thing as a pure socialist country or economy, nor is there anywhere to be found a pure free-market economy. Any example that can be found is actually a hybrid. In the west, we have modestly-free to mostly-free markets with some socialist-like features, such as the programs mentioned in the post you quoted. In places like China, they allow some free enterprise in small operations while everything large and/or important is operated by party operatives.
In other news, download speeds up 35.8%, upload speeds up 22.0% in the year since the repeal.
https://www.speedtest.net/reports/united-states/
Can you please explain why I have three different fiber options then? According to your theory, it was impossible for the 2nd and 3rd fiber plants to get built in my area.
> I feel that we first need proof that in-person voter fraud is a big enough problem to require a solution that can potentially disenfranchise vulnerable populations.
I think that we first need proof that disenfranchisement of vulnerable populations is a big enough problem to require a solution that leaves us wide open to in-person voter fraud.
It was never about the orders, it was about orders that exceeded constitutional authority. Obama is still the reigning king of 0-9 Supreme Court losses, and will be until at least 2025.
I find it hard to believe that a human being intelligent enough to press the buttons in the right order to spell words actually thought that half of the country was upset about the form of the orders rather than their content.
Wasn't there a report recently that said that the fake news was less fake than the nominally real news?
Don't worry. It isn't like Russia is going to extradite a dozen of their GRU operatives to stand trial.
Sun Tzu says to appear strong where you are weak.
They are hoping that Obama will rise from the grave and surrender the west Pacific to them.
IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Natureâ(TM)s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. â" That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, â" That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. â" Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, i
Your numbers are similar to numbers from other analysts. Looks like it'll be a quarter billion dollar loss on this movie.
They'll toss you out the airlock for making a mess in the lab.
Link and excerpt:
I'm glad you found it interesting. Before I hit Submit, I asked myself if I really thought anyone would want to read me rambling about cuneiform. I figured the answer was no, but I had already typed it all out...
Go get some graph paper and draw a full cycle sine wave. Call that 20 kHz. Calculate the time per division of the paper for 44.1 kHz sampling and mark the sample points. Measure the voltage at the three sampling points. Make a table with quantizations of those three sample points at various bit depths.
Now, draw a second full sine wave offset to the left (delayed) by 1 nanosecond. Measure that new wave at the same three times. Add those samples to your quantization table. Figure out how many bits you need to get different values from the first wave.
Congratulations, you now have a chart that shows that there indeed is a minimum phase delay that can be represented by a given sample rate and bit rate, and for a given input frequency. Feel free to repeat the exercise at different input frequencies, different sample rates and different phase offsets if you want to explore all of the dimensions of the limit.
Cuneiform texts have similar problems, and translation is a tedious process. I'm hopeful that new systems can help automate the process, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for it.
For a hint at the problems, cuneiform was used for thousands of years, across several languages.
In the early days, it was very terse, writing just the key words that would allow a literate native speaker of the language to reconstruct the real sentence. You would have a sentence written as "(picture of a man) (picture of a house) (picture of a noun that sounds like the verb to-build)". The reader would be expected to know that the intended sentence was something like "Lugale-e-mundu" or "The King built the house" and infer from the context (for example stamped on the still-wet bricks) that it meant "The king ordered the construction of these houses" or whatever.
Over time, the symbols were pared down from little drawings to simplified figures, to abstract representations, to a couple of strokes that carry very little similarity to the original drawings.
At the same time, the scribes got really inventive with the symbols. A written symbol could mean the noun that it once resembled, or it could mean a verb that sounds similar to the noun, or it could be a syllable, or it could be a marker to indicate that the next or previous stuff was a proper name, or the name of a deity.
Additionally, symbols multiplied. They ended up with dozens of symbols for the "e" sound, for example, with different meanings. So you could have two sentences with different meanings that sounded exactly the same, but they could be written with exact symbols, or with generic symbols.
To make things even more fun, Sumerian died out as a spoken language long before it faded as a written language. So, the scribes lost confidence in their writing and started gradually writing everything out longhand. This actually turned out to be fantastic for us, because it let us see the structure of the spoken language in ways that were completely hidden in older writings.
And other cultures with completely different unrelated languages started using the writing system. So you might find a tablet that you can't translate because it is Akkadian written phonetically, for example. Even worse, it could be written as if it were Sumerian, so the structure would make sense, but the names wouldn't.
That is actually how the Sumerian language was re-discovered ~1200 years after it died completely. There was a language still living enough for scholars to know what it sounded like, and ancient clay tablets written by people who had spoken that language centuries before.
The scholars noticed two things. First, there was a huge pile of those tablets that were completely incomprehensible. And second, that the ones they could read showed a writing system that was a hilariously bad fit for the written language. Like the subject, object and verb order was SVO when spoken, but SOV when written, and the written language was full of markers that were not present in the spoken language, and the markers in the spoken language were completely absent in the writing system.
Eventually, they figured out that they were looking at several different languages, and they were able to reconstruct Sumerian from that mess.
Anyhow, to process one of these tablets, you need to examine the strokes in the clay and match them to symbols. Then you take a wild guess at which language you think it might be and see if you can find a meaningful translation in that language. If not, you go back to pick a different language and try again. And again, and again.
Because of the tedium of doing this by hand, and the very short supply of people who know these languages and can do the work, our museums quite literally have tons of these tablets that have never been translated.
Other ancient writings face a similar problem. We have more of them in storage than we know what to do with. It was big news a few weeks ago that a 1500-year old C
Yes, I am familiar with them. I still mourn the loss of my original pre-soundblaster A3D card and the rumble headphones that came with it. I ganked a lot of noobs with that card.
I said "mind" specifically because audiophile robbers are absolute scum. We are talking about distances that are hard to see, much less hear. There is no way that someone could point out a 22 microsecond delay, much less a 50 nanosecond one. But that doesn't keep the scum from claiming that it is "better" in some nebulous way.
Even failing A-B testing doesn't invalidate the "more pure" theory.
For what it is worth, I don't believe that people can hear the 22 microsecond phase delay (aka quarter inch) from my initial calculation, much less a 50 nanosecond one. But I also don't think it could be comprehensively measured in the mind either way.
A lot of dubious and overpriced gear gets sold in the gap between "can't prove" and "can't disprove".
The interaural phase difference really does get thrown around as a reason to buy very expensive analog gear. My initial estimate, despite being off by a few orders of magnitude already strained credulity, and was very simple math. The overlap between "has money" and "does math" is apparently not great.
It isn't possible for there to be literally no loss of phase, but I may have overestimated the minimum increment. Thinking about it some more, I think the minimum time resolution varies with the frequency of the input wave, and inversely with the product of the sampling rate and the noise floor (bit depth).
My bad for posting while still half asleep.
He covers the whole topic of timing in about 30 seconds and does so in very scant detail, and with an infinite wave very very far from the filter frequency. It would be interesting to see the demonstration done with a precision delay line, a 20 kHz signal and various bit depths. If I'm right, and I may not be, even though I'm fully awake now, you can't accurately reproduce an 88 nanosecond phase delay on a 20 kHz signal using 8-bit PCM at 44.1 kHz.
I should hedge that a little more. I actually calculated that for a 22.05 kHz signal, right at the limit, where all of the phase information necessarily has to come from the bit depth. If we drop to 20 kHz to get under the filters, the resolving power of each bit gets a little bit stronger. 50 nanoseconds is probably too small to register digitally - but still trivially resolvable on a decent analog scope.
I hate to even say it, but there are two limitations to your (completely correct) statement:
The first is that you need to filter the signal, stripping out any frequency components above the sampling frequency (half the sampling rate). This is a necessary condition of the exact reproduction characteristic of Nyquist-Shannon sampling.
The second is that this filtering necessarily discards some inter-track phase information from multi-track recordings. Inter-ear phasing is an important part of the way we process sounds in our brain. The difference in time it takes a sound to reach our ears and crawl through our hearing mechanisms tells us about where a sound is in three dimensions, and the difference in time taken by various reflections and echos of that sound tells us what kind of room we are in.
It turns out that none of us can hear anything over 22 kilohertz, which is why they picked that sample rate. And the minimum phase difference in a CD corresponds to roughly a quarter inch difference in the free air path of the sound (napkin math) .
I don't know if the minimum phase difference that our brain can respond to is known or even knowable. But if it is smaller than a quarter inch, I'd be amazed.
At any rate, that phasing information was lost in the recording and mastering process anyway, for nearly all recordings.
Hilariously, those don't work for me. But these do:
https://i.imgur.com/O0Aahi5.gif?noredirect
https://i.imgur.com/p05aEhm.gif?noredirect
You don't know the half of it. Our spies have obtained visual confirmation. Apparently the whole factory was managed by just one person.
Even better idea, in addition to not giving away your data, why not also practice good operational security habits? Pick secure answers to those retarded questions. You are storing your password in an encrypted password safe, right? Add some more fields...
Site X thinks my first car was a "eterverinkipen43", but site Y thinks it was a "trocklencaterm39". Some people think my mother's maiden name was "metablersilippe8", but others think it is "glytenclegratio3".
There is absolutely no reason why any two sites or entities should have the same "secret", and none of those "secrets" should be things that your whole family and your entire school class knows. If you go to the "security" page of a site and it shows your answers to these questions, they are stored in plaintext and you absolutely positively must not use that same "secret" elsewhere.
And if a secret can be used as a password (or worse - can reset a password) it needs to be at least as strong as your password and protected as well as your password. Scratch that, it should be protected even better than your password because it will probably never be expired or changed.
I'm not sure that I should need to explain this here, but...
Each device connected directly to the modem uses DHCP to get an IP address from your ISP's servers. They didn't get the information from snooping on you - your devices deliberately and intentionally contacted them to check in.
If the top executives are doing unskilled light office work for huge salaries, why isn't there a bidding war for those jobs? Why doesn't someone offer to do the same plagiarism for less money?
Letting them starve may be the Libertarian position - I'm not one, so I can't say - but it certainly isn't the libertarian position.
The libertarian position is that people are happy to help their neighbors who need help, and we really need to stop using our government to interfere in that process.