It depends on where you live. In California they are almost commonplace, especially in the metro areas. A closer cousin to Tesla than Ferrari would be Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Porsche, etc. They are expensive and only the affluent can afford them, but not so crazy expensive that you need to be a CEO or rock star.

Yup, pfSense is Good Stuff. On the hardware side it'll run on damn near anything. I run mine on an old Celeron machine with traffic shaping, no issues. I don't know that I'd want more than one or two simultaneous VPN users with that compute capacity, though.

Identifying and prosecuting are two different things. The former can be impractical, the latter can be impossible.

First, the company damaged carries the legal and financial burden of just bringing suit. That probably involves hiring an attorney and possibly a detective. Small companies will often not have those capabilities.

Then, assuming they can find them, they have to serve the offender. Good luck getting that done in Mumbai.

Then, assuming the offender don't show up to defend themselves and you win your case, you have to collect on the damages. Again, good luck with that.

It's the best way, but not a sure way. Unscrupulous companies will sometimes engage in reverse-astroturfing, where they hire a bunch of folks to post bad reviews of their competitors.

Pardon me, you are correct. I meant mb, not kb.

Assuming G.729-level of compression, or ~8kb/second, 100 minutes of voice calls would consume ~48kb of your data plan bandwidth. Next to nothing, really.

I didn't think there was a market for a full-screen touchphone or a giant tablet either. Obviously I should not go into product marketing because I don't know shit about what people want, but Apple seems to have it figured out pretty well.

Why don't you use Bing to find the answer?

It probably is hashes and not passwords. If they were the actual passwords, they'd be using them themselves instead of trying to sell them.

The cast of Friends was making $1M/episode as well.

No, you don't need much intellect.

That's not how it works, either. A peering arrangement is an interconnection between two providers in which neither pays the other for traffic. Verizon would like to change this model and receive payment.

This is half true. Verizon is selling asymmetric services (although they are changing most FiOS plans to symmetric).

What is not true is that asymmetric connections encourages asymmetric usage. It's the other way around, and has been since the days of dialup.

It's not just Level3 (not Layer 3), it's also Alternet and possibly others. Peering has gotten tough. It's supposed to be hey, let's connect our stuff together because I want to send you a bunch of stuff and you want to send me a bunch of stuff and we both win. The Internet has evolved and that has resulted in asymmetric traffic flows where one party carries more (sometimes far more) of the burden than the other, but the cost models have remained the same.

In Verizon's mind, they receive no benefit from increasing peering capacity in cases where they receive far more traffic than they can send. They forgot one thing, though; their residential customers. They are the ones who need the additional capacity, and without it their service will continue to degrade.

This is exactly what's happening. I do the same thing for a specific server I use. Standard routing via FiOS results in consistent 1mb download speeds. I set up a GRE tunnel to my VPS host and I get consistent 10mb download speeds. The culprit appears to be a shitty peering connection between so-4-1-0-0.LAX01-BB-RTR1.verizon-gni.net (130.81.151.246) and 0.ae2.XL3.CHI13.ALTER.NET (140.222.225.187).