It's a mixture of FTTN, coax, and regular "DSL type" POTS copper lines. The dirty secret of Uverse, is that it is really just a mish-mash of what was already present, with them "maybe" upgrading a few things here and there. This allows them to get away with charging people more than what they would for normal DSL, and also get away with the "up to" disclaimer nonsense for their speeds.

It's part of the reasons results for Uverse can vary even more widely within a same-service area than cell phone coverage.

Except in PA, where Verizon is required by the Commonwealth to roll out and offer DSL even in the most rural of areas if enough of the neighbors get together and decide they want it.

Results vary in other States/Commonwealths, of course.

And of course, we also have Comcast and Time Warner, with Comcast having their headquarters in Philadelphia.

I differ, in that I would make sure it had a top-rated and reliable power supply (Corsair or Seasonic) and a powerful GPU (currently the best price to power ratios are the 750 GTX Ti and the R9 270 series from everything I've been reading) before it had an SSD any day of the week.

Why? I've had SSDs bite the dust more than once, very early into their supposed life cycles at rates that should be an absolute embarrassment to the engineering teams at the manufacturers in question.

If you can get even 45 mbps out of them on a claimed 100 mbps, I'll eat a hat.

They're illegal, but happen all of the time anyhow. It's only a matter of getting caught or not.

I found out from some local members of the Amish community that the reason they reject grid power is that it would put them in ongoing debt - which is very much against their religious beliefs. This is also partially why they reject the use of automobiles (some communities are more permissive and allow the hiring of vehicles to drive them long distances) - purchasing one can A) put you into debt which is against religious beliefs and B) goes against their beliefs of being good stewards of the earth (ongoing greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution).

They don't reject use of things like some modern power tools, etc for use in their outside work for the 'English', especially when it comes to roofing contracts, building RVs, sheds, furniture, etc.

What's interesting to note - the debate is still ongoing in Amish communities about solar power panels and if they will be formally allowed - on the one hand it will give them electricity and whatnot in a 'clean' manner in compliance with their beliefs, on the other, there is objection to some of the materials used in those devices and how those materials are resourced.

I remember reading about flaws, exploits, etc that broke Tor anonymous browsing/data transfer as far back as 2005 or so. Some of these issues are still there because they honestly can't be fixed without a complete overhaul of how the entire thing is coded and works. Instead they have fixed what they could, and coded in mitigations for the rest.

It goes without saying though, that Tor, like many other things online, is, was, and always will be vulnerable to MITM attacks.

What's apparently happening here (didn't RTFA) according to the summary, is that they are looking to have non-fluff, etc content added specifically to the Gamestop versions of titles - meaning an actual part of the game is exclusive for their version (imagine playing a version of The Witcher for instance, that was missing an entire chapter from your version because it wasn't the Gamestop one).

Yes, but as in all of the Elder Scrolls titles, you'd almost never hit all of the quests in the game even in 5 or 6 playthroughs (because funny things happen, like questgiver NPCs dying to randomly wandering monster spawns or overly zealous town guards), so those 16 quests were basically useless fluff.

They tried that with Vista and pre-SP1 Win7. They had to nuke it because there was a serious vulnerability found in the stack that they couldn't fix, so they disabled the entire functionality for both OSes in a patch. Their "new solution" to this was Live Tiles, etc in Win8.

As for changing Aero, etc, you could do that too - although next to nobody wanted to pay the license fee to MS to create those things, so it lead to some developers creating ways to bypass the signing requirements.

In this day and age of ransoming extortionists, folding companies, and natural disasters, you better have the paranoid amount and never do fewer than 6 backups.

They should have tracked down who was responsible, and had a baseball bat liberally applied to their kneecaps.

They capped total mouse frame movements to the 30 FPS of the console version. This is just lazy porting, again.

If Hulu is still providing their desktop app (and I think they may have a mobile one as well), I would suggest using that instead of their actual site - it runs on Air which funnily enough, runs worlds better than the actual browser Flash modules.

As for sorting - I agree, their current methods leaves much to be desired, as it seems their system only sorts by up to three "tags" applied by their employees, and many (I dare say most) of their movies are mis-tagged, at least for their streaming service. To be fair, Amazon isn't any better with their movie tagging.

Hell, it doesn't even stop government agencies OTHER than the IRS requiring you to use it on all kinds of forms and applications, either.