My understanding is that it's more like 25 to 5000 customers (I think Cable Labs suggests 250 for DOCSIS 3.0) sharing a certain amount of channels/bandwidth (probably around 300Mbps down for DOCSIS 3.0 and over 1Gbps down for DOCSIS 3.1) on their node to CMTS.

The target over-subscription ratio for gigabit seems to be no more than 50:1 from the few papers I've read.

300 Mbps * 1 month = 98.6 TB; / 250 subscribers = 400 GB but that's saying if everyone used an equal amount / all of their share.
With the realistic 1.3Gbps+ range for DOCSIS 3.1 with 50 subscribers it'll be over 8TB.

And, like you say, it only matters if everyone is competing for bandwidth at the same time and most of the time that doesn't happen.
Flat caps don't make sense for that problem. Most people aren't home during the weekday and so bandwidth is going unused during that time.

Peak usage caps or traffic shaping heavy users to give priority to light users or even much higher overall caps with weighted data during peak usage times would make a lot more sense than the current flat cap scheme.

It seems to me that ISPs don't really want to deal with it and would rather attempt to balance keeping ahead with capacity and speed upgrades as needed while every now and then moving data cap targets to protect themselves from the heaviest of users.

You don't need a specific domain name to run an HTTP server.

They can use direct IPs and/or modified hosts files, other domain names run by registrars in more favorable countries, TOR, alternative DNS roots, etc.
See: Sci-Hub, KAT, the already innumerable existing piratebay proxies, etc

Even the Great Firewall of China can't keep people from accessing information on the internet that they're determined to access and western countries certainly haven't resorted to near that level of internet oppression yet.

All they're really doing is making copyright infringement less convenient and possibly causing TPB to lose some users while Google PageRank adjusts.

Honestly, I believe more money (and man hours) is being wasted in court than is saved.
Consider how many years it takes for courts to deal with things like this and that it takes just a few minutes and dollars to purchase a new domain name.

All TV is digital now in the U.S. (even broadcast OTA) in order to free up spectrum and cable TV used to be required to offer basic cable and local broadcast channels unencrypted, over the wire, via clear-QAM.

Then in 2012 the previous FCC chairman and commissioners decided to change that rule and let cable companies encrypt everything and thus require ALL users to pay a monthly fee for a set-top box, in addition to their normal service fees.

This also means that the clear-QAM tuner hardware in TVs, that increases the cost of TVs and that we already paid for, became useless.

This is a bit weird because these same cable companies are providing internet service over the same cables but users can choose to rent a cable modem from their provider or buy their own cable modem from a 3rd party.

Yeah, those cable customers are going to drop their cable TV service to watch Netflix... on their cable internet connections.

That'll really show those big bad regional cable monopolies who is boss.

I wish slashdot had a Kappa emoticon.

npm does not require you to install packages from the registry and your application's package.json dependencies do not either.

For production you can very easily have your own internal git server hosting your packages and dependencies, at specific verified versions.
Or if you don't like git you could have an internal SSL/TLS server hosting tarballs of all of the packages/dependencies.

The npm registry makes sharing packages easy but nothing says you have to use code straight from that to production.
Hell, you don't even have to use npm if you don't want to.

And javascript on a server can make sense for something like making an web service API that spits out JSON data (and since browsers are limited to javascript you're generally going to want your data in JSON.)
JSON is already, obviously, native to javascript and thus very easy to use, you can reduce duplication of effort and manpower by having the same knowledge requirements on the client/server, and in my experience it's a bit annoying to shift gears when thinking in multiple languages on the same project.
Basically, using the same language for everything can reduce complexity which every resource I've ever read stresses as a good thing.
Let me emphasize that can. If you look at node.js like a hammer and every problem starts to look like a nail then you're not going to have a good time.

And for people who just hate javascript because it's javascript: yes, javascript has annoying quirks.
But all languages have annoying quirks and I find scripting languages in general make you pay a toll for their convenience. Perl, php, python, lua, bash, ruby, etc are not perfect for everything either.
The toll is generally worth it but it does give us something to bitch and moan about.

I sort of agree.

Honestly, we already pay gasoline taxes that are supposed to go to the building and maintenance of roads.

Only, the wall street journal (paywalled) says that states are instead using that stable, guaranteed income to pay for other things like debt.
40% of federal fuel taxes [1] go to things other than roads as well.

I'm all for top earners paying more taxes, as we honestly don't need a nobility with more money than small countries, but I'm not sure that income makes sense to put into roads.

I'd rather fuel taxes actually went to road building and maintenance like it's supposed to...

Having increased high earner income tax fund social and work programs aimed at poverty does make sense though. If politicians would actually do it and not funnel it elsewhere.

If we learn to store energy better then we can harvest all of the energy we need for the night during the day.

Fossil fuels are basically stored solar energy after all...

I agree that solar doesn't make sense everywhere and that a variety of production methods are necessary but I can't see solar going away.
Grabbing some of the energy that the sun is blasting us with just makes too much sense.

Though I honestly wonder how useful it is to send people to prison for stuff like that.

Maybe if prison were some form of profitable conscripted labor where the profits went to the victims.

I'd say that justice for negligent vehicular homicide might be a lifetime ban from getting a driver's license, a term of public service of some sort as penance, and financial restitution to the victims.
In the event that the person doesn't reasonably follow through on that then I'd send them to prison -- primarily to protect society.

Maybe a little prison time first as an incentive would be useful but really I think studies would have to be done to see what's generally the most effective.

Certainly our current system seems based on millennia-old "we'll just ostracize people into terrible conditions when they do bad things and treat them like they're not really people anymore" methodology with no objective measurement if that actually makes sense to do.

I was lead to believe that training and escalation of force rules basically say that once an American cop is using lethal force that their intention is supposed to be to kill.
As in, they're not supposed to aim for shoulder or leg or wounding shots -- they're supposed to do center of mass body shots that will put the target down / kill them.

Most lethal force would still fall, arguably, under justifiable homicide but your "proven intent" argument seems poor.
I could buy an ignorant, untrained person shooting a lethal firearm at someone else and not having an intent to kill but a trained officer?

I think it's telling that our system is broken when countries like the UK can go years without their police killing anyone (or maybe even firing a gun) while our system kills at least 1000 people a year.

Sure, in the grand scheme of CDC-tracked death causes, 1000+ people isn't really that many people but we can still do better. And the fact that we don't even have real statistics and media are having to track the fatalities themselves is also shameful.

And SoCs aren't even really made in China, are they? China isn't a big player in semiconductor manufacturing unless one counts Taiwan as China.

China assembles a lot of electronic stuff but I don't believe they are a big player in actually manufacturing it. USA/South Korea/Europe/Japan/Taiwan are.

Global economy and all...

And not just for the Presidency.

The Tea Party's (lack of?) performance in Congress means there is a fair chance that the 2016 elections will see Republicans lose the Senate.
Democrats only need to gain 3 to 4 seats to break the majority.

If a Democrat is elected as President then almost certainly we'll see a swing in Congress as well.

And given that it's ransomware it doesn't have to include a back door component. It might even be smarter not to include a back door as it gives fewer traces back to the exploiter for the authorities to follow.

The software just has to get onto a machine, even if air-gapped, and encrypt files and then prompt the user to contact some address for the key to decrypt the files.

So even if the patient data isn't encrypted it is quite possible that no data left the hospital network.

Meh. Cox isn't that great and I've been an customer of their internet service for over 16 years and my family has been a cable TV customer off and on for over 20 years.

While they have progressively increased speeds (and are finally supporting IPv6) they also steadily increase prices. The cost of my tier of service has nearly doubled over the last 15 years (but speeds have more than doubled.)
They used to (they might still) advertise only the first year promotional price for services without listing anywhere what you'll actually pay.

They're still not competitive with many of the fiber companies out there unless you don't actually care about cost. They do the same as the rest of the cable industry in that they skimp on upload to free up more bandwidth for download.

They have grouped up with AT&T to support legislation in states to block municipal ISPs because they like their incumbent duopoly. The city I used to live in is not allowed to charge less than Cox for municipal fiber service because that would apparently be anti-competitive.

If you actually do have downtime problems then, just like any ISP, you'll have a potentially bad time with glorified installers failing to troubleshoot the issue.
You're certainly not going to get an EE diagnosing problems for you and probably won't get the experienced people unless you're a nag or lucky.

They killed off their usenet service years ago which was unfortunate. They used to have a public website that informed users of maintenance and outages but they killed that and now you're just left guessing. My power company has a real-time outage street map which is amazing during hurricanes, I dream of Cox doing that one day.

Their website historically is slow and even goes down though they recently did a redesign that seems to be better. Maybe they finally paid someone to do it right.

I have seen Cox test a system where they inject their own custom javascript into websites. It wasn't DNS-based either but actual packet injection/manipulation. I noticed it because noscript caught the script and I then went digging into where it was coming from and what it did.

In the cable TV arena they've jumped on the mini set-top box bandwagon where they "give" you a device for free but you have to rent it from them eventually.
Under the guise of freeing up more bandwidth they're moving to all digital encrypted service that requires these boxes when they could just as easily have used clearQAM and not required people to rent devices to watch basic service that they already pay for.

I honestly have a hard time saying Cox is any better than Comcast. I'm ambivalent. They could be worse and they could be a lot better.

Scientific "faith" is generally "I believe this is true until further evidence suggests otherwise." I see this as a rational response.

Religious "faith" is generally "I believe this is true despite evidence suggesting otherwise." I see this as an emotional response.

It really has nothing to do with you, personally, being able to do studies to verify claims and the comparison doesn't hold up with regards to critical thinking.

Critical thinking is the antithesis of most forms of organized religion because they are largely not compatible with change. If you think critically about most religions you'll find holes all over the place and they actively teach you not to do that.

This not really true of science. Even the most well-established theories, laws, have holes that leave doubts that scientists are always trying to figure out better theories for (see: pretty much any Feynman lecture and all of history.)
Sure, some theories might be disparaged due to lack of evidence but they're still considered and even accepted when compelling evidence does appear.

And there are credible authorities and charlatans. Priests are obvious, if well meaning, charlatans -- much the same way that a four year old who believes there is a monster under the bed is honestly afraid but obviously delusional.

To group all authorities into the same untrustworthy group would be a meaningless comparison and madness (or clinical paranoia.)

I really don't see how anyone can, in good faith, compare the authenticity of scientific theories to obvious collections of made up stories and cultural taboos from ancient man.

Isn't that why the enterprise version of GitHub exists for locally hosting the service? Isn't that how GitHub makes money and subsidizes the free services?
And you're putting up some pretty big barriers by saying neither user's box allows network shares or an sshd...

Now one big issue with github going down isn't it stopping programmers from writing code but preventing some people from deploying code.

Node.js npm and Rust crates package managers sometimes point to github repos for packages...