No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
There are things called routers that...route traffic. A dumbed down version is routers talk to other routers to find out what they know about.
If a game server you connect to matches you with someone in Japan, your computer sends a packet with the address in Japan attached to it. Your home router probably has no clue where that is, so it goes to its upstream router and asks if they know, this process repeats until one figures it out and you get a route.
This all happens very quickly, and it's why people say the Internet routes around damage.
That's not how that works. The router merely sends the packet to the next directly connected router.
Let's take a simplified example:
If you were in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, USA and wanted to send a packet to Kyouto, Japan, your router would send the packet to another router it's connected to on the west coast*. From your router's perspective, that's it; it just sends it over and never "thinks" about that packet again.
The router on the west coast receives the packet, looks at the headers, sees that its supposed to go to Japan and sends it over a link to Hawaii.
The router in Hawaii again looks at the packet, sees that it's supposed to go to Japan and sends it over its link to Toukyou.
The router in Toukyou then sends it over its link to Kyouto and it'll be locally routed further to the exact host from there but you get the idea.
This is generally how IP routing works; always one hop to the next.
What I haven't explained is how your router knows that it can reach Kyouto via the west coast or how the west coast knows that it can reach Kyouto via Hawaii.
This is where routing protocols come in. You can look up how exactly these work in detail but what's important is their purpose: Build a "map" of the internet which you can look at to tell which way to send a packet at each intersection depending on its destination.
In operation, each router then simply looks at the one intersection it represents on the "map" and can then decide which way (link) to send each individual packet over.
The "map" (routing table) is continuously updated as conditions change.
Never at any point do routers establish a fixed route from one point to another or anything resembling a connection; the internet protocol is explicitly connectionless.
* in reality, there will be a few local routers between the gateway router sitting in your home and the big router that has a big link to the west coast