But how does the internet cable get into your basement?

If your area uses underground cables then they might have to dig to cut your internet; it would take time but they wouldn't have to breach your property to do it. But many places use the existing overhead cable infrastructure to deliver internet, which are far easier to cut in an attack scenario. Or they could just attack the local exchange point, it's not as direct but it's nowhere near your house.

And in any case it may be easier to just cut the power. Your laptop or mobile phone have battery power but your modem or router probably don't.

Sleep tight.

A 100MB update might be 100MB of new content, so your 500MB game install grows to 600MB.

Or it might be 100MB of files that replace existing files, so your 500MB install might stay the same or even shrink, if the new files are smaller than the ones they're replacing.

Or the update might itself be an application which plays a video while it's installing the update. So the 100MB update might be 90MB of installer code and video, and 10MB of actual content (which again, could be either additional files, or replacement files).

Or maybe the update is compressed, so the 100MB update actually expands into 200MB of files (so if it's all new content, your game now takes 700MB on disk).

Most likely the update is some combination of those things. So it's impossible to predict what the new size of the game will be on disk. It depends on what that particular update contains, which is in turn a function of what the development priorities were.

Minecraft specifically is procedurally generated. The game world basically consists of a bunch of mathematical algorithms for how to generate the world based on a random input, these are part of the game code and relatively small. That random input is distilled down to a single number called the seed, and using that seed you or any one else can recreate the environment assuming they have the same algorithms (ie. a compatible version of Minecraft). Individual changes the player makes to the world are then stored in the player's save file. But beyond that, the game world can extend almost an infinite amount using the same world generation algorithms (though you might get some oddities once you reach certain practical limits, hence Minecraft enforces an artificial boundary).

Most games do not use procedural generation, their worlds are hand-crafted or at least pre-determined. Even in this case it's not necessarily a problem to store a large world. The game's data might say, this map is 100x100 "virtual metres" and brown, and at coordinate 0,0 is a 2x2x2 metre red cube. It's just a few numbers, it doesn't take much space. Similar to procedural generation, all you're really storing is instructions for how to render the world (you're storing more numbers, but the algorithms for turning the numbers into 3D objects are far less complicated).

Now change the map to be 1000x1000 "metres", and the cube to be 4x4x4 metres. The map is an order of magnitude larger, but all you've really done is change some numbers; you're still using the same amount of data to describe a much bigger world. So the size of the virtual world doesn't really correlated with the amount of data needed to describe it.

What does increase the size of the game data though is complexity. Instead of a single cube, maybe it's thousands of triangles in the shape of a house. It's no longer a solid red colour, but it has detailed wood and brick textures. And the map isn't a 1000m^(2) flat plane any more, it's a realistic terrain with hills and valleys defined by a height map, littered with trees of varying heights at different x,y coordinates. Now your game world needs far more numbers, and other data like texture images, to be stored.

Portable devices today can easily store gigabytes of data and have relatively powerful processing capability; but even so, game developers need to ensure they balance graphical detail with the hardware resources they have available.

The dictionary defines information as: Knowledge or facts learned, especially about a certain subject or event

And data is defines as: Facts that can be analyzed or used in an effort to gain knowledge or make decisions

Data and information can have specific definitions and differences in various technical contexts. But colloquially, they are often used interchangeably; or sometimes we define data as the raw knowledge, and information as the additional knowledge inferred from the data.

Data and information are philosophical concepts, they do not have a tangible presence or consume physical space. However you can't store or convey information without some physical medium on which to do so. Data in a brain requires neurons. Data in a book requires ink. Data in computer science requires electricity, or magnetism, or bumps on a polycarbonate surface, etc.

To "use data" doesn't make literal sense in most cases, data as a concept cannot be physically "used", and even as a physical representation often the mechanisms used allow the data to be "consumed" in a way that does not deprive anyone else of it - essentially a copy of the data is communicated.

But when you say "using mobile data" it's clearer what you mean colloquially. In this sense, you are "consuming" a portion of your allotted mobile data plan. Or in other words, it costs money to run a mobile network; you've paid for the ability to send and receive a certain amount of digital data using the provider's network, so performing an activity like browsing web pages or watching YouTube videos counts towards that data usage. And if you go over that limit your access may be blocked, slowed, or incur additional charges. The "usage" and "consumption" occurring here is in the sense of your contract only allows a finite amount of data transmission, it's not like you are physically taking electrons away from YouTube and they might run out. "Using data" is just the shorthand term we use to describe this.

You don't need to turn off a hard drive to unplug them. The act of unplugging the drive is what turns it off (one of the plugs is for power). Drives can otherwise really only be turned off by the OS's power management plan, but that isn't a pre-requisite for disconnecting it.

That said: any storage media you wish to disconnect while the system is on, you should ensure it not have any pending writes or is not actively being written to. If you disconnect a storage medium while it's in use, you could corrupt its data. Windows has an "eject storage device" feature for external storage devices for exactly this purpose. For internal drives, generally they shouldn't be disconnected while the system is on, even if it's not a problem electrically^([1]); unless the system is specifically designed for it^([2]).

[1] Eg. SATA is hot-pluggable - it can be safely (dis)connected while the system is powered

[2] Eg. servers which can remain operational while dead drives are replaced

>Can I use any volts/watts charger for my phone?

No.

In general:

1. When we are talking chargers, we mean a device which converts AC electricity from a wall outlet, to DC electricity required by an electronic device
2. The charger must support the voltage and frequency of your residential electricity supply. Any significant deviation from that can damage the charger and/or present a fire hazard.
   1. Some chargers support a range of input voltages for international use
3. The charger's output voltage (Volts) must match the device's input voltage. Any significant deviation from that (more than about 10%) could damage the device, the charger, or be a fire hazard
4. The charger's output current (Amps) and/or power rating (Watts, equal to Volts x Amps) should be equal or greater than the device's required current/power rating. A device will only draw as much power as it needs.
   1. A lower current/power rating can mean the device charges slower or not at all.
   2. A significant lower rating can damage the charger or device.
5. A standard like USB is smarter than most chargers, generally speaking any charger supporting a USB standard (like USB 3.2) must support the minimum requirement, and higher currents and voltages can be supplied by both charger and device negotiating for it, you don't have to worry about incompatible electrical ratings causing damage.
6. The plug on the charger must also match the power jack on the device. Don't assume a plug and jack are compatible even if they physically fit and the power ratings are compatible; the polarity must also be consistent (especially an issue on barrel plugs).

Or TL;DR:

1. Use a charger compatible with your country.
2. The Voltage on the charger must match the device.
3. The Amps and/or Watts on the charger should be the same or greater than the device.
4. A charging standard like USB or Lightning is designed to simplify things for consumers so you don't have to worry about electrical ratings or causing damage.

These days, the companies who run phone networks (telecommunication carriers, aka "telcos" or "carriers") run all their networks via computers. If you send an SMS from one phone to another, it's likely already passing through multiple computers, so they can do things like collect logs for billing, queue messages for later delivery in case one phone is out of service, transfer messages to recipients on other carrier networks (eg. send it overseas via internet) etc.

These carriers might also provide a service that allows third parties to send SMS without using a phone, or connected to their cell network. Basically, one computer sends data to another computer run by the carrier - an SMS gateway - that will create the SMS message and push it out to the recipient phones. This generally costs money to use.

Some SMS gateways are used via web requests - like a REST API that many websites use today - others work by converting specific emails to SMS (eg. send an email to 123456789@sms.xyzcarrier.com, and the email body will be the text message).

There are also online services that act as a middleman, also confusingly calling themselves SMS Gateways. They deal with the various carriers across the world and their different gateways, figuring out which carrier to use based on the country and phone number, while providing a single unified service for end users and programmers to use with a simplified billing plan. This is likely what your cloud software is using on the server-side code.