Homedad, it's about the age-old tale of the kid of has to trace his route back in the forest, but he only has 30 white stones. So, if the 38 and 08 parents are losing them in the forest too far, they will not be able to find their way back to the Upgrade Cottage when they used to live (before they moved to a USB2.0 Hotel).
Not a bad analogy for getting the message across. But to be more specific, every packet on the Internet has a Time-to-live field. Every router will reduce it by one as the packet traverses the router. This is call "decrementing the TTL." Some home routers *don't* do this so the ISP can't pick up that you have a "router" Anyway, after 30 routers, the TTL will be zero. At that point, the router drops the packet and sends "TTL Expired in Transit" message to the original sender. This is in place so packets won't live forever on the Internet (if you have a loop for example).
