litchralee
@litchralee@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Other than a faulty charging port, is there any reason to use a wireless phone charger over wired? 4 hours ago:
I’m also old, but I understand people do watch portrait videos. Sometimes a lot of them, in a single sitting. There’s a popular social media app which exclusively has short-form portrait videos.
- Comment on Other than a faulty charging port, is there any reason to use a wireless phone charger over wired? 6 hours ago:
Some charging pads also prop up the phone at an angle, making it easy to read the screen while also not having to hold the phone up. Most phones have their charging port on the bottom, so a phone stand couldn’t be used while charging with a cord.
- Comment on Should I withdraw/stop putting into my 401k? 11 hours ago:
This 100%. The other comments addressed the “should I withdraw?” aspect of OP’s question, but this comment deals with “should I stop contributing?”. The answer to the latter is: no.
The mantra in investing has always been “buy low, sell high”. If the stock market is down, continuing your 401k contributions is doing the “buy low” part.
- Comment on how do they decide where to put bus stops? 3 days ago:
I can understand the pessimism in some of the answers given so far, especially with regards to the poor state of American public transit. But ending a discussion with “they guess” is unsatisfactory to me, and doesn’t get to the meat of the question, which I understand to be: what processes might be used to identify candidate bus stop locations.
And while it does often look like stops are placed by throwing darts at a map, there’s at least some order and method to it. So that’s what I’ll try to describe, at least from the perspective of a random citizen in California that has attended open houses for my town’s recently-revamped bus network.
In a lot of ways, planning bus networks are akin to engineering problems, in that there’s almost never a “clean slate” to start with. It’s not like Cities Skylines where the town/city is built out by a single person, and even master planned developments can’t predict what human traffic patterns will be in two or three decades. Instead, planning is done with regards to: what infrastructure already exists, where people already go, and what needs aren’t presently being met by transit.
Those are the big-picture factors, so we’ll start with existing infrastructure. Infra is expensive and hard to retrofit. We’re talking about the vehicle fleet, dedicated bus lanes, bus bulbs or curb extensions, overhead wires for trolleybuses, bus shelters, full-on BRT stops, and even the sidewalk leading up to a bus stop. If all these things need to be built out for a bus network, then that gets expensive. Instead, municipalities with some modicum of foresight will attach provisos to adjacent developments so that these things can be built at the same time in anticipation, or at least reserve the land or right-of-way for future construction. For this reason, many suburbs in the western USA will have a bulb-out for a bus to stop, even if there are no buses yet.
A bus network will try to utilize these pieces of infrastructure when they make sense. Sometimes they don’t make total sense, but the alternative of building it right-sized would be an outlandish expense. For example, many towns have a central bus depot in the middle of downtown. But if suburban sprawl means that the “center of population” has moved to somewhere else, then perhaps a second bus depot elsewhere is warranted to make bus-to-bus connections. But two depots cost more to operate than one, and that money could be used to run more frequent buses instead, if they already have those vehicles and drivers. Tradeoffs, tradeoffs.
Also to consider are that buses tend to run on existing streets and roads. That alone will constraint which way the bus routes can operate, especially if there are one-way streets involved. In this case, circular loops can make sense, although patrons would need to know that they’ll arrive at one stop and depart at another. Sometimes bus-only routes and bridges are built, ideally crossing orthogonal to the street grid to gain an edge over automobile traffic. In the worst case, buses get caught up in the same traffic as all the other automobiles, which sadly is the norm in America.
I can only briefly speak of the inter-stop spacing, but it’s broadly a function of the service frequency desired, end-to-end speed, and how distributed the riders are. A commuter bus from a suburb into the core city might have lots of stops in the suburb and in the city, but zero stops in between, since the goal is to pick people up around the suburb and take them somewhere into town. For a local bus in town, the goal is to be faster than walking, so with 15 minute frequencies, stops have to be no closer than 400-800 meters or so, or else people will just walk. But then a service which is purely meant to connect between two bus depots would prefer a few more stops in between that make sense, like a mall, but maybe not if it can travel exclusively on a freeway or in a dedicated bus lanes. So many things to consider.
As for existing human traffic patterns, the new innovation in the past decade or so has been to look at anonymized phone location data. Now, I’m glossing over the privacy concern of using people’s coarse location data, but the large mobile carriers in the USA have always had this info, and this is a scenario where surveying people about which places they commute or travel to is imprecise, so using data collected in the background is fairly reliable. What this should hopefully show is where the “traffic centers” are (eg malls, regional parks, major employers, transit stations), how people are currently getting there (identifying travel mode based on speed, route, and time of day), and the intensity of such travel in relationship to everyone else (eg morning/evening rush hour, game days).
I mentioned surveys earlier, which while imprecise for all the places that people go to, it’s quite helpful for identifying the existing hurdles that current riders face. This is the third factor, identifying unmet needs. As in, difficulties with paying the fare, transfers that are too tight, or confusing bus depot layouts. But asking existing riders will not yield a recipe for growing ridership with new riders, people who won’t even consider riding the existing service, if one exists at all. Then there’s the matter of planning for ridership in the future, as a form of induced demand: a housing development that already sits on an active bus line is more likely to create habitual riders from day 1.
As an aside, here in California, transit operators are obliged to undergo regular analysis of how the service can be improved, using a procedure called Unmet Transit Needs. The reason for this procedure is that some state funds are earmarked for transit only, while others are marked for transit first and if no unmet needs exist, then those funds can be applied to general transport needs, often funding road maintenance.
This process is, IMO, horrifically abused to funnel more money towards road maintenance, because the bar for what constitutes an Unmet Transit Need includes a proviso that if the need is too financially burdensome to meet, they can just not do it. Thats about as wishy-washy as it gets, and that’s before we consider the other provisio that requires an unmet need to also satisfy an expectation of a certain minimum ridership… which is near impossible to predict in advance for a new bus route or service. As a result, transit operators – under pressure to spend less – can basically select whichever outside consultant will give them the “this unmet transit need is unreasonable” stamp of disapproval that they want. /rant
But I digress. A sensible bus route moves lots of people from places they’re already at to places they want to go, ideally directly or maybe through a connection. The service needs to be reliable even if the road isn’t, quick when it can be, and priced correctly to keep the lights on but maybe reduced to spur new ridership. To then build out a network of interlinking bus routes is even harder, as the network effect means people have more choices on where to go, but this adds pressure on wayfinding and fare structures. And even more involved is interconnecting a bus network to a tram/tram/LRT system or an adjacent town’s bus network.
When they’re doing their job properly, bus routing is not at all trivial, and that’s before citizens are writing in with their complaints and conservatives keep trying to cut funding.
- Comment on Why don’t wireless connections (WiFi, Bluetooth, etc.) use anything between 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz? 5 days ago:
have bandwidth that is some % of carrier frequency,
In my limited ham radio experience, I’ve not seen any antennas nor amplifiers which specify their bandwidth as a percentage of “carrier frequency”, and I think that term wouldn’t make any sense for antennas and (analog) amplifiers, since the carrier is a property of the modulation; an antenna doesn’t care about modulation, which is why “HDTV antennas” circa 2000s in the USA were merely a marketing term.
The only antennas and amplifiers I’ve seen have given their bandwidth as fixed ranges, often accompanied with a plot of the varying gain/output across that range.
going up in frequency makes bandwidth bigger
Yes, but also no. If a 200 kHz FM commercial radio station’s signal were shifted from its customary 88-108 MHz band up to the Terahertz range of the electromagnetic spectrum (where infrared and visible light are), the bandwidth would still remain 200 kHz. Indeed, this shifting is actually done, albeit for cable television, where those signals are modulated onto fibre optic cables.
What is definitely true is that way up in the electromagnetic spectrum, there is simply more Hertz to utilize. If we include all radio/microwave bands, that would be the approximate frequencies from 30 kHz to 300 GHz. So basically 300 GHz of bandwidth. But for C band fibre optic cable, their usable band is from 1530-1565 nm, which would translate to 191-195 THz, with 4 THz of bandwidth. That’s over eight times larger!
For less industrial use-cases, we can look to 60 GHz technology, which is used for so-called “Wireless HDMI” devices, because the 7 GHz bandwidth of the 60 GHz band enables huge data rates.
To actually compare the modulation of different technologies irrespective of their radio band, we often look to special efficiency, which is how much data (bits/sec) can be sent over a given bandwidth (in Hz). Higher bits/sec/Hz means more efficient use of the radio waves, up to the Shannon-Hartley theoretical limits.
getting higher % of bandwidth requires more sophisticated, more expensive, heavier designs
Again, yes but also no. If a receiver need only receive a narrow band, then the most straightforward design is to shift the operating frequency down to something more manageable. This is the basis of superheterodyne FM radio receivers, from the era when a few MHz were considered to be very fast waves.
We can and do have examples of this design for higher microwave frequency operation, such as shifting broadcast satellite signals down to normal television bands, suitable for reusing conventional TV coax, which can only carry signals in the 1-2 GHz band at best.
The real challenge is when a massive chunk of bandwidth is of interest, then careful analog design is required. Well, maybe only for precision work. Software defined radio (SDR) is one realm that needs the analog firehose, since “tuning” into a specific band or transmission is done later in software. A cheap RTL-SDR can view a 2.4 MHz slice of bandwidth, which is suitable for plenty of things except broadcast TV, which needs 5-6 MHz.
LoRa is much slower, caused by narrowed bandwidth but also because it’s more noise-resistant
I feel like this states the cause-and-effect in the wrong order. The designers of LoRa knew they wanted a narrow-band, low-symbol rate air interface, in order to be long range, and thus were prepared to trade away a faster throughput to achieve that objective. I won’t say that slowness is a “feature” of LoRa, but given the same objectives and the limitations that this universe imposes, no one has produced a competitor with blisteringly fast data rate. So slowness is simply expected under these circumstances.
In the final edit of my original comment, I added this:
Radio engineering, like all other disciplines of engineering, centers upon balancing competing requirements and limitations in elegant ways. Radio range is the product of intensely optimizing all factors for the desired objective.
- Comment on Why don’t wireless connections (WiFi, Bluetooth, etc.) use anything between 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz? 6 days ago:
Also, what if things that require very little data transmission used something lower than 2.4Ghz for longer range? (1Ghz or something?)
No one seemed to touch upon this part, so I’ll chime in. The range and throughput of a transmission depends on a lot of factors, but the most prominent are: peak and avg output power, modulation (the pattern of radio waves sent) and frequency, background noise, and bandwidth (in Hz; how much spectrum width the transmission will occupy), in no particular order.
If all else were equal, changing the frequency to a lower band wouldn’t impact range or throughput. But that’s hardly ever the case, since reducing the frequency imposes limitations to the usable modulations, which means trying to send the same payload either takes longer or uses more spectral bandwidth. Those two approaches have the side-effect that slower transmissions are more easily recovered from farther away, and using more bandwidth means partial interference has a lesser impact, as well as lower risk of interception. So in practice, a lower frequency could improve range, but the other factors would have to take up the slack to keep the same throughput.
Indeed, actual radio systems manipulate some or all of those factors when longer distance reception is the goal. Some systems are clever with their modulation, such as FT8 used by amateur radio operators, in order to use low-power transmitters in noisy radio bands. On the flip side, sometimes raw power can overcome all obstacles. Or maybe just send very infrequent, impeccably narrow messages, using an atomic clock for frequency accuracy.
To answer the question concretely though, there are LoRa devices which prefer to use the ISM band centered on 915 MHz in The Americas, as the objective is indeed long range and small payload, and that means the comparatively wider (and noisier) 2.4 GHz band is unneeded and unwanted. But this is just one example, and LoRa has many implementations that change the base parameters. Like how MeshCore and Meshtastic might use the same physical radios but the former implements actual mesh routing, while the latter floods to all nodes.
But some systems like WiFi or GSM can be tuned for longer range while still using their customary frequencies, by turning those other aforementioned knobs. Custom networks could indeed be dedicated to only sending very small amounts of data, like for telemetry. That said, GSM does have a hard cap of 35 km, for reasons having to do with how it handles multiple devices at once.
- Comment on [deleted] 6 days ago:
I habitually remove the automatic +1, so I won’t feel self-aggrandizing haha
- Comment on [deleted] 6 days ago:
It’s for this reason that I sometimes spell out the units as: 1000 GBytes/sec or 1000 Gbits/sec. In my book, Byte is always “big B” and bit is always “little b”, and then spelling it out makes it unambiguous in writing.
- Comment on What is everyone's favoured domain name provider these days? 1 week ago:
There are, but the process may be truly arcane – 1993 for the .us process found in RFC 1480 – but people have done it: web.archive.org/web/…/usdomain.html
- Comment on What's wrong with a technocracy? 2 weeks ago:
I don’t think I was? As a rule, I always remove the automatic +1 for my own comment, since I prefer to start the count from zero.
- Comment on What's wrong with a technocracy? 2 weeks ago:
@jayemar already gave a valid counterpoint, about how to select the technocrats in the first place. But let’s suppose we did somehow select the best and brightest of their fields. The next problem is that life is messy, and there often isn’t a single answer or criteria which determines what is in the public interest.
Btw, for everyone’s benefit, J-PAL is the Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT, with branches covering different parts of the world, since policies on addressing poverty necessarily differ depending on local circumstances. They might be described as a research institute or maybe a think tank, as they advocate for more-effective solutions to poverty and give advice on how to do that.
Poverty, as an objective, can be roughly distilled into bringing everyone above some numerical economic figure. There may be different methods that bring people out of poverty, but it’s fairly straightforward to assess the effectiveness of those solutions, by seeing how many people exit poverty and how much the solution costs.
Now take something like – to stay with economics – management of the central bank. The USA central bank (The Federal Reserve) was created with a dual mandate, which means they manage the currency with care to: 1) not let inflation run amok, and 2) keep USA unemployment low. The dual mandate is tricky because one tends to begat the other. So when both strike, what should a technocrat do? Sacrifice one goal short-term to achieve the other long-term? Try attacking both but perhaps fail at either?
Such choices are not straight yes/no or go/no-go questions, but are rightfully questions of policy and judgement. Is it fine to sell 10% of parkland for resource extraction if it will iron-clad guarantee the remaining 90% is protected as wilderness for time immemorial? How about 25%? 60%?
Subject matter experts (SMEs) are excellent at their craft, but asking them to write public policy – even with help from other SMEs – won’t address the fuzzy dilemmas that absolutely arise in governance.
In a democracy, voters choose not only the politician with views they agree with, but also are subscribing to that politician’s sense of judgement for all of life’s unknowns. Sometimes this goes well, sometimes that trust is misplaced. Although it’s imperfect, democracies can answer the fuzzy dilemmas which technocracies cannot.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
Irrespective of any subsequent arrests made, publicizing evidence of actual criminal activity is generally a social good, which often doesn’t (but can) overlap with vigilantism. Taking the term broadly, vigilantism is doing something that the law can’t/won’t do. Wikipedia discusses the various definitions, some of which require the use of force (something conventionally reserved to the law or government) but the broadest definition would include whistleblowing and community activism.
On the flip side, certain forms of publicizing evidence are illegal, such as leaking designated national secrets. In the USA, apart from that rather narrow exception, the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech provides the legal cover to reveal the genuine evidence of someone’s criminal conduct, because criminal matters are: 1) in the public interest to expose, 2) an assailant cannot assert a privacy interest upon the evidence of their crime, and 3) the truth cannot be penalized by defamation claims. That basically covers any applicable USA free speech exceptions, although someone accused could file a frivolous lawsuit to financially harass the one who exposed the evidence. Such lawsuits are only punishable in the handful of states with anti-SLAPP laws, which is why more states and the feds need to adopt anti-SLAPP protections.
So from a legal perspective, leaking evidence of a crime is generally allowed. From a moral perspective, most would agree, and it’s why we have things like public trials. But does exposing crimes constitute vigilantism? I would say no, but others with a different definition might say yes, even if they agree that’s it’s legally and morally correct.
- Comment on When fighter jets are scrambled to intercept a plane for security reasons, what can they actually do? 3 weeks ago:
Movies would have people believe that the jets are there to shoot down the errant jet. During the Cold War, this was entirely plausible and did happen. But more commonly, when a fighter jet is sent to intercept an unknown aircraft – perhaps one that has entered restricted or prohibited airspace – it may be just to have eyes on the situation.
Airspace is huge. The vastness of the air is like the vastness of the sea. Sometimes it’s an advantage because there’s fewer things to hit. But on the flip side, if an aircraft needs assistance, there might not be anyone for many miles in any direction. As for what an assisting fighter jet can do, the first is to establish navigational accuracy. History has shown that airplanes can get lost, and sometimes unfortunately end up hitting mountains or running into known obstacles or weather. A second aircraft can confirm the first aircraft’s position, since two separate aircraft having navigational problems is exceptionally rare.
The next thing is having eyes on the outside of the aircraft. Things like a damaged engine on a jetliner aren’t visible to the pilots, but there’s a chance the passengers or cabin crew can look. But damage to a rudder is impossible to see from inside the aircraft; I’m not yet aware of a commercial aircraft equipped with a tail-viewing camera.
Finally, if it should come to it, an assisting aircraft can be the pilot’s eyes, if for some reason the pilots can no longer see out their windscreen. At this point, the flight be alreybe doomed but it may help avoid additional casualties on the ground. I’m reminded of the flight where volcanic ash sandblasted the windshield, or when a cargo jet had a fire onboard which filled the cockpit with thick smoke.
To be clear, neither incident was aides by fighter jets, but having an external set of eyes to give directions would have made things a little bit easier for the pilots.
- Comment on Does 'attempted murder' require a viable method? 3 weeks ago:
IANAL. In the USA, the majority of US States adopt some definition of murder based on the age-old definition from English common law. But each state modifies the definition to include or exclude things, to the point that discussing even just a single state’s definition would be a mini law course. However, some generalities can be drawn using just the age-old definition.
Murder is generally defined as having four elements, or components which the trier-of-fact (eg a jury) must find in order for culpability to attach. Attempted murder is the absence of the fourth element. This is not rigorous, since again, we’d have to identify the exact jurisdiction and the question didn’t indicate one. Anyone who has:
- Has performed or omitted some act…
- Which is the proximate cause of death…
- With malice aforethought…
- And the victim dies…
Is guilty of the crime of murder. As a minor discussion of these points, the first element means that positively doing something (eg cutting a safety strap) and not doing something (eg not turning off the electricity to exposed wires) can be parts of a murder charge. For the second element, the term “proximate cause” is a legal term deeply entwined with “foreseeability” and whether a chain of causation or liability connects the act with the death. A Rube Goldberg-esque manner of death might fail the proximate cause element, unless the setup was purposely concocted precisely to kill. Likewise, proximate cause isn’t always the last element in a chain of events, since that would mean a victim would be their own killer for walking into firing range of a sniper laying-in-wait.
The third element, malice aforethought, refers to the mental state of the accused. That is, did they genuinely intend great harm and/or death upon the victim. Different jurisdictions vary on whether an intent-to-merely-assault that leads to death can be charged with murder, and often times that’s what second-degree murder is used for. Mental state is not a binary quantity either, as different “levels” of mental state correspond to different charges, all else the same. Malice aforethought is the worst sort, corresponding to a killer that plans a victim’s death, or acts with utter disregard for any victim’s life. Lesser levels might be charged as “reckless homicide”, “negligent homicide”, etc.
Finally, the fourth element for murder is that the victim must actually die. If the victim is immediately dead and this is verifiable using the body, this is easy to prove in court. But if the victim lingers, the legal jurisdiction might adopt a “year and a day” rule, since if the victim doesn’t die quickly, then it’s assault/battery rather than murder. Or if the victim is believed to be dead but it can’t be proven – eg victim’s body never recovered – then the defense might try to argue that the victim is simply missing but alive.
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OK, so to the question. You’ve described a scenario where someone has: 1) affirmatively pressed the kill button, 2) which is believed to result in person X’s death, 3) with full intention to kill person X, but 4) person X does not die. At even a passing glance, this is not murder since person X is alive. But does it meet the first three elements to support attempted murder? Probably not, at least without additional details.
Element #1 and #3 are present, but it’s element #2 that will be problematic. It isn’t sufficient to just tell someone that “yes, this button will absolutely kill person X”. At the very minimum, the accused needs to at least be aware of the mechanism that person X will be killed, and how that relates to the “kill button”. An implied method-of-death would suffice, such as when ordering a skilled archer to assassinate a rival. Even though the accused just says “go kill him”, the accused is aware that the archer is capable of killing using their bow-and-arrow. Whereas ordering a toddler to kill the rival would be presumed as nonsensical.
If, however, the button was already demo’d to the accused as killing some other (pretend) victim first – meaning the accused has seen the manner that the “button press” leads to death – that might establish proximate cause, even if it’s not obvious what the cause of death was. If the pretend victim clutches their chest and falls down, it’s plausible to the accused that the button’s mechanism somehow involves a pacemaker malfunction. If instead the accused is told specifically that the bombs on the victim’s car will go off, then that’s a more solid establishment of element #2, although even bombs do not reliably detonate.
But there’s even more: just because a set of circumstances arguably meets the three elements for attempted murder, it’s ultimately the trier-of-fact that will have to believe it. That is to say, it would be tough to convince a jury that the accused had “absolute” certainty that the button would kill, which also affects element #1. Unless the accused admits to that after-the-fact, that’s tough to prove. What is illegal according to the elements of a crime is not the same as what will easily convince a jury.
If it seems like this elements – or really all the elements – of murder are fact-intensive, that’s because they are. Killing is as old as humans are, and how it’s been performed and how it’s been regulated/abolished has evolved over history. Modern legal scholars have to figure out how things like stochastic terrorism/killings or life-affecting afflictions (eg HIV/AIDS) should be fitted into the system of written law, because modern law requires writing down the crimes beforehand.
- Comment on Is there any handbooks for warning lights on cars/machinery 3 weeks ago:
To be clear, this is about exterior mounted warning lights, and not like a caution lamp on a control panel, right?
- Comment on What happened to cylindrical plugs? 3 weeks ago:
My primary complaint with the F-type connector is that it only does half the job: a proper connector should make a reliable and consistent mechanical and electrical coupling. For the latter, the F-type fails miserably, on account of having no protruding pin of its own: reusing the center conductor as a “pin” is at best slapdash, and at worst fails to account for inconsistent conductor cross-sections.
When affixing an F-type connector onto a new segment of coax, unless great care has been taken to slice the cable cleanly, the center conductor often ends up with a arrow-shaped tip which also flattens the round cross-section into an oval. This tip is now a minor danger to people, in addition to no longer being assumed as round. This certainly doesn’t help with reliable mating later.
Furthermore, a solid copper tip is not ideal for a connector, unless the opposite coupler that grasps the tip is made of copper as well. But copper can’t be used to make springy receivers, so inevitably another metal must be used. But the prevailing composition of contacts for connectors are either solid brass or are plated (eg gold). But a sharp copper tip will end up scratching the mating surfaces over time.
And this is just the start of the F-type’s follies. The user experience of turning a 7/16" fine thread in narrow spaces is exhausting. With no consistent specs for the F-type, some cheaper connectors have the thinnest possible hex head to fit a wrench on. Compression F-type is better, but then we have to compare to other connectors.
In the broadcast and laboratory spaces, BNC is the go-to connector, with easy mating and quarter-turn engagement. It also comes in 50 and 75 Ohm variants (albeit confusingly). In telecoms, the SMA connector is used for its small size, and larger coax might use the beefy N connector. Some of these variants are even waterproof. Solderless is an option. All these connectors are rated by their manufacturers for a minimum number of mating events.
In all circumstances, according to this chart, the RF performance of BNC, SMA, and N are superior to F-type, which has only ever been used for TV, CCTV, and certain low-frequency clocking systems. I’m not sure what you mean by “rated to absurd frequencies”, but surely SMA’s (up to) 25 GHz rating would be tremendously and wildly insane by comparison to 1-2 GHz for F-type.
So that’s my beef. It’s just a bad connector, used only because it’s cheap.
- Comment on What happened to cylindrical plugs? 4 weeks ago:
I’m not sure how hard you’re rotating a 3.5 mm cable, but yes, that sound is the sudden making and breaking of the contacts, which it’s not meant to do. It will wear down the surfaces, even if the 3.5 mm tip is gold plated, since the gold is for anti-corrosion not for anti-friction.
But, the notion of cylinder housings for connectors has not died. After all, large cylinders are easy to grasp. Here is one very beefy example, often called the California Standard connector due to its use for Hollywood movie productions. This is a waterproof, twist-lock connector that also suppresses arcs if you unplug it while it’s still in. It heavy enough to probably also double as a blackjack for self-defense lol
- Comment on What happened to cylindrical plugs? 4 weeks ago:
A cylindrical connector would be fine for connecting one or two conductors. But more than that and it starts to become a nightmare to design, and even worse to build and use reliably. Classic examples include the venerable RCA connector, the BNC connector for radio signals, and IMO the worst connector to ever exist, the F-type connector used for TV coaxial cable.
With just two conductors, a cylinder can have have a concentric shape, where the inside is a pin and the outside is a shell. But you’ll notice that although all these connectors are circular, they’re hardly designed to rotate while attached. You generally have to remove or at least loosen them before trying to turn them. Or you still try it and the TV picture might flicker a bit. The problem is one of electrical contact.
The engineers that make connectors go through painstaking efforts to get the conductive surfaces to align – or “mate” as they say – because if they don’t, the signal quality drops like a rock. It’s already hard enough to get cheap connectors to reliably align, but now you want them to move relative to each other? That’s tough to build, and moving surfaces will eventually wear down.
Even worse is that circular shapes tend to have poorer mating, because manufacturing tolerances for curves is wider than tolerances for flat surfaces. We actually don’t want to make round contacts, if a rectangular shape would suffice. Flat contacts are simpler to produce and generally more reliable [citation needed].
But even more intractable is the matter of matching the pinouts. Here is the pinout when looking at the connector of a USB C cord:
USB C pinout when looking straight at a USB C cord
Even without understanding what each pin does, it’s noticeable that certain pins are the same whether you flip the connector over. In fact, they even label them that way: pin A12 on the top-right is also B12 on the bottom-left. The most damaging scenario is if USB 5v power was sent down the wrong pin, but it’s very clear that the VBUS pins – which are the 5v power – will always be in the same place no matter the cord orientation.
The only pins which are different upon inversion are the data lines – anything with a + or - in the name – or certain control signals which are intentionally paired with their opposite signal (eg CC1 and CC2). The USB C designers could have packed way more data pins if they didn’t have to duplicate half the pins to allow flipping the connector over. But that design choice has made USB C easier to use. A fair tradeoff.
And that’s the crux of it: in engineering, we are always dealing with tradeoffs, either for performance, cost to produce, ease of use, future compatibility, and a host of other concerns. Wanting a cylindrical connector could certainly be a design goal. But once it starts causing problems with alignment or manufacturing, there will inevitably be pushback. And it’s clear that of all the popular connectors used today, few are cylindrical.
Heck, even for DC power, the barrel connector has given way to more popular designs, like the Anderson PowerPole or the XT family of connectors, because the market needed high-current connectors for drones and Li-po batteries. Granted, the XT connectors are basically two cylindrical connectors side-by-side haha.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
Starting with the title question, US States are bound by the federal constitution, which explicitly denies certain powers from the States, found mostly in Article I Section 10. The first clause even starts with foreign policy:
No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.
In this context, the terms “treaty, alliance, or confederation” are understood to mean some organization which would compete with the union that is the United States of America. That is to say, a US State cannot join the United Kingdom as a fifth country, for example. Whereas agreements between states – the normal meaning of “treaty” – is controlled by the third clause, which refers to such agreements as “compacts”.
No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.
Compacts are only allowed if the US Congress also approves. This is what allows the western US States, the federal government, and Mexico to all agree on how to (badly) divide the water of the Colorado River.
So if foreign policy is meant to include diplomatic relationships, military exercises, setting tariffs, and things like that, then no, the US States are severely constrained in doing foreign policy. The diplomatic relations part is doable, where state-elected officials can go to foreign countries to advocate for trade and tourism. But those officials must not violate the federal Logan Act, which prohibits mediating an active dispute involving the USA, since that’s the US Secretary of State’s job. For example, it would be unlawful if a US State governor tried to mediate a prisoner exchange with a country that the USA has engaged the military against.
For your other question about what US States are, the answer to the question changed significantly in the 1860s. During that decade, the federal constitution gained three amendments, with the 14th Amendment being the most significantly for the notion of statehood. That Amendment’s Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses gave life to the notion of “incorporation”, which is that the US Constitution’s limits on the federal government also applied to the several States.
Before the 1860s, US States were indeed closer to countries in a trading, monetary, and foreign policy alliance. Some US States even had official religions, since the First Amendment’s prohibition on endorsing religion only applied to the federal government. But post 1860s, it was firmly established that the federal government isn’t just some economic committee, but an actual representative body, one whose laws will trounce state laws.
The best example I can point to is how broad the federal government exercises its “interstate commerce” powers. Basically, if something has anything remotely to do with crossing a state border, the feds can write laws on that topic. That was extremely rare pre 1860s, and now it’s basically the norm. Airspace, telecoms, and railroads are all matters which the federal government asserts its authority, and if US States were countries, they might object to the feds. But they’re not countries, so they don’t wield that power.
- Comment on Will LibreWolf be affected by Firefox's new Terms of Service? 4 weeks ago:
These Terms only apply to the Executable Code version of Firefox, not the Firefox source code.
www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/firefox/
Thus, the answer turns in whether any Firefox binaries are used or distributed with LibreWolf. On their website, I don’t even see any binaries for LibreWolf that they host, except the Windows binary. For all other OS, they refer to that OS’s package manager. But we’ve still, there is nothing to suggest that any Mozilla-compiled binaries are in LibreWolf.
The answer appears to be: no.
- Comment on See highest paying hourly jobs in my area 4 weeks ago:
Setting aside the question of data availability, do job offers even have a strong association to post codes or even specific cities or regions anymore? On one end, some jobs are definitely location-based, such as in-home hospice work. In the middle would be jobs open to an entire area, such as construction worker. And at the opposite end are remote jobs which anyone in the country can apply for, and that’s only due to HR not wanting to deal with employment laws in foreign countries; fully-remote software jobs can be like this.
- Comment on Why have an adversarial legal system? 5 weeks ago:
The other comments have covered a lot of the background and variances throughout the world. But what I’ll add is that few countries are purely in one camp or the other. To use the USA as an example, criminal cases are adversarial, in the sense that the defense attorney will duke it out with the government’s attorney whether someone goes to prison.
For civil cases like a contract dispute, the procedure is closer to an inquisition system, although with the judge still merely presiding over the process. But attorneys in a USA civil case can depose witnesses, much like how (I think) a European judge-led inquisition would call a witness, and similar to how British coroners conduct an inquest (if murder mystery depictions on the BBC are accurate).
Perhaps the full thrust of the inquisition style can be found in USA federal agencies, whose rulemaking capacity requires asking direct question to subject matter experts in a public forum, one which eventually leads to a determination on some germane topic, often enacting secondary legislation at the same time. Americans might not necessarily call such an action as a “ruling”, but evidence was taken, all sides were heard, and even public comment was accepted, before rendering a decision.
- Comment on How do I make a phone call to (not from) an elevator speaker, just like what a debt collector once did? 5 weeks ago:
I mean, you’re still using a resource that was provisioned only for emergency use. The rough analogy is borrowing the exterior-mounted fire extinguisher of your apartment building to use it as a temporary paperweight, and then putting it back after two minutes.
Your use of it in this way might be benign, but if everyone is doing that, someone will eventually mess up and that resource won’t be there when it’s truly needed. Plus, what is the objective from calling your own elevator while you’re in it? Just yell lol
I don’t mean to sound boring, but while there’s a time and place for pranks and fun in an elevator, I personally think the emergency equipment is off-limits. Everything else is fair game, up to and including playing Doom on the LCD screen that modern elevators seem to have.
- Comment on How do I make a phone call to (not from) an elevator speaker, just like what a debt collector once did? 5 weeks ago:
Could you explain more about what you observed? Many elevator phones have an inbound number, so that emergency responders can return a call, although it would be unlisted for obvious reasons. So far as I’m aware, the phone is akin to a normal phone line, rather than being a special line like a payphone. So if you did find the number, it may be possible to call it.
That said, I can’t endorse messing around with the emergency equipment in an elevator, even though it’s not actively in use. Enough prank calls might cause the property management to disconnect the line, making it unavailable when an actual emergency arises. And even though that would incur legal liability for the management, that would still mean someone who needed help couldn’t get help.
- Comment on What does this open source software notice mean? 5 weeks ago:
This is essentially a quick rundown of open-source software licensing. The notice is saying that the TikTok app uses some software that is owned by Facebook, but that Facebook has irrevocably licensed the software such that anyone (including you or TikTok) can use and distribute that software for free, provided they follow the few rules in the BSD 3-clause license, which has three clauses: 1) include these three clauses with any source code copy of Facebook’s software, 2) include these three clauses in the docs bundled with any compiled app that uses Facebook’s software, and 3) do not use Facebook’s name in a way that implies an endorsement or affiliation with Facebook.
TikTok can continue using that particular version of Facebook’s software until the heat death of the universe, and Facebook can never come back later and demand payment from TikTok or you or anyone for that software. But Facebook is still considered the owner, because they retain the right to relicense the software under different terms, perhaps with a license that doesn’t require including the copyright notice, for example. Likewise, Facebook has the right to sue to enforce the BSD 3-clause terms against anyone who isn’t abiding by those terms. But it looks like TikTok is abiding, since they posted the full BSD 3-clause terms, so Facebook can’t complain.
Note: Facebook could change the license for later versions of the software, but any versions prior would be unaffected. Integrating any software commercially always requires checking the license terms, and while open-source software has fairly standardized terms, diligence is still important and licenses do occasionally change.
- Comment on What determines whether people are likely to purposely (but mistakenly) put two words together (without a space)? 1 month ago:
As you correctly observed, English is tricky and there aren’t too many hard rules with the language, which is aggravating for English learners but also highlights its flexibility, which is an important quality for the de facto language of science, aviation, international trade, etc. So to answer the question, I think there are multiple aspects which make a combined word more likely, including: 1) the constituent words are different parts-of-speech being combined into a noun, 2) a contraction whose spelling happens to be very similar to an existing word but is still mostly unambiguous, and 3) how likely the combined word appears in colloquial or subject-matter specific speech and writing.
Even a combo word that meets all three of those points is not guaranteed to be universally accepted as a new word, but some combo words get accepted even if they don’t meet most of those points. Starting with your examples, “greenhouse” certainly meets point #1, since “green” is an adjective and “house” is a noun, which combined form the new noun “greenhouse”. “login” does the same, although it also meets point #2, since it’s a contraction of “log in” (v.), meaning to sign into a web service. The same goes for “work out” (v) and workout (n, an exercise program for each day of week).
I personally always write “log in” when I mean the verb, and “login” to refer to the credentials needed to sign in. But that’s my CS degree showing. As such, I’m of the opinion that “login” as a verb is a typo, since it’s the wrong part-of-speech (a noun when a verb is needed). Same goes for “alot” (IMO, a typo) and “allot” (v, to allocate). Whether such typos are permissible depends on the quality of the writing, as “takecare” and “ofcourse” would be unacceptable in a dissertation but perfectly fine for an IRC chatroom for die-hard fans of British cooking shows. But I think most people in the latter group, if asked, would probably agree that “ofcourse” is a typo. Basic English literacy means we’re not going to hapazardly throwawaythewhitespace andtryto pretendthatitdoesnt matter.
Finally, prevalence, which is considered by many linguists to be the ultimate test of neologisms: if people use it and it’s understood, then it’s a word. But that rule needs to be viewed from the lens of the intended audience. For example, years and years ago, I understood the legal term “housecar” in the California Vehicle Code to mean something akin to a family saloon car, meaning a car suitable for transporting a whole family. This would contrast with a pick-up trucks, sports cars, and commercial vehicles. But my naivete was to not look up the actual definition, and I just wrongly assumed that definition because it made sense for “house” and “car” to combine in that way. The real definition is a car that is also a house, meaning an RV or motorhome. That just goes to show that – since I’m not a lawyer – I was not the audience to gauge whether “housecar” is a valid combo word or not. Whereas California-based lawyers would have likely recognized the meaning in short order.
Basically, each combo word is unique in its circumstances, but perhaps those three points I mentioned have a lot (haha) to do with whether a combo word achieves universal adoption. “alot” does not seem to have met the full acceptance test.
- Comment on Is there an implemented system of automated trucks anywhere that is fully operational? 1 month ago:
Can you be more precise about what level of automation these trucks should have? Other forms of transport like trains and aircraft have automation, but it’s not full automation and they accept that limitation as the technology develops.
SAE has a classification system for automation of the driving task, but this wouldn’t necessarily include the task of loading and unloading cargo, nor the paperwork management for consignments, all of which are part of the commercial truck driving job.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
Answering the question as written and without any particular comment on the example given, yes, it can be manipulative to respond to allegations with a counter that the allegations are slanderous, but it’s not always manipulative. Though it does highlight the gap between what someone says and what they mean.
Some folks will argue that the term “slander” has lost its original meaning but I still ascribe to the legal definition which says it’s a form of defamation. That is, a falsehood being perpetuated about someone, regarding something that can be proved one way or another. Without defining the term, no one could sensibly answer the question here.
So does this mean when person X asserts slander, they’re saying they have a potential lawsuit? Possibly, but that’s the rub: “slander” is now colloquial shorthand for “all those things they said about me are lies”. It’s natural to refute unsavory descriptions about oneself, even in spite of attached evidence, so sometimes calling something as slanderous is a knee-jerk reaction, akin to saying “ow!” after stubbing one’s toe on the bed post.
But that’s the most charitable view. “Slander” can also be a rejection of the validity of the evidence, and that’s more a symptom of the “post-truth” era we’re currently in, where controversies are more newsworthy than the truth they purport to stand upon. In that sense, labeling allegations as slanderous is manipulative because it serves the purpose of misleading the audience, or encouraging them to not bother vetting or even looking at the evidence at all. And sometimes you can’t blame the audience: fact checking is difficult and boring.
I bemoan the use of legal terms in colloquial speech, as terms of law must be exact and precise, while colloquialisms must be free to express broad thoughts and ideas. But since laypeople are rarely asked to consider if a comment is actually legally actionable, and most off-the-cuff commentary isn’t, I won’t dwell on that aspect.
Sometimes it’s the original allegations which are genuinely manipulative, and it’s not manipulative to point out manipulation. Other times, no possible reading of the facts can save the remaining reputation of a genuinely awful person.
But what I will say is that a simple response of “it’s slander!” alone is not persuasive, IMO. If someone wants to be believed, they’ll have to put more effort into their defense than that, insofar as public perception is concerned. But if the evidence is bad, this shouldn’t be very hard to do.
The public and media might also bear some responsibility, if they will so easily equate “both sides” as having valid points when there’s an avalanche of evidence on one side and only bad evidence on the other. But other times, a factual question can be reasonably interpreted differently, and that’s fair too.
So I’m sorry to say that there’s no clear cut answer, whether it’s always or never manipulative. I’m not a lawyer, but their common adage is “it depends”.
- Comment on What realistically would happen if someone came back to life from the dead ? 2 months ago:
A few months ago, we had a question about what would happen if necromancy was possible and an undead was called as a court witness. I gave a rather fun-to-write, tongue-in-cheek answer, which might be germane to your question too. Here’s just a snippet:
So now we come back to zombies. Would a jury be able to set aside their shock, horror, and awe about a zombie in court that they could focus on being the finder of fact? If a zombie says they’re an eye-witness to a mugging, would their lack of actual eyeballs confuse the jury? Even more confusing would be a zombie that is testifying as an expert witness. Does their subject matter need to be recent? What if the case needs an expert on 17th Century Parisian fashion and the undead is from that era and worked in haute couture? Are there no fashion historians who could provide similar expert opinions?
- Comment on Can someone explain to me how a ventilation fan can suck LESS when on high compared to low? 2 months ago:
Constant Speed is probably what I was thinking of. And speaking of multi engine failure, you’ve just reminded me of the demise of TransAsia Airways Flight 235 where the right engine feathered itself erroneous, but then the crew misdiagnosed the situation and shut down the left engine. Mentour Pilot made a video on that particular accident.
