You can have a breaker without a protection relay,
Of course you can: A simple circuit breaker is just a heater that is mechanically coupled to a switch that locks in the off ("tripped") state: Just like a fuse, but resettable -- no fancy-pants "protection relay" required.
But: If a protection relay exists in this context, it is part of the circuit breaker system. Thus the generalized term "circuit breaker" certainly applies.
A fuel pump is often mechanically driven
"Often?" None of the modern cars I've owned have had a mechanically-driven fuel pump: It is always in the fuel tank (with the fuel), with wires going to it, connected to some manner of switch or relay. (I've owned antique cars with mechanical fuel pumps, but they don't count for any meaningful quantity of "often.")
A breaker will work fine without a protection relay. It simply won't trip on fault conditions which is considered dangerous.
Thank you, Captain Obvious.
You clearly not entirely sure what you're talking about,
Funny, because other than the definition of "often" as it relates to automobile fuel pumps, you seem to agree with me.
But calling it a "protection relay" instead of a "circuit breaker" really is missing the point with pedantry.
As I understand it, such a protection relay is one component tells the switchgear and/or other components what to do, based on loading and other parameters.
The entire system, viewed as a black box, is a circuit breaker. And in practice, the entire system behaves in a manner not dissimilar to the circuit breakers in my own house: Detect fault (either current fault or ground fault or arc fault or some manner of goddamn fault) and direct stuff to turn off.
Just like any other circuit breaker in common parlance.
On any scale, there are many parts to the systems that we call circuit breakers. Any failure of any one of them to behave as expected can still accurately described as a failure of the circuit breaker as a whole.
Anything else is pedantic. A car analogy:
"My car is broken. It left me stranded on my way to the Super Bowl."
"What's wrong with it?"
"The fuel pump relay."
"Oh, well the car isn't broken then. It's just a fuel pump relay."
"But the car doesn't work."
"Sure it does. Only the fuel pump relay failed. The rest of the car is fine, isn't it?"
"Stupid fucking pedant."
"You're a bit of an ass for saying that."
"And you don't seem to understand that no matter what, the whole car doesn't work without that part."
Doesn't the phone company charge an extra fee for digital dialing? As if it's still costing them extra?
When I was a kid, we had a variety of telephones in the house. Some hung on the wall, some had dials, and some had buttons. In the beginning, all of the phones (including those with buttons) used pulse dialing. I remember two distinct conversations between my parents regarding this issue, the first from sometime in the 80s and the second in the early 90s:
1. "Should we pay for Touch-Tone(tm) service?" "It's expensive. We already pay too much for phone service." "It's only a couple of dollars a month, and we can dial faster."
And so it was. We had Touch-Tone(tm), and life was really neither better nor worse, just different. It was a line-item on the bill until
2. "They want to sell us call waiting and three-way calling and distinctive ring services, all bundled up. Can we use those?" "Maybe. Then the kids would have their own phone numbers."
And so it was. With the change of service, the Touch-Tone(tm) item dropped off, though I remember my dad calling to order package and insisting upon it being that way...
And as an adult, I've never been billed for it. And these days, I don't have a land line at all. Come to think of it, it's been years since I've used a real phone that actually used DTMF itself: It's always either a digital office phone, some incarnation of VOIP, or a cell phone.
You said a fracking operation burns 80,000 gallons of diesel per week, right?
I think he said it takes about 80,000 gallons of diesel fuel, over the course of a week, to frack one well, which he goes on to say is usually done just once over the lifetime of the well.
All this conjecture about evil aliens trying to exploit us is fun.
But if we apply the razor and consider that there might just be a difference in perspective, I think we can all agree on the following: The universe is only very big because we are very small.
As soon as we stop thinking of aliens in terms of human scale and desire and capability, things become a lot more mundane: Chances are excellent that even if other intelligent life does exist out there, we're either far too big or far too small to bother fucking with.
I've never seen a UPS driver carry anything but packages, a tablet, and a hand cart.
And the screen door that was allegedly locked, how in the world would you ever know since you apparently never use that entrance?
And even then, I have had screen doors on my own house which were allegedly locked open in a strong wind, or just by giving them a little tug. At least on mine, the latches are shit.
Meanwhile: Spam. I routinely have shipping companies send me SMS messages with progress updates, and have never received anything from them that I did not explicitly ask for.
The service you speak of is called Smartpost, or Mail Innovations, or a variety of other terms depending on the shipper. It uses common carrier for the backhaul, and USPS for local delivery.
It's optional. UPS and Fedex still deliver regular UPS and Fedex packages, but AFAICT it costs more than having USPS handle the last mile.
Which, you know, is fine and good. The problem I have with it is that when I pay a vendor for UPS or Fedex shipping, I want regular-old UPS or Fedex -- not some bizarre interconnected "Mail Innovations" system that combines the worst elements of everything. FFS, I don't even want Fedex Home Delivery, a service that can apparently use any grubby discount courier for delivery, with drivers that aren't under the employ of Fedex or USPS or any other well-known entity.
But the root of that problem is vendors who lie about what the shipping method they're using, not that such services exist. People can't make good, informed decisions if the information in front of them is a lie.
Not that I try to ship UPS anyway. They're the guys who hide packages so you don't know they've been delivered.
This is a good thing: A package that is cannot be seen is a package that will not be casually stolen.
If you want to know when your stuff shows up just have them send you an SMS or an email upon delivery. It's easy to do, right from the tracking page.
Yes, you're misunderstanding. They can do that too. Or talk to a proper DVR system. Or combinations of these things, like always record lower-quality video (storage, bandwidth) and record higher-quality video when something interesting happens and send a series of stills out via email.
It's almost as if someone had thought of this stuff before you did.
"Just point it at a V4L2 device" != analyzing video from fixed cameras around a facility.
Motion is cool. Motion is not an appropriate answer for TFS (TFA?).
(That said: Thank you for reminding me about Motion. I've recently had need to set up a simple, single recording webcam in my house with motion detection, for free or cheap, and had forgotten all about it. I have a USB camera scavenged from a broken HP laptop which is easily concealed.
But for the level that the poster is asking about, involving real money, FFS: Even on the very low end of the applicable spectrum, Axis cameras can handle much of this sort of duty *internally* and submit the video to the network device of your choosing without other outside help.)
There's a plethora of products that record (DVR-style) with analytics for the stuff you're asking about, but they all do it in real-time as it happens. Milestone comes to mind, as do Panasonic's offerings.
Why do they work this way? Because if it were that important, you'd want to know right away, not a week later when you get around to it.
Failing that, if visually scanning a weeks' worth of video is taking too much time to be worthwhile, then perhaps you need to re-evaluate what the incident is worth.
I think the argument that the author is trying to make is that the scope of new work is more tightly focussed than before. There have been relatively few new 'fundamental' discoveries in physics, compared to refinements and increasing precision.
Neat tech, the two of those. Even neater in one package. And yes, they're both relatively ancient methods if you look back far enough.
But really: In coarse terms, science has always been slow. From fire to the wheel to the internal combustion engine and car took aeons.
And for every step that we accomplish, we encounter a plethora of new things that we hadn't yet known about, and each of those things has its own intricacies that must also be learned.
Is it a state of constant refinement and precision? Perhaps. But then, has there ever been a time when hasn't it been this way?
They were the best. I hate HP. I think their design engineers go through a lot of trouble to use as many different sizes and types of screws as possible into each computer they create. Not impossible to work on but positively the worst to the point that I all but refuse to work on them.
I'm going to miss Dell. I have only ever really used Dell. They have been the best servers, desktops and laptops I have ever owned, and the best supported. I'm really going to miss Dell.
If anything, Windows' refusal to peacefully coexist on a disk with anything but itself is what ends up fucking shit up.
Both installers for Windows and Linux distributions are equally capable of fucking up an already-installed OS if you don't know how to deal with them.
I've done dual- and triple-boot thing before. I don't anymore, for a variety of reasons, but it's never been particularly horrendous with any of the different operating systems I've done it with.
In fact, the last time I built a dual-boot box, I used the Windows Vista (!) bootloader to launch Ubuntu. It worked fine. Peacefully, even.
*shrug*
The only rational complaint I have about MSFT in this regard is that it'd be nice if they'd spend even a tiny fraction of the effort that random folks put into making NTFS fly under Linux into making ext3/4 work well under Windows.
Poor sharing of filesystems between operating systems is the biggest showstopper for dual-booting, in my experience:
At home/work, it's easy(ish) to use a network share to share data and documents between operating systems, which crosses the filesystem void neatly enough as long as you store everything worth sharing on the network.
But with a singular dual-booting laptop on the road? Not so much: It's still a whole lot like having two or more different computers, only one of which can be on at the same time.
1. Not-so-huge data that is suited for off-line, off-site storage. Put a BD in your safe deposit box or at a friend's house, and it won't degrade like a hard drive and won't die like a flash drive. 20GB (or whatever) is enough to hold a lot of important work from an author, a musician, or many other creative fields.
2. Movies. Backing up BD movies to writeable BDs, and being able to play them in the same manner as the original, seems like a useful function. (Especially with Red Box offering DVDs, not that I would ever encourage anyone to ever keep a copy of a rented film...)
3. Giving them away. I can fill a cheap BD (or several) with data and give it to a friend/customer/mail it to another country and it costs me very little, and I don't ever need the media returned. 16/32GB thumb drives or hard drives are very expensive by comparison: Chances are that I want my thumb drive/hard drive back so I can use it for something else later.
BDs are nice in the same capacity as giving a friend a burned CD full of whatever, or a cassette tape of a vinyl record.: They're cheap enough that it doesn't matter.
(At this point, someone will say: Yes, but can't you just give them data over the Internet? To which I can retort, yes, I can...but sometimes doing that just sucks.)
Yes, but don't you all use GSM down there? In the States, we've got variations of CDMA, GSM, PCS, and iDEN, all of which are mutually incompatible, and all fighting for spectrum.
In a place where any one of these were universal, having excellent coverage is only a roaming agreement away. I'm unsurprised that Australia can have excellent coverage even with its relatively sparse population.
But up here, we don't do it that way because it'd be too easy (or something), hence the cellular nonsense that you read about with some frequency on/..
Actually, the third slash means "this computer" and is required on Windows too. You have to write "file:///C:/..." on Windows to get anywhere. So no, it isn't a typo.
[citation needed]
On my computer (Windows 7), in Windows Explorer, these all work the same:
Slashdot Mirror
Of course you can: A simple circuit breaker is just a heater that is mechanically coupled to a switch that locks in the off ("tripped") state: Just like a fuse, but resettable -- no fancy-pants "protection relay" required.
But: If a protection relay exists in this context, it is part of the circuit breaker system. Thus the generalized term "circuit breaker" certainly applies.
"Often?" None of the modern cars I've owned have had a mechanically-driven fuel pump: It is always in the fuel tank (with the fuel), with wires going to it, connected to some manner of switch or relay. (I've owned antique cars with mechanical fuel pumps, but they don't count for any meaningful quantity of "often.")
Thank you, Captain Obvious.
Funny, because other than the definition of "often" as it relates to automobile fuel pumps, you seem to agree with me.
Indeed.
But calling it a "protection relay" instead of a "circuit breaker" really is missing the point with pedantry.
As I understand it, such a protection relay is one component tells the switchgear and/or other components what to do, based on loading and other parameters.
The entire system, viewed as a black box, is a circuit breaker. And in practice, the entire system behaves in a manner not dissimilar to the circuit breakers in my own house: Detect fault (either current fault or ground fault or arc fault or some manner of goddamn fault) and direct stuff to turn off.
Just like any other circuit breaker in common parlance.
On any scale, there are many parts to the systems that we call circuit breakers. Any failure of any one of them to behave as expected can still accurately described as a failure of the circuit breaker as a whole.
Anything else is pedantic. A car analogy:
"My car is broken. It left me stranded on my way to the Super Bowl."
"What's wrong with it?"
"The fuel pump relay."
"Oh, well the car isn't broken then. It's just a fuel pump relay."
"But the car doesn't work."
"Sure it does. Only the fuel pump relay failed. The rest of the car is fine, isn't it?"
"Stupid fucking pedant."
"You're a bit of an ass for saying that."
"And you don't seem to understand that no matter what, the whole car doesn't work without that part."
When I was a kid, we had a variety of telephones in the house. Some hung on the wall, some had dials, and some had buttons. In the beginning, all of the phones (including those with buttons) used pulse dialing. I remember two distinct conversations between my parents regarding this issue, the first from sometime in the 80s and the second in the early 90s:
1. "Should we pay for Touch-Tone(tm) service?" "It's expensive. We already pay too much for phone service." "It's only a couple of dollars a month, and we can dial faster."
And so it was. We had Touch-Tone(tm), and life was really neither better nor worse, just different. It was a line-item on the bill until
2. "They want to sell us call waiting and three-way calling and distinctive ring services, all bundled up. Can we use those?" "Maybe. Then the kids would have their own phone numbers."
And so it was. With the change of service, the Touch-Tone(tm) item dropped off, though I remember my dad calling to order package and insisting upon it being that way...
And as an adult, I've never been billed for it. And these days, I don't have a land line at all. Come to think of it, it's been years since I've used a real phone that actually used DTMF itself: It's always either a digital office phone, some incarnation of VOIP, or a cell phone.
I think he said it takes about 80,000 gallons of diesel fuel, over the course of a week, to frack one well, which he goes on to say is usually done just once over the lifetime of the well.
Not 80,000 gallons of diesel per week, forever.
All this conjecture about evil aliens trying to exploit us is fun.
But if we apply the razor and consider that there might just be a difference in perspective, I think we can all agree on the following: The universe is only very big because we are very small.
As soon as we stop thinking of aliens in terms of human scale and desire and capability, things become a lot more mundane: Chances are excellent that even if other intelligent life does exist out there, we're either far too big or far too small to bother fucking with.
Neither will this.
So the door had pry marks on it?
I've never seen a UPS driver carry anything but packages, a tablet, and a hand cart.
And the screen door that was allegedly locked, how in the world would you ever know since you apparently never use that entrance?
And even then, I have had screen doors on my own house which were allegedly locked open in a strong wind, or just by giving them a little tug. At least on mine, the latches are shit.
Meanwhile: Spam. I routinely have shipping companies send me SMS messages with progress updates, and have never received anything from them that I did not explicitly ask for.
The service you speak of is called Smartpost, or Mail Innovations, or a variety of other terms depending on the shipper. It uses common carrier for the backhaul, and USPS for local delivery.
It's optional. UPS and Fedex still deliver regular UPS and Fedex packages, but AFAICT it costs more than having USPS handle the last mile.
Which, you know, is fine and good. The problem I have with it is that when I pay a vendor for UPS or Fedex shipping, I want regular-old UPS or Fedex -- not some bizarre interconnected "Mail Innovations" system that combines the worst elements of everything. FFS, I don't even want Fedex Home Delivery, a service that can apparently use any grubby discount courier for delivery, with drivers that aren't under the employ of Fedex or USPS or any other well-known entity.
But the root of that problem is vendors who lie about what the shipping method they're using, not that such services exist. People can't make good, informed decisions if the information in front of them is a lie.
This is a good thing: A package that is cannot be seen is a package that will not be casually stolen.
If you want to know when your stuff shows up just have them send you an SMS or an email upon delivery. It's easy to do, right from the tracking page.
*shrug*
Checks get cut on Thursday, no matter what day I submit the billing.
I submit my billing on Wednesday. The check gets cut and mailed on Thursday.
Before the USPS closed every useful nearby processing center, I'd always get it on Friday.
Subsequently, since it now has to travel hundreds of miles instead of 30, I get it on Saturday.
And by August, since delivering on Saturday is expensive, I'll get it on Monday.
Thanks, I guess.
Yes, you're misunderstanding. They can do that too. Or talk to a proper DVR system. Or combinations of these things, like always record lower-quality video (storage, bandwidth) and record higher-quality video when something interesting happens and send a series of stills out via email.
It's almost as if someone had thought of this stuff before you did.
Recently built a PC for free for a buddy. It works well; plays games and everything.
Please send the 100 bucks to the address above via Paypal.
Thanks.
*ahem*
"Just point it at a V4L2 device" != analyzing video from fixed cameras around a facility.
Motion is cool. Motion is not an appropriate answer for TFS (TFA?).
(That said: Thank you for reminding me about Motion. I've recently had need to set up a simple, single recording webcam in my house with motion detection, for free or cheap, and had forgotten all about it. I have a USB camera scavenged from a broken HP laptop which is easily concealed.
But for the level that the poster is asking about, involving real money, FFS: Even on the very low end of the applicable spectrum, Axis cameras can handle much of this sort of duty *internally* and submit the video to the network device of your choosing without other outside help.)
Why are you going back in time for analysis?
There's a plethora of products that record (DVR-style) with analytics for the stuff you're asking about, but they all do it in real-time as it happens. Milestone comes to mind, as do Panasonic's offerings.
Why do they work this way? Because if it were that important, you'd want to know right away, not a week later when you get around to it.
Failing that, if visually scanning a weeks' worth of video is taking too much time to be worthwhile, then perhaps you need to re-evaluate what the incident is worth.
Perhaps he was just very drunk.
I read this paragraph on a IPS LCD with a surface acoustic wave touch screen.
Neat tech, the two of those. Even neater in one package. And yes, they're both relatively ancient methods if you look back far enough.
But really: In coarse terms, science has always been slow. From fire to the wheel to the internal combustion engine and car took aeons.
And for every step that we accomplish, we encounter a plethora of new things that we hadn't yet known about, and each of those things has its own intricacies that must also be learned.
Is it a state of constant refinement and precision? Perhaps. But then, has there ever been a time when hasn't it been this way?
tl;dr version for the attention-impaired:
herp derp derp... herp, herp. derp, herp herp derp...
Both installers for Windows and Linux distributions are equally capable of fucking up an already-installed OS if you don't know how to deal with them.
I've done dual- and triple-boot thing before. I don't anymore, for a variety of reasons, but it's never been particularly horrendous with any of the different operating systems I've done it with.
In fact, the last time I built a dual-boot box, I used the Windows Vista (!) bootloader to launch Ubuntu. It worked fine. Peacefully, even.
*shrug*
The only rational complaint I have about MSFT in this regard is that it'd be nice if they'd spend even a tiny fraction of the effort that random folks put into making NTFS fly under Linux into making ext3/4 work well under Windows.
Poor sharing of filesystems between operating systems is the biggest showstopper for dual-booting, in my experience:
At home/work, it's easy(ish) to use a network share to share data and documents between operating systems, which crosses the filesystem void neatly enough as long as you store everything worth sharing on the network.
But with a singular dual-booting laptop on the road? Not so much: It's still a whole lot like having two or more different computers, only one of which can be on at the same time.
That's what Netscape thought when they released Communicator, and we all know how well that went.
That's a solved problem for both DVDs and BDs.
BD burners are good for a few things:
1. Not-so-huge data that is suited for off-line, off-site storage. Put a BD in your safe deposit box or at a friend's house, and it won't degrade like a hard drive and won't die like a flash drive. 20GB (or whatever) is enough to hold a lot of important work from an author, a musician, or many other creative fields.
2. Movies. Backing up BD movies to writeable BDs, and being able to play them in the same manner as the original, seems like a useful function. (Especially with Red Box offering DVDs, not that I would ever encourage anyone to ever keep a copy of a rented film...)
3. Giving them away. I can fill a cheap BD (or several) with data and give it to a friend/customer/mail it to another country and it costs me very little, and I don't ever need the media returned. 16/32GB thumb drives or hard drives are very expensive by comparison: Chances are that I want my thumb drive/hard drive back so I can use it for something else later.
BDs are nice in the same capacity as giving a friend a burned CD full of whatever, or a cassette tape of a vinyl record.: They're cheap enough that it doesn't matter.
(At this point, someone will say: Yes, but can't you just give them data over the Internet? To which I can retort, yes, I can...but sometimes doing that just sucks.)
[citation needed]
Yes, but don't you all use GSM down there? In the States, we've got variations of CDMA, GSM, PCS, and iDEN, all of which are mutually incompatible, and all fighting for spectrum.
In a place where any one of these were universal, having excellent coverage is only a roaming agreement away. I'm unsurprised that Australia can have excellent coverage even with its relatively sparse population.
But up here, we don't do it that way because it'd be too easy (or something), hence the cellular nonsense that you read about with some frequency on /..
And the Xbox portion of MSFT lost $210 million in the first quarter of 2012. So much for cherry picking facts...
[citation needed]
On my computer (Windows 7), in Windows Explorer, these all work the same:
file://C:/
file:///C:/
file:////////////////C:/
These also work the same:
file://
file:///
file:////////////////