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 questions 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.

That said, one could argue that such “Article III” rulemaking (eg FCC Commissioners) or judgements (eg Immigration Court) are distinct from the traditional judicial rulings from “Article I” courts (eg US Supreme Court). But that’s a Constitutional wrinkle for another discussion.

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.

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.

EDIT: And just to get ahead of anyone suggesting that calling the emergency phone is a way to test it, it really isn’t. A true test would be making an outbound call to the emergency dispatcher, and then asking them to verify the caller ID and return the call. Good property management should already be doing this regularly, in the same way as testing the fire alarms and checking extinguishers.

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.

I think you’re right, as prosumer and low-end enterprise switch vendors have less of an incentive to bundle first-party xcvrs along with switch sales. However, the ISP and large-enteprise market segments still have vendor locks, although many have an “allow unsupported xcvr” mode which will apply best-effort to operate a third-party xcvr but the warranty won’t be honored while such a xcvr is installed.

The likes of Cisco and HPE do things like this, but given that the target customers of such switches are buying them in the hundreds to thousands, and each switch already costs thousands of dollars, the cost of first-party pluggables is just a part of the deal. Such customers also value reliability to a greater degree, so even a miniscule prospect of incompatibility will be avoided.

Insofar as it pertains to this community, the ability to enable the unsupported xcvr mode means old high-end equipment gets a second life in someone’s homelab, since warranties stop mattering there

Firstly, and it’s honestly a minor issue, I think your question will draw more answers if it had a title that at least mentions the crux of the question, that is “what is a western style room/home?”.

Anyway, answering the question, the distinction of a western-style room, home, hotel, bathroom, suit, or even envelopes is a description generally used only in contrast to the “global norms” that are Western-world designs. So far as I can tell, this isn’t (usually) rooted in any sort of bias against the non-Western world, but rather a helpful if coarse indicator about what things will look like.

To that end, classification as western style is mostly going to appear in places where that is not the norm or is not endemic to the given place. Japan is a good example as the island nation continues to have its own designs that remain popular, while having imported a great number of western ideas since the Meiji Restoration in the mid 1800s.

Whereas the distinction as western design isn’t very useful when all relevant design options already stem from western approaches. Take for example the slender and tall townhomes common in the Netherlands. If such a townhome were constructed in San Francisco, calling it a western design is terribly unhelpful, as a standard townhouse in San Francisco would already be of American (and thus western) design. Rather, that home would be described as “Dutch style”, to contrast against the standards found in SW America, which hews closely with standard American construction but with notable Spanish influence, such as tile roofs and verandas.

The distinction also doesn’t help when comparing forms that most wouldn’t even find comparable. So an alpine cabin (a cold weather, western design) is not comparable to an Alaskan Indigenous igloo despite both being a home or dwelling. There must be at least some similarity before drawing the destination of western or eastern or whatever design.

But from what I have gathered, SFP+ is perfectly standardized, and it’s only the lockout code preventing you from using any transceiver on the market

Unfortunately, the situation is not so simple. Even if the various vendor-locks weren’t a thing, the fact is that the testing matrix of xcvrs on the market crossed with the number of switch manufacturers and all their models is ginornous, and it would be a herculean effort to acquire, let alone validate even a subset of all combinations.

While SFP is defined in a standard, the allowable variances – due to things like manufacturing capabilities and the realities of environmental influences – mean that it’s possible for two compliant transceivers to just not link up. It’s unfortunate, but interoperability with so many players and at such cut-throat margins leads to this reality.

And since it’s a chain of components, any incompatibility of switch, xcvr, or fibre can wreck a link, and then the blame game hot-potato gets tossed around since no vendor wants to investigate a link issue if it might not be their fault.

In my experience, though, the initial link negotiation is the most problematic part when building a link that isn’t all supplied by one vendor. Once past this, I find that a link rarely has issues thereafter. Which is good if you’re able to return xcvrs if they don’t work for your setup.

Ok, I’m back. I did some quick research and it looks like that Mikrotik switch should be able to do line-rate between the SFP+ ports. That’s important because if it was somehow doing non-hardware switching, the performance would be awful. That said, my personal opinion is that Mikrotik products are rather unintuitive to use. My experience has been with older Ubiquiti gear and even older HP Procurve enterprise switches. To be fair, though, prosumer products like from Mikrotik have to make some tradeoffs compared to the money-is-no-object enterprise space. But I wasn’t thrilled with the CLI on their routers; maybe the switches are better?

Moving on, that NIC card appears to be equivalent to an Intel x520, so drivers and support should exist for any mainline OS you’re running. For 10 Gbps beyond, I agree that you want to go with pluggable modules when possible, unless you absolutely know that the installation will never run fibre.

I will note that 10 Gbps over Cat 5e – while not mentioned in the standard and thus officially undefined behavior – it has been reported to work over short distance, in the range of 15-30 meters by some accounts. The twisted pair Ethernet specs only call out the supported wire types by their category designation but ultimately, it’s the signal integrity of the differential signals that matter. Cat 3, 5, 5e, 6, etc are just increasingly better at maintaining a signal over a distance. This being officially undefined just means that if it doesn’t work, the manufacturer told no lie.

But you’re right to avoid 10 Gbps twisted pair, as the xcvrs are expensive, thermally ridiculous, power hungry, and themselves have length limits shorter than what the spec allows, because it’s hard to stuff all the hardware into an SFP+ pluggable module. Whereas -SR optics are cheap and DACs even cheaper (when the distance is short enough). No real reason to adopt twisted pair 10 Gbps if fibre is an option.

That said, I didn’t check the compatibility of your selected SR transceiver against your NICs and switch, so I’ll presume you’ve done your homework for that.

Going back to the x8 card in a electrically x4 slot, there’s a thing in the PCIe spec where the only two widths that are mandatory to support are: 1) the physical card width, and 2) the 1x width. No other widths are necessarily supported. So there’s a small possibility that the NIC will only connect at 1x PCIe, which will severely limit your performance. But this is kinda pathological and 9 out of 10 PCIe cards will do graceful width reduction, beyond what the PCIe spec demands. And being an x520 variant, I would expect the driver to have no issue with that, as crummy PCIe drivers can break when their bad assumptions fall through.

Overall, I don’t see any burning red flags with your plan. I hope you’ll update us with new posts as things progress!

I’ll have to review your post in greater detail in a bit, but some initial comments: cross vendor compatibility of xcvrs was a laudable goal failed only by protectionist business interests and the result is that the only real way to validate compatibility is to try it.

Regarding your x4 slot and the NICs being x8: does your mobo have the slot cut in such a way that it can accept a physical x8 card even though only the x4 lanes are electrically connected?

For keystone jacks, I personally use them but I try not to go wild with them, since just like with electrical or RF connectors, each one adds some amount of loss, however minor. Having one keystone jack at each end of the fibre seems like it shouldn’t be an issue at all.

Final observation for now: this plan sets up a 10 Gb network with fibre, but your use-case for now is just for a bigger pipe to your file server. Are you expecting to expand your use-cases in future? If not, the same benefit can be had by a direct fibre run from your single machine to your file server. Still 10 Gbps but no switch needed in the middle, and you have less risk of cross vendor incompatibility.

I’m short on time rn, but I’ll circle back with more thoughts soon.

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 new part-of-speech, 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” (n.) 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 or household. 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.

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.

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” rather than “I now have cause to sue”. 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”.

My German is non-existent, but it seems to me that those two references can agree with this form for the lowercase d:

Of course, your second reference shows an initial stroke towards the top of the circle, but the rest of the stroke is one motion where the ascender double-backs on itself, completing the circle in a counterclockwise move that also starts the ascender. That is to say, the circle and ascender are naturally attached.

I could find only one reference which explicitly starts a new stroke for the ascender after completing the circle, but this example is from cursive, not from standard form:

If I had to guess, the impetus for not doubling back is to prevent the ascender from becoming messy, since writing over the same part of the page can cause smudging. And perhaps in hurried writing, this form lends itself to detaching the circle from the ascender. But I personally draw my cursive d with the ascender more akin to how cursive l is drawn, with a looping ascender, which preserves the attachment:

There is no ambiguity in cursive doing it this way, and for standard form, it saves a lift from the paper.

Seeing as drawing the d with its circle separated from the ascender requires a lift, and also becomes ambiguous from an O and an L, I’m not entirely sure how that form would be clearer to read. Context of the language means there’s usually no issue of confusion between a D or OL, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the drawn form is clear to read, which is going to mess up any OCR system prior to performing spell checking.

But some pathologal examples might include “olay” vs “day” vs “0 day”.

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?

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 erroneously, but then the crew misdiagnosed the situation and shut down the left engine. Mentour Pilot made a video on that particular accident.

I like this answer. The only thing I would add is that when the fan blades are all stalled, it might seem then that drag and energy consumption should reduce, since there’s not much air moving. But in a cruel twist (fan pun intended) of aerodynamics, the useless spinning of stalled fan blades still causes parasitic drag. So not only does the fan not move air, it’s also consuming more energy than spinning a solid disk of the same moment-of-inertia.

When the engine fails for certain single-propeller aircraft, there’s sometimes a mechanism to lock the propeller to make it stop rotating, since it would otherwise “windmill” in the air and waste the precious kinetic energy that’s keeping the plane aloft. Or so I’m told.

I guess your nephew can start studying to become a network engineer now lol

In all seriousness, a 16 port managed switch exposes enough complexity to develop a detailed understanding of Ethernet and Layer 2 concepts, while not having to commit to learning illogical CLI commands to achieve basic functionality. 16 ports is also enough to wire up a non-trivial network, with ports to spare for exercising loop detection/protection or STP, but doesn’t consume a lot of electricity.

I would pair that switch with a copy of The All-New Switch Book, 2nd Edition to go over the networking theory. Yes, that book is a bit dated but networking fundamentals have not changed that much in 15 years. Plus, it can be found cheap, or on the high seas. It’s certainly not something to read cover-to-cover, since you can skip anything about ATM networks.

Then again, I think students might just simulate switch behaviors and topologies in something like GNS3, so no hardware needed at all.

The other comments correctly mention aspects like managing terrain and the width of railroads vs roadways. What I want to highlight is the development of road building methods at around the same time that metal-on-metal rail developed.

The 1800s were a wild time. Some clever folks figured out that they could put a contemporary steam engine – invented early 1700s; used only for stationary uses in lieu of water power – onto a wagonway. Wagonways are basically wooden or metal guides/flanges so that a horse-drawn wagon could be pulled along and stay perfectly centered on the path.

Up until this point in history, the construction of graded, flattened surfaces for moving goods didn’t change very much compared to what the Romans were doing with their roads. That is, a road had to be dug down and some soil removed, then backfilled with coarse material (usually large stones), and then a layer of smaller stones to try to approximate a smooth surface. The innovations the Roman introduced included a keen eye for drainage – freeze/thaw cycles destroy roads – and surveying methods (also to build things like aqueducts and canals). And concrete, of course.

But even the best built roads of that era were still prone to rutting, where each passing wagon slowly wears a groove into the road. Wooden wagons wider or narrower than the groove would suffer poor performance or outright break down. The wagonways sought to solve that issue by: 1) forcing all wagons to fit within the fixed guides on the sides, and 2) concentrate the grooves to exactly within the guides. The modern steel-on-steel railway takes this idea to its logical end.

An adhesive railroad seeks to be: all-weather, heavy duty, and efficient. Like Roman roads before it, all railways (except maybe on-street tramways) need to excavate the soil and build it up, usually being higher and wider than the rest of the land. It also minimizes the width of the earthworks, by being so compact and building upward. This sturdy base also provides a strong foundation to support heavy loads, preventing the steel rails from sinking or “rutting”. And finally, putting the wheel atop the rail makes for low-friction operation. Early wooden plateways sort-of did this, but they didn’t manage curves like how modern rails do.

All the while, instead of trying to support heavy wagons, another clever person sought to reinvent road building outright, postulating that if a surface could just spread out the load from light/medium traffic, then the soil beneath could be used as-is, saving a lot of earthworks. A gravel surface would meet this criteria, but gravel is not all-weather and can develop rutting. The key innovation was the use of binder (basically glue) to hold the surface together, such as tar. This sealing process meant the surface wouldn’t shift underneath traffic. This neatly avoided the issue of dust, made the surface water impermeable, and reduced road maintenance. So famous is this surfacing process that the inventor’s name can still be found in the surface for airport runways, despite runways always being excavated down to a significant depth.

So on one hand, rail technology developed to avoid all the pitfalls of 1700s roads. On the other hand, road surfacing developed to allow light/medium traffic roads to be economically paved for all-weather conditions. Both developments led to increased speed and efficiency in their domain, and networks of both would be built out.

Rail networks made it possible to develop the “streetcar suburbs” around major historical cities in the late 1800s. But on the same token, cheap road surfacing made it possible to build 1950s American suburbs, with wide, pedestrian-hostile streets sprawling in serpentine patterns. The fact that sealed roads are water impermeable has also substantially contributed to water pollution, due to increased rain runoff rather than absorbing into the underlying soil.

I’m personally very cautious about damage to/around batteries, due to !spicypillows@lemmy.world . At the very least, a photo might help depict the scale of the dent.

And while it might not be a spicy pillow right now, a damaged battery is more likely to turn spicy spontaneously. Replacement of the battery is, of course, the most risk-reducing move.

I once read a theory on an electricians forum about how the USA electrical code’s mandated maximum distance between adjacent outlets on a wall, coupled with the typical bedroom layout, as well as home builders trying to be as cheap as possible, led to only a single outlet being placed directly in the middle of the longest wall. This is also the most logical position for a bed, so the theory is that the bed pressing against the outlet over time was a contributing factor to electrical-related house fires.

I cannot find where I read that originally, and certainly the granularity of nationally-reported fire data is not sufficient to prove that theory. And while the electrical code’s distance requirements haven’t changed, more homes will now put enough outlets so the only one isn’t behind the bed.