litchralee @ litchralee @sh.itjust.works

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2 yr. 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:

1. Has performed or omitted some act...
2. Which is the proximate cause of death...
3. With malice aforethought...
4. 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 a sniper's bullet.

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 suffered only a flesh wound, and 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. Whatever convinced the accused that the button is genuinely may not be convincing to a panel of jurors. Unless the accused voluntarily admits to that fact after-the-fact in court, that is 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 element #2 -- or really all the elements -- of murder are fact-intensive, that's because they are. Murder is not as clear-cut as a parking ticket. 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.

To be clear, this is about exterior mounted warning lights, and not like a caution lamp on a control panel, right?

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 in 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.

Or.... we could just make appliances that are tolerant of the world's different AC voltages. The world's commercial electric grids only use a handful of voltages, and they're all between 100-240v. Compressing the list by removing voltages which are within less than 10 volts, the list is quite short: 100v, 120v, 230v, 240v.

That's all there is. And it's exactly why most USB phone chargers list their input voltage as: 100-240. Today's modern switch-mode power supplies can properly tolerate any of the world's voltages, as long as you adapt the connector. The voltage side of things is mostly solved, except maybe for cheaper, motor-driven devices. But even that is changing to use inverter technology that can take almost any voltage.

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 on. It can only connect in one orientation, so you keep rotating around the center pin until it slots in. It's heavy enough to probably also double as a blackjack for self-defense lol

In a sense, we already have one. And it's used on the vast, vast majority of desktop computers, it's the standard for removable cords on electric kettles around the world, and it shows up in all data centers. I'm talking about IEC 60320, sometimes just called the "IEC connectors" or for one very specific connector, the "PC plug".

For the task of attaching AC power to an appliance, this is probably the one with the greatest adoption worldwide. And there absolutely could be a wall-mounted version of these, the same way that datacenters essentially have power strips -- ok, they're RPCs lol -- with these connectors.

Their only noticeable drawback is that the voltage can be anything up to 250v. So plugging 120v appliances into an Italian 230v outlet would be bad. But this family of connectors -- formally called "couplers" -- was meant to match current-capacity, where a mismatch would cause a fire due to overload. It's still the user's responsibility to check the voltage, in the same way that buyers have to check the type of battery they need for a remote control (eg AA vs AAA).

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:

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.

Starting with the title question, US States are bound by the federal constitution, which explicitly denies certain powers to 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. The postal service is one such activity which is explicitly and wholly a federal matter, written into the initial Constitution. But now, airspace, telecoms, and railroads are all matters which the federal government asserts its authority via the "interstate commerce" powers, and if US States were countries, they might object to the feds. But they're not countries, so they don't wield that power.

These Terms only apply to the Executable Code version of Firefox, not the Firefox source code.

https://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 the LibreWolf 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 even still, there is nothing to suggest that any Mozilla-compiled binaries are in LibreWolf, which only has source code commonality with Mozilla Firefox.

The answer appears to be: no.

There'd be a square or two which just say "Nestlé" lol

It's quite interesting that "rural highways" is one of the categories identified, but not any other sort of improved road. The data source has a base granularity where one square is 250,000 acres (~100,000 hectares), and then additional state data is factored in for increased precision. It supposingly being USDA data, they might primarily care only about those highways used to connect farms to the national markets.

That said, I would be keenly interested in the land used for low-volume, residential streets that support suburban and rural sprawl, in comparison to streets in urban areas. Unlike highways which provides fast connectivity, and unlike dense urban-core streets that produce value by hosting local businesses and serving local residents, suburban streets take up space, intentional break connectivity (ie cul de sacs), and ultimately return very little in value to anyone except to the adjacent homeowners, essentially as extensions of their privately-owned driveways.

It may very well be in USDA's interest to collect data on suburban sprawl, as much of the land taken for such developments was perfectly good, arable land.

Is the question regarding intellectual property? Like how Disney guards its various franchises and brands (eg Mickey Mouse)?

We kind of already know what happens in that scenario, but historically -- and even Disney has benefitted from this -- anything which was part of the unwritten body of mythos was fair-game to use or remix. Modern copyright and trademark laws only affect that which was reduced to a fixed medium, like film or novels. And even then, the standard of originality -- in the USA anyway -- means that just recording a word-of-mouth story does not imbue a claim to the story itself, but merely its rendition on paper.

As a practical matter, so long as people still talk in-person and share their accounts and experiences, the rich human tradition of storytelling will not end, copyright be darned. If some new legal mechanism is invented to enforce "speaking crimes", then we're already zero steps away from an Orwellian nightmare where "thoughtcrime" is prohibited.

This probably can't be cross posted to !castiron@lemmy.world , but I think it'd be funny there too

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.

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 am always deeply enthralled when math and comp-sci unite to yield an elegant result, where my definition of elegance is: efficient + minimal.

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.

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.