That makes sense to anybody and everybody. "Protection against what?" "Short circuit." "Oh".

These are the same people who have a light fixture that is intermittent, and declare that it is caused by a "short," when in reality they're almost certainly experiencing what would more appropriately described as a "long."

You're really not helping educate anyone at all. Please stop.

Yes I am strange, and your UID is strange: It has too many digits. So what?

The "protection relay" is all that has been discussed in any of TFAs that I've seen, without any mention of "breaker". And then someone generalizes and says that it's a "circuit breaker," before some EEs come along and say that the "protection relay" is not a circuit breaker, when the fact is that it does just that: It does not have to be in series with the load in order to control that load*.

And then I show up in the middle of all of it and try to simplify terms. And then you tell me how wrong I am for using simple and established English terminology, even though in the broadest of terms such a system would obviously be considered a "circuit breaker."

*Simple, bone-headed electronics: Need to turn things on and off? Use a transistor. Need to turn bigger things on and off? Use that transistor to drive a relay. Need to turn even bigger things on and off? Use a contactor* driven by that relay. Bigger things? Switchgear. Need a fancy way to turn big things off when something goes wrong? Use a "protection relay" in place of or in addition to your usual relay.

Most folks would consider that a pedantic way to describe a simple system, even if they don't even know the word "pedantic" but merely understand the concept, because such details aren't really all that important to the general populace. And anyone who understands English could properly describe the system as "an electronic switch."

**: The delineation between "relay" and "contactor" is also pretty vague, such that the terms can be used interchangeably across a fairly wide range of applications.

Good luck flying your car to work.

A circuit breaker never detects *anything*. Ever. It can't.

Mine do. They're in the basement, in the panel. Not on a trolley, or on a cart, or in their own building. But they do. Some of them detect overcurrent, some of them also detect ground faults, and some of them additionally detect arc faults. It's not an abnormal panel.

I know you don't care but swallow your pride and learn something.

But you're not trying to teach. You're trying to prove that my terms are wrong. And they're not incorrect terms to begin with.

Which, really, is the whole point that I've been trying to make. Or did you miss that part?

Oh, and for pedantry: I can also say that communication failed because of a PIC card error in the CPP that caused the CIP tray to lock, but nobody cares. It might be the truth, but it's pedantic: If folks try to understand, their eyes glaze over. And almost everyone else just skips that part.

It is much simpler to generalize and say "the radio system failed." Even if is so ambiguous as to alarm every autistic nit on this side of the Mississippi who understands these terms, this would still a correct (though generalized) statement.

It is pedantry. And I don't care who you've met, or what the facilities look like (didn't I just say that?).

You're still wrapped up in pedantic details. Stop doing that and zoom out a bit.

Power comes into a collection of gear from the grid (whether that be a local substation or a very long length of wire: I DON'T CARE!). Power comes out, powers facility (REALLY, it's that simple).

In between those two circuits is a circuit breaker, that upon detecting an abnormal condition, breaks the circuit.

Which is what we saw during the superbowl: Stuff turned off because the circuit was broken because the circuit breaker detected something awry and did what it was designed to do.

Seriously. These aren't very big words.

Don't worry. My day job is about as non-technical and unimportant as they come -- mostly all I do is wireless communication systems for emergency dispatch centers.

So when you call 911 and an ambulance never shows up, you can refer back to this thread and pat yourself on the back for having foretold the eventuality.

Meanwhile, I maintain that arguing about the exact definitions of a "circuit breaker" or "protection relay" is unnecessary pedantry because any thing or collection of things capable of autonomously breaking a circuit in response to abnormal conditions can be (rightly!) termed as a "circuit breaker."

This thing, or collection of things, might be in a panel. It might be on a trolley or cart. It might be a collection of gear filling entire room, or with its own isolated building, or be contained within two or more buildings. It could stretch across continents. I don't really care: The collection of stuff acts as a circuit breaker, and therefore it is a circuit breaker.

Nobody outside of EE fields cares about what parts this circuit breaker might consist of, or that there might be a portable apparatus with an overlapping name, or that the term is too generalized to satisfy every pedant in the world.

My whole argument is against unnecessary pedantry.

You're supporting it very well.

Which is over half of vehicles in some places, which I'd call 'often'.

"Some places" isn't the US. TFA is about the US.

And being in the US, I do see a few diesel cars around every now and then. I do not see them "often."

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.

QED. :P

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."

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.

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.

This will not work.

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.