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Mildly interesting court opinion:
A woman and her daughter allege the following: In the middle of the night, they are about to get out of their car in front of their house. They look out of the car's window and are terrified to notice a cousin of theirs standing outside the window and pointing what appears to be a pistol at them, with his finger on the trigger. They hear two clicks, but no gunshot occurs. The two alleged victims flee to a nearby alley. By the time they return to their car with a police officer, the cousin has disappeared.
The cousin is charged with possessing a gun as a felon, possessing an instrument of crime, assault, and reckless endangerment. A search of his residence turns up no gun. Nevertheless, at a bench trial he is found guilty of all charges and is sentenced to 26 years of prison (with the possibility of parole after 13 years). The appeals panel vacates the conviction of reckless endangerment since there is no proof that the gun was loaded, but affirms the other three convictions, and leaves the 26-year sentence untouched since the trial judge imposed no penalty for the reckless endangerment.
Don't forget that you can be convicted of serious charges in a "he said she said" case, on witness testimony alone, if the jury (or the judge in a bench trial) finds the witnesses more credible than you are "beyond a reasonable doubt"!
Mildly interesting court opinion:
While driving around in the middle of winter, a police officer observes a woman crying and yelling as she bangs on the front door of a house while wearing only a bathrobe and a pair of slippers. When the officer stops and inquires, the woman states that her romantic partner pushed her out of the house after an argument. The romantic partner exits the house and talks with the officer. The officer advises the woman of her state-law rights to seek a restraining order or press criminal charges for domestic violence, but the woman refuses to do so.
Several minutes later (after, among other things, using her car's computer to review the department's training on domestic violence), the officer returns to the house and talks again with the woman to advise her even further of her rights under state law. The woman still isn't interested in doing anything. However, since the police have been called to this house five times in total, the officer tells another officer to contact a detective for further investigation.
Later on the same day, the woman is found dead in the house. The romantic partner pleads guilty to manslaughter. The woman's estate sues the officer for negligence, arguing that the officer was obligated to arrest the romantic partner because there was evidence that the romantic partner had perpetrated domestic violence (pushing, which constitutes the crime of assault) against the woman. The officer moves for summary judgment, arguing that state law grants absolute immunity to liability for any failure to make an arrest. The trial judge denies the motion.
The appeals panel reverses. The law says that an officer is obligated to arrest an alleged perpetrator of domestic violence if the alleged victim "exhibits signs of injury". Here, the officer observed no such signs. And, in any event, that domestic-violence law does not override the separate law that grants absolute immunity to liability for failure to make an arrest, which applies in all cases where the officer acts in good faith. The woman's estate will not be getting any damages.
Not-so-fun fact: While both the federal government and the New Jersey government allow random members of the public to access all the documents in a case docket online, it appears that the Pennsylvania government does not! Rather, electronic access to Pennsylvania judicial documents is restricted to lawyers and case participants "for legal and security reasons", and members of the public must request documents manually by submitting a form to the court clerk.
Microsoft has a convenient list of controller manufacturers that are sufficiently high-quality to be trusted with the official Xbox license.
8BitDo
ByoWave
GameSir
Hyperkin
HyperX
MSI
Nacon
PDP (Turtle Beach)
PowerA
Razer
ROG (Asus)
SCUF
Surge
Thrustmaster
I have a Microsoft wireless Xbox360 controller I bought to use with emulators on my PC. I very rarely game so it sat around for a couple of years, and when I came to use it again the dongle was dead. The giant dongle. The giant dongle with the ~2m wire (why?!). I have a wifi dongle that is barely larger than the USB port it plugs into and that can handle bi-directional network speed data transmitted to the other end of the house, but a receiver for what amounts to little more than single key presses sent from the chair towards the screen has to be the size of a 240V wall plug for some reason.
Anyway after a little reading around I prised open the giant dongle's case and replaced the microscopic fuse component (why use such a small component when there's so much space?) and restored it to working order. Apparently this is a common fault. Imagine how many people have resorted to just binning it and buying another. Probably not many at the price they charge, the size they make it, and the frequency with which it breaks.
A 'blade'-style automotive fuse housing costs 50-75 cents at scale, and a glass vial-style fuse holder costs 30-50 cents, and the fuses themselves cost money on top of that. A single 0606 500ma fuse is cheaper at unit one digikey prices; at scale, they're basically free. They're probably only included at all because they're part of the USB standard -- overdraw could and does kill older motherboard USB ports, and rarely even entire motherboard USB controllers! -- not that it stops designers in other cases.
Ideal answer would involve a PTZ self-resetting fuse (though they're not great options for USB devices people are likely to leave plugged in indefinitely, and usually end up 5-10c), or a through-hole conventional fuse that could be fixed by anyone with a soldering iron and patience (though mixing SMD and through-hole parts gets stupid expensive, esp for boards with SMD on both sides). But it's not as nonsensical as it looks at first glance.
Appreciate your sharing some details of the manufacturing trade-offs. It's more the size of the thing that baffles me, although it did make it much easier to work on. Okay there's a large antenna in there, but that just raises the question of why the antenna is larger than the antenna in a wifi dongle? And why add a 2m cable for a wireless dongle? Anyone who needs the extension could use an extension lead.
I'd also be interested in any speculation for why the fuse failed. As you say I had left it plugged in when I wasn't using it (I don't anymore), and even though I now have 9 extra spare fuses on hand I'd prefer to avoid any need to repeat that type of soldering. Other than loose connections I've never had any other USB devices fail whether they're high draw like charging a battery or low draw like a USB stick, or a wired controller.
They badly overengineered it. Both these things significantly improved reliability, because all other things being even a larger antenna will have much better signal characteristics than a smaller one of the same general design, and being able to place a receiver on the front of a computer rather than the back had a pretty massive difference. Some of those decisions weren't even crazy for the time -- the 360 released in 2005, where a lot of people still owned big CRT and plasma TVs designed for play from 6+ ft and built into furniture, and even for desktop computers CRT hadn't completely gone the way of the dodo yet, and especially major vendors will still big fans of making PCs (even gaming PCs) cases big thick piles of steel
There's a lot of more subtle goofiness like this : it uses a custom wireless protocol that was a lot less funky than bluetooth of the time in order to reduce latency from retransmits, for example.
The fuse existing is mostly a problem downstream of how the USB standard evolved. Originally, there was a hard 500mA@5V limit per USB port in the standard, but this was held more in principle than the breach; even by 2000 you could find cheap USB chargers that would put out 2A@5V ish, gfl. Wireless dongles were only supposed to use around 400mA, but even slightly sketchy source (eg, powered usb hubs) could push enough voltage to get at the fuzzy edge, and even if the dongle could tolerate that wider range, the wires (and some sources) wouldn't be able to supply it permanently without damage. As time went on and those skuzzy chargers became more common, it was just accepted (and saved money) to use fuses a lot less or with a much higher tolerance than the official rating, under the presumption that devices which could be damaged by sourcing more power would have safeties against it.
Why it failed is unfortunately probably more boring. While there are some potential weird cases (Five Below-brand USB hubs, badly implemented cell phone chargers, putting it on top of a wireless pwoer charger), chances are pretty good it's just time and entropy. Fuses, especially older SMD fuses, are both temperature sensitive and relatively fragile devices, since they work by breaking. Over time, a 500 mA fuse will become a 470 mA and then 450 mA, until eventually the intended current passing through the device will bust it. That's worse on wireless devices, since the antenna is basically an inefficient hot plate, and worse still with big PCB antenna like that particular dongle made, and worse still on devices like this that were pretty close to the edge of their power envelope to start with. The new fuse, especially if you bought it recently, is almost certainly going to be much more reliable, even under the same conditions. If you want to be extra-safe, I'd unplug it when you've got long periods where it's not in use, but it's probably going to be good for another 10 years.
Right, I hadn't considered how old the xb360 is. My last console was a PS1, after that I tuned out of the console scene entirely and largely out of PC gaming too until I picked this up around 2017. And my wifi dongle benefits from over a decade of improvements to wifi tech in an era when almost everything including the kitchen sink gained wifi, so not a fair comparison. Makes sense.
That's reassuring about the new fuse. I did match the original spec (250mA) despite some commenters on the fix-it page I was following suggesting using a higher rating. Better safe albeit with another blown fuse than sorry with a fried receiver.
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