brianorca

In AC, diodes work half the time, every 1/60 second. The “good” LEDs will have circuitry to fully rectify the AC into DC, drop the voltage properly, and smooth the peaks and valleys, so they will be continuously lit. So the cheap LED Christmas lights might have a slight flicker, and the good ones are steady. (Or get fancy with chasing colors, etc.)

All of that happens inside each of the “bulb” enclosures, or sometimes in a box at one end, so it technically doesn’t matter which end they are getting electricity from, since the socket at the far end is still just connected in parallel to the plug at the near end. (Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to link them together.)

It’s just a really bad dangerous idea to reverse them.

It’s also checking your other traffic. (Since Cloudflare handles traffic for so many companies.) Are you visiting other sites in a realistic fashion, or are you doing 99% of your traffic trying to do one thing over and over.

Others mention the mouse motion, and monitoring your other traffic to similar sites. When it shows the checkbox, it has already determined you are probably human. If you had suspicious activity, they will give you more advanced tests instead of just a checkbox.

It would still work. But it is VERY dangerous. 1. The far end of the light string will now have exposed metal prongs that are energized at 120v, which can be fatal. 2. If the other end gets plugged into a socket, there is a 50% chance it will be a different circuit on a different phase, which can create a 240v direct short, across a wire that has no properly sized circuit breaker. 3. Using it to plug a generator into your house during a power outage can kill electrical workers trying to fix the outage if you fail to open your circuit breakers.

If someone can’t make the own cord, what’s the chance they know how vital it is to flip the breaker?

Two things: 1: there’s a high chance you do cross live and neutral, or even live and live on different phases. 2: using it to plug in a generator to power your house can kill electrical workers who are trying to restore a power outage. (If you fail to open your circuit breaker.)

It also falls off too easily. My favorite for this use case is black Gorilla tape. Like duct tape but thicker.

My guess is that’s how high it needs to be for the sewer to flow in the right direction.

This is because NSA has two roles: eavesdropping on foreign adversaries, and protecting our internal systems from adversaries. Under the first role, they might introduce an exploit known only to themselves. Under the second, they help protect US systems from exploits known to others.

Spoilers in Connect are not readable when I click them. (White on white) Unless I first select the post so the background in grey.

Because most of what you look at in real life is mundane. But go find a nice sunset or a green forest, and you can appreciate it. When you see a scene in HD or 3D on the screen, there is a heavy selection bias to show you pleasant scenes that most people seldom see in real life. If it was super 4k and 3D, but it was just your same living room you see every day, it would be uninteresting. But the same camera showing a living room in a 10 million dollar house would be interesting. (And the natural views outside even more so, most likely.)

This actually exists, but for a different operating system. The AS400 (aka iSeries) had a command line where programs had a standard way to specify parameters, so that pressing a prompt key (F4) would allow you to build the proper command line by filling a form. I do miss that, pity it doesn’t exist for Linux.

You can get Mint on a “Live” USB flash drive, so you can boot it up and see if it handles all your hardware before you install anything.

If someone is paying you to write code, they have some say in the contract about how it is licensed. You could be upfront about only doing GPL, and they could be upfront about saying no. But if you try to do it after the fact, that’s a violation of the contract.

Canines have five digits on their front paws, just like we do. Their “dew claw” is equivalent to our thumb, so the outside digit is still a pinky digit.

Sounds like sleep. Hibernate is when it turns completely off, such that you can leave it unplugged for a weekend and still have battery when it pops you back into your session. It takes longer to save and restore the session than sleep does.

I remember seeing somebody back in the 90’s, who apparently had extreme visual problems, wearing a contact lens that looked like a tiny telescope sticking out. It looked a lot less comfortable than this image though.

Seems like a Hancock move.

50 meters would assume a flat surface of the water, not the gentle slope of a beach.

Especially at the time of this movie, can you imagine the computer time to re-render this scene? Weeks, at least.