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.)

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

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.)

I’m not sure there is any more the hermit kingdom can be sanctioned, other than getting Russia and China to actually honor the existing sanctions. (Ha!)

Ukraine doesn’t want to target Moscow. They are not like Russia, they go after actual military targets, not civilians. They have been using their homebuilt drones for long enough inside Russia to show their priorities.

TBH, all connected cars have security concerns, but cars built by an opposing superpower would have National Security concerns, too. The two concerns are related, but separate.

The whole point of a public key is it can be publicized. Use any public publishing method, the more public the better.

We knew the deal was changed, but not by who. (As far as I know.)

Replace NT in this list with ME and you have all the consumer versions. NT versions 3.5 and 4 were the business versions in parallel with 95, 98, and ME.

Hair is hair. At least they didn’t use wall paint.

Also note that before this switch, years were often designated in relation to the founding of a city or by the start of a ruler’s reign. There were always ordinal numbers, so the first year of a reign would be year 1, and there was never a zero, because it was year X of a previous reign.

Air support.

If enough people are using this new system, Russia could easily pivot to target it as well. Jamming is not inherently hard, especially if a nation is attempting it.

Jamming in the US will bring the FCC down your throat. The stronger the signal, the faster they will show up. Russia transmitting a jamming signal from Russia doesn’t have to worry about such things. A jamming device is not hard to find, but on sovereign soil it’s still untouchable short of war.

In what world would Putin allow anything other that a yes-man be his official backup?