I know it was very big already:) Hard to really imagine those things as both the space and time aspects are so far from normal human perspectives. These time spans are just so vast... 15 million years... 4.6 billion years... 13 billion years... compared to our typical lifespan of maybe 80 years...
That period in the history of our universe may have been warm, but I imagine that, at the time, the average hospitable planetary surface would have been pretty dark. After all, if the Goldilocks zone is what you get without having a nearby star at all, then having a star nearby would make things too hot. So, any planetary surface suitable for life to evolve on would have been a necessarily dark place.
And I thought planets normally form in conjunction with stars, out of the disk of dust around them? Or are there different theories on the formation of planets, specifically in that period? Also while there were heavier elements (needed to form solid rocks, not just life), there wasn't very much of such material.
TFS talks about stars existing, and burning up (producing all kinds of heavier elements in the process) in just 3 mln years. If so, just 10 mln years after the Big Bang there would have been all kinds of elements present in the universe.
We can probably ignore the sun's background radiation: if an alien civilisation is advanced enough to see our planet next to the sun in visible light (reflection from the sun's rays) they can probably focus enough to pick up our radio signals (the sun's radio frequency waves will not be deflected by the Earth much if at all). The fact that there are radio signals coming from our planet should be the giveaway. No other planet in our solar system is producing such signals. And that's of course assuming this alien entity is using radio waves themselves for communication, and as such thinks it's a good idea to look for radio waves as a sign of the presence of intelligent life.
Same for this SETI, I don't think we'll ever be able to understand alien signals beyond the mere fact that they are out there.
The ones being late, that are almost always the drivers, not the public transport users.
Why? Because drivers get stuck in traffic, have to spend ages finding a parking place, then ages to walk from that parking place to their destination... With a little preparation (the same you have to do if you want to drive to an unknown destination - check your route, and figure out how long it will take) you can make it perfectly on time.
And four hours late never happens if you simply leave on time. That's about twice the longest distance available. Arriving late simply means you leave late. And if I'm in a hurry, I'll use taxi. Cheaper than cars even, And much faster than driving yourself as you don't have to park the thing!
I am a frequent public transport user. I don't even have a car.
Unless on a familiar route, I wouldn't be able to answer such a question. Instead I have an app for that. Hong Kong has over 500 bus routes, about 300 green minibus routes, numerous red minibus routes (of which no route information is available other than on their stops, if they even have formal stops), non-franchised buses, and on top of that the trains, trams, light rail and ferries.
Quite often to get home from an unfamiliar place I just find a bus stop, see which buses run there and where they go (looking for major interchanges on the route, e.g. "I need a cross-harbour route - any of the about 80 such routes will do"), and go from there. Works quite well.
That's about one in every 10,000 people on this planet.
And with every person on the list likely multiple people that share their name (having a similar name to someone on that list is enough to be affected!), possibly even the same name and date of birth, plus the fact that only a minor fraction of the world even has access to planes for economical reasons, I wouldn't be surprised if this list by now affects about one in every 1,000 airplane passengers that want to fly to the US, or within the US, in one way or another. And it's growing, rapidly.
By far most of these people haven't done anything wrong - save a few they probably have never even been convicted of a crime, in a US court or otherwise. They've just been flagged for primarily political reasons (resentment against the US), and put on that list.
Point 2) do the math, show them how much they could save, both with productivity lost in important projects, and most importantly, how much they could save shifting more mundane tasks with cheaper people.
Make sure to show them that there is more work than the department can handle now. Otherwise: out you go, in comes a cheaper replacement taking over everyone's mundane tasks, and your not so mundane tasks are taken over by the higher qualified people. After all, if you have work for five people, it doesn't make sense to hire six. It may make sense to replace one with someone with a different skill set, and re-organise the work.
GPS is not reliable or accurate enough for doorstep deliveries, will need some human controller.
The max. accuracy of normal GPS is about 1m, which is already a bit coarse for doorstep delivery and in urban areas receivers may get confused by reflections off of buildings. And even if GPS were accurate enough, you'd need to know really accurate coordinates of that doorstep, or that park bench where the person ordering the pizza is.
So certainly a human operator will have to do the last part of the trip.
What I can say is that the situation has deteriorated over the past decade. Mostly thanks to kowtowing to the US. Nowadays everyone has to carry ID all the time; that's since just over a decade (and the rule was implemented remarkably silently). You have to give fingerprints for your passport, officially to make it more secure (but does it? Last summer I didn't see fingerprint scanners at the border, for example).
Overall I think the Dutch do not fear their government (not like in more totalitarian states like the US, where everyone seems to fear their government), at least I don't exactly fear the government. It is chosen democratically, high degree of freedom of expression, and a free and strong press takes care of providing a proper counterbalance.
The police in general do not abuse their power. Though over the past ten years there are more and more laws that give the police opportunities to abuse power, like the right to conduct random searches of people and vehicles. Police for example can at any time without giving a reason cordon off a street and search anyone that happens to be in that area.
This AIVD thing is different, though. I don't consider AIVD to be government, they're more like police or judiciary: paid for but independent of the government. They have a mandate, to collect intelligence, and there are laws regulating what they can and can not do. Governments of all countries do this, it's normal part of police work too.
What happened here appears to be outside that mandate (it should be, imho, but I don't know what the law says or what exactly happened). If they want info from a forum, they can just register as user (may need some undercover work, whatever), and read all posts on that forum - like any user can. It's not OK to hack into a server, and download complete databases, that's going too far. In case of a known criminal link, it's defensible, but in this case there seems to be no such suspicion.
I've never seen my rabbits do it. I have seen my guinea pigs do so regularly (but only very fresh, straight from the anus). I've been told that this is indeed to give the food a second chance, as digesting plant matter is hard and there is a lot of nutritional value in their droppings.
Infant mortality is primarily down thanks to better hygiene at home, and vaccinations and other medical care.
And as you say yourself, it's been over the past centuries (well, mostly the last century). Electronic baby monitors only came when most infant mortality had been solved already.
Now of course the US is known to be behind the rest of the developed world in infant mortality rates... maybe on that side of the pond they can actually make a difference.
My kid used to love sweet corn, eating it big time.
The kernels would come out virtually unchanged. Really made me think you could simply pick them out, wash them off, and return them for a second round.
Never actually did that, though.
Re:What happens when the App crashes?
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Rigging Up Baby
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· Score: 1
For the first half year or so we also kept a paper records. Started that a few weeks after the baby was born.
It mostly served as a short term reminder for us. When I came home from work, I could instantly check on what happened. Latest feed, latest diaper change, sleep that day, those things are most important to know. Helped a lot in general care, knowing what happened during the day, without having to bother my wife with it, hoping she remembered well.
And for my wife to remember which side to start nursing first - for proper milk production you have to alternate which breast to nurse your baby.
The thing is, many people use Google because the others are simply less than useful. I've tried them occasionally, the search results are just not as useful as Google's.
The proposal I heard was to try to circumvent this by making the "canary" something more complicated -- imagine that, every day that you didn't receive a secret warrant, you went to some location in your city, took a photo, and posted it on your webpage. Could a judge then force you to keep doing so? Or even more extreme -- every day that you don't receive a warrant, you run a 10K. Could a judge force you to keep running? Or keep going to work? Or keep self-mutilating in some way? At what point are a person's basic liberties more important than the secrecy of the warrant?
In that case, one thing the judge can definitely not do, is put you in jail.
Not free but cheap. I just pre-paid my phone subscription for a year - just out of convenience - just over US$30, including more minutes than I ever use (700 minutes a month or so). Use pre-paid and it's even cheaper (effectively about USD 6.5 for half year - when the number expires - good enough for just receiving SMS)
This makes me consider to indeed get a number especially for that purpose. And use another number for my regular calls.
If you ever consider crossing the Atlantic, you will find out that there are no ships available that take you. Planes are the only option.
Or if you occasionally want to travel between say Europe and the Far East, you can choose either a plane, or a 14-day train trip (plus a lot of hassle for the various transit visa).
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I know it was very big already :) Hard to really imagine those things as both the space and time aspects are so far from normal human perspectives. These time spans are just so vast... 15 million years... 4.6 billion years... 13 billion years... compared to our typical lifespan of maybe 80 years...
That period in the history of our universe may have been warm, but I imagine that, at the time, the average hospitable planetary surface would have been pretty dark. After all, if the Goldilocks zone is what you get without having a nearby star at all, then having a star nearby would make things too hot. So, any planetary surface suitable for life to evolve on would have been a necessarily dark place.
And I thought planets normally form in conjunction with stars, out of the disk of dust around them? Or are there different theories on the formation of planets, specifically in that period? Also while there were heavier elements (needed to form solid rocks, not just life), there wasn't very much of such material.
TFS talks about stars existing, and burning up (producing all kinds of heavier elements in the process) in just 3 mln years. If so, just 10 mln years after the Big Bang there would have been all kinds of elements present in the universe.
We can probably ignore the sun's background radiation: if an alien civilisation is advanced enough to see our planet next to the sun in visible light (reflection from the sun's rays) they can probably focus enough to pick up our radio signals (the sun's radio frequency waves will not be deflected by the Earth much if at all). The fact that there are radio signals coming from our planet should be the giveaway. No other planet in our solar system is producing such signals. And that's of course assuming this alien entity is using radio waves themselves for communication, and as such thinks it's a good idea to look for radio waves as a sign of the presence of intelligent life.
Same for this SETI, I don't think we'll ever be able to understand alien signals beyond the mere fact that they are out there.
Public discussion has only just begun.
The ones being late, that are almost always the drivers, not the public transport users.
Why? Because drivers get stuck in traffic, have to spend ages finding a parking place, then ages to walk from that parking place to their destination... With a little preparation (the same you have to do if you want to drive to an unknown destination - check your route, and figure out how long it will take) you can make it perfectly on time.
And four hours late never happens if you simply leave on time. That's about twice the longest distance available. Arriving late simply means you leave late. And if I'm in a hurry, I'll use taxi. Cheaper than cars even, And much faster than driving yourself as you don't have to park the thing!
I am a frequent public transport user. I don't even have a car.
Unless on a familiar route, I wouldn't be able to answer such a question. Instead I have an app for that. Hong Kong has over 500 bus routes, about 300 green minibus routes, numerous red minibus routes (of which no route information is available other than on their stops, if they even have formal stops), non-franchised buses, and on top of that the trains, trams, light rail and ferries.
Quite often to get home from an unfamiliar place I just find a bus stop, see which buses run there and where they go (looking for major interchanges on the route, e.g. "I need a cross-harbour route - any of the about 80 such routes will do"), and go from there. Works quite well.
FTFS: about 700,000 people on that list.
That's about one in every 10,000 people on this planet.
And with every person on the list likely multiple people that share their name (having a similar name to someone on that list is enough to be affected!), possibly even the same name and date of birth, plus the fact that only a minor fraction of the world even has access to planes for economical reasons, I wouldn't be surprised if this list by now affects about one in every 1,000 airplane passengers that want to fly to the US, or within the US, in one way or another. And it's growing, rapidly.
By far most of these people haven't done anything wrong - save a few they probably have never even been convicted of a crime, in a US court or otherwise. They've just been flagged for primarily political reasons (resentment against the US), and put on that list.
Point 2) do the math, show them how much they could save, both with productivity lost in important projects, and most importantly, how much they could save shifting more mundane tasks with cheaper people.
Make sure to show them that there is more work than the department can handle now. Otherwise: out you go, in comes a cheaper replacement taking over everyone's mundane tasks, and your not so mundane tasks are taken over by the higher qualified people. After all, if you have work for five people, it doesn't make sense to hire six. It may make sense to replace one with someone with a different skill set, and re-organise the work.
GPS is not reliable or accurate enough for doorstep deliveries, will need some human controller.
The max. accuracy of normal GPS is about 1m, which is already a bit coarse for doorstep delivery and in urban areas receivers may get confused by reflections off of buildings. And even if GPS were accurate enough, you'd need to know really accurate coordinates of that doorstep, or that park bench where the person ordering the pizza is.
So certainly a human operator will have to do the last part of the trip.
And after taking control over that thing, what's stopping you from disconnecting the video stream as well?
I'm a Dutch, living abroad.
What I can say is that the situation has deteriorated over the past decade. Mostly thanks to kowtowing to the US. Nowadays everyone has to carry ID all the time; that's since just over a decade (and the rule was implemented remarkably silently). You have to give fingerprints for your passport, officially to make it more secure (but does it? Last summer I didn't see fingerprint scanners at the border, for example).
Overall I think the Dutch do not fear their government (not like in more totalitarian states like the US, where everyone seems to fear their government), at least I don't exactly fear the government. It is chosen democratically, high degree of freedom of expression, and a free and strong press takes care of providing a proper counterbalance.
The police in general do not abuse their power. Though over the past ten years there are more and more laws that give the police opportunities to abuse power, like the right to conduct random searches of people and vehicles. Police for example can at any time without giving a reason cordon off a street and search anyone that happens to be in that area.
This AIVD thing is different, though. I don't consider AIVD to be government, they're more like police or judiciary: paid for but independent of the government. They have a mandate, to collect intelligence, and there are laws regulating what they can and can not do. Governments of all countries do this, it's normal part of police work too.
What happened here appears to be outside that mandate (it should be, imho, but I don't know what the law says or what exactly happened). If they want info from a forum, they can just register as user (may need some undercover work, whatever), and read all posts on that forum - like any user can. It's not OK to hack into a server, and download complete databases, that's going too far. In case of a known criminal link, it's defensible, but in this case there seems to be no such suspicion.
I've never seen my rabbits do it. I have seen my guinea pigs do so regularly (but only very fresh, straight from the anus). I've been told that this is indeed to give the food a second chance, as digesting plant matter is hard and there is a lot of nutritional value in their droppings.
Because that's more money for the developers of course, what were you thinking?
Infant mortality is primarily down thanks to better hygiene at home, and vaccinations and other medical care.
And as you say yourself, it's been over the past centuries (well, mostly the last century). Electronic baby monitors only came when most infant mortality had been solved already.
Now of course the US is known to be behind the rest of the developed world in infant mortality rates... maybe on that side of the pond they can actually make a difference.
My kid used to love sweet corn, eating it big time.
The kernels would come out virtually unchanged. Really made me think you could simply pick them out, wash them off, and return them for a second round.
Never actually did that, though.
For the first half year or so we also kept a paper records. Started that a few weeks after the baby was born.
It mostly served as a short term reminder for us. When I came home from work, I could instantly check on what happened. Latest feed, latest diaper change, sleep that day, those things are most important to know. Helped a lot in general care, knowing what happened during the day, without having to bother my wife with it, hoping she remembered well.
And for my wife to remember which side to start nursing first - for proper milk production you have to alternate which breast to nurse your baby.
The thing is, many people use Google because the others are simply less than useful. I've tried them occasionally, the search results are just not as useful as Google's.
Would that be "put them in jail until they comply"?
Oh, wait... might cause an issue here...
It has to be done every day. When you get a warrant, I suppose you have an option to object. Even delaying by a day or two would be enough.
Google is too big to fail.
And I'm afraid that's indeed not a joke - Google is how people find stuff on the Internet. Without it, the Internet uses most of it's value.
And no, also-runs like Bing and Yahoo will not be able to pick up the slack.
The proposal I heard was to try to circumvent this by making the "canary" something more complicated -- imagine that, every day that you didn't receive a secret warrant, you went to some location in your city, took a photo, and posted it on your webpage. Could a judge then force you to keep doing so? Or even more extreme -- every day that you don't receive a warrant, you run a 10K. Could a judge force you to keep running? Or keep going to work? Or keep self-mutilating in some way? At what point are a person's basic liberties more important than the secrecy of the warrant?
In that case, one thing the judge can definitely not do, is put you in jail.
Not free but cheap. I just pre-paid my phone subscription for a year - just out of convenience - just over US$30, including more minutes than I ever use (700 minutes a month or so). Use pre-paid and it's even cheaper (effectively about USD 6.5 for half year - when the number expires - good enough for just receiving SMS)
This makes me consider to indeed get a number especially for that purpose. And use another number for my regular calls.
That is old. Try this again, and I may be impressed.
You obviously don't make any long distance trips.
If you ever consider crossing the Atlantic, you will find out that there are no ships available that take you. Planes are the only option.
Or if you occasionally want to travel between say Europe and the Far East, you can choose either a plane, or a 14-day train trip (plus a lot of hassle for the various transit visa).