Kind of like the humble brag "Ugh I just spilled wine on my Harvard admission letter!", Uber is bringing attention to this to let more people know about this great new way to use Uber, while at the same time updating their completely unenforceable community guidelines to "discourage it" so if someone complains about getting hit on on a ride, they can say "It's not our fault... he wasn't supposed to do that, it's right there in the community guidelines"
Because a bot buying stock doesn't prevent you from buying it as well?
Sure it does -- in the same way.
Bots buying tickets buy them to sell them at a higher price. Bots buying stocks buy them to sell them at a higher price. If you're unable or unwilling to pay that price, then you can't buy the ticket/stock.
On the flip side, if Climate Change is your religion, and yet you live in low-lying coast land, you're kind of an idiot at this point. If you Believe, then topographical maps are free and you should be taking care of yourself and your family - live and work where it will remain safe, and make the move now, not after everything goes crazy. Heck, buy a bunch of safe property while you're at it, great money to be made when the waters rise!
I believe in Climate Change and the resulting sea level rise. I live about 10 feet above MSL (and about 2 miles away from the water) and my region recently voted to tax ourselves to help pay for mitigations against that rise.
But instead of paying those taxes, I'd rather pay a bit more in goods and services to cover the costs of reducing carbon emissions to reduce the rate of global warming and slow the sea level rise.
OP here, knowing the usual subjects would try and known be down a peg or two for throwing in the towel in trying to enjoy a tech site for nerds when it's nothing but a flood of butthurt liberal editors smearing our president every chance they get with propaganda I decided it deserves one final message.
You haven't said what you think this so called "propaganda" is -- the headline and summary are factual and don't even say that opposition to net neutrality is "bad", they just pointed out that the weakening of net neutrality policies is consumer un-friendly and will be a boost to large ISP's. That's hardly a controversial opinion and many conservatives think it's a good thing. This same article could be posted on a conservative news site and it would be applauded as a step in the right direction.
If you take offense at your own political party's policies, then maybe you're supporting the wrong party?
With the sensational leftist tabloid boogeyman headlines and clickbait articles, this isn't the site for me anymore. You've jumped the shark/. kindly go fuckoff and join all the other extremist sites while I go search for tech news that matters.
What part of "Trump Appoints Third Net Neutrality Critic To FCC Advisory Team" is not completely factual? You may not like the facts but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be reported.
It is not a bargain at all. Also that price is construction only, and fails to include all owner's costs in development, not to mention the capacity factor is far below conventional power plants.
Well yeah, it's a PV Solar plant of course it has a lower capacity factor than a conventional plant, you might as well just say "It's dark at night"
But given this is India, expecting them to build a modern combined cycle plant without natural gas infrastructure, or nuclear power without experience is too much.
You mean like the Sugen combined-cycle power plant in Gujarat, India? Or one of the 22 nuclear reactors in operation at seven sites that generate about 25% of India's electricity?
Even beyond that, systems that can be so completely broken are typically fragile systems, systems that break in ordinary use. As an example, here's a standard SQL injection, which was present all through a system I worked on recently:
SET lastname='$FORM_LASTNAME'
Sure that can be leveraged by an attacker, but what happens when the user's last name is O'Reilly? O'Reilly can't sign up for the service.
That example is typical. Code that's easily hacked is fragile, poor quality code in general, in most cases. Fixing security isn't JUST fixing security. Code that can't be broken is code that doesn't break.
Even worse, what if his name was "Robert'); DROP TABLE Students; --"?
Actually you're wrong. It's not the computer's fault. It's just doing what that thing between the keyboard and the chair told it to do. You need to train people how to not open email attachments. I'm frankly shocked idiots continue to fall for this shit.
Rather than making it more difficult for humans to use computers, why isn't the right thing to do: Train computers to stop being infected by someone opening attachments? Sandboxes have been around for years, and with hardware VM support, sandboxes can be entirely virtualized with little effect on performance.
I send and receive documents and spreadsheets with external users all the time - are you saying that I should just go back to 1990 era plain text emails because computers can't be trusted?
Amazon could solve this issue by only allowing reviews from people who have actually purchased the product on Amazon.
Sure, this would remove the ability to review products that you bought elsewhere, but I'm sure that's not a large percentage of reviews.
They could easily have it both ways - provide a checkbox to show only show reviews (and calculate the average score) for verified purchases.
Though this wouldn't get rid of the problem entirely -- companies that are willing to give away product in exchange reviews will just reimburse reviewers for the purchase price of the product, so they'll come up in the "Verified purchase" section.
Yes... let's keep kicking those environmental issues down the road. Fourteen years should give plenty of opportunity to blame some other government when this (and many other distant promises) don't actually happen...
If the the new Administration does ignore Global Warming (and indeed, rolls back the paltry reductions that have already been put into place), I wonder if that opens up the USA to huge reparation payments down the road when other countries are forced to make huge expenditures due to the climate change?
I can see the synergy between elderly people and IoT devices -- the elderly rarely use the internet, so so the IoT devices can use that otherwise idle bandwidth to run DoS attacks -- it's a win-win for everyone!
sadly, it's still a dream. As sending a note through an e-mail takes so much more time than handing over a piece of paper to someone, finding the information on a note that you've written is much easier than going through hundreds of e-mails, having connectivity issues, hardware issues and battery issues... a pen and paper is "cheap". there is too many things that are more easily done with pen and paper or printed on a piece of paper that we still have many years ahead of us that we will still retain the ability to use our writing skills, for the better or worse...
Finding written notices is only easier if it was relatively recent and you know roughly where to look -- just try finding that note you wrote down in a conversation with Bob 6 months ago. Paging through 100 pages of handwritten notes is going to take longer than typing "from:bob after:2016/4/17 before:2016/5/16 subject:widgets"
And if you're at home but left your notepad at work (or vice versa), then you're not going to be able to find it at all.
That said, I find I retain more information when I take notes on paper than when I type them. I still tend to take meeting notes by computer (since I often want to check calendars, etc), but if I'm attending a seminar or other session where I want to learn and retain new information, I take notes on paper. I rarely refer to the notes, but taking the notes helps me retain information.
They should manufacture phones in the USA and China, price them accordingly and sell them with a big American flag on the USA phones. I'm sure everyone in the red states will snap up the higher priced American phones and then manufacturing jobs will all roll back to the USA.
I've never bought a computer that I didn't upgrade.
I don't doubt that there are lots of people like you that really do want to upgrade their laptop. Unfortunately for people like you, there aren't a lot of you out there, and the market is probably going to shift toward non-upgradable laptops. Already the new macbook has outsold all competitors
And if providing upgradable laptops provides no real competitive advantage while also being a disadvantage - people like you can buy a small laptop now and upgrade it later when components are cheaper... so the manufacturer makes less money from the sale - upgradable laptops will become less and less common.
When I bought my last laptop a few years ago, I made sure to get one with plenty of upgrade potential -- extra drive bay, memory slot, etc. Since then, I've upgraded it exactly zero times, and still see no need to upgrade it.
I used to feel the same about buying a phone without a replaceable battery or SD card slot.... then I bought my first Nexus with neither.... I've been very happy with my choice and haven't missed the upgradability.
I'd imagine that a lot of people are like me -- they like the idea of having the option to upgrade, but don't actually *need* to upgrade so a non-upgradable laptop isn't all that unattractive.
Only the stupid terrorists buy books, the smart ones get the USA to train them directly.. And I assume they get free study guys with the training, no need to buy anything on Amazon.
Yeah, I can only guess that maybe it's a global setting, so you don't have to remember or worry about what quality a video is playing at when you're watching on your phone. Still, doesn't seem like much of a big deal.
The Netflix app (at least on Android) has settings in the Mobile app:
Wifi only
Low (4 hours/GB)
Medium (2 hours/GB)
High (1 hour/GB)
Unlmited (not recommended without unlimited data plan)
While it's fun to talk about, a secession will never happen. Despite Trump's blustering, and even with republican senate and house control, it's exceptionally hard to make any broad governmental changes. Though I am a little worried about the Supreme Court.
It's not the republican senate that is the problem, it is the democrat senate. The republican house would love for california to leave. The republican house plus the democrats from California could easily get the 2/3s needed to start the process. The problem there is that california only has 2 votes in the senate and there are likely a lot of democrats in the small eastern states that would not want a large portion of their liberal voting block to leave.
Ahh, sorry, I wasn't clear in that last comment -- I didn't mean I was worried that the US Government wouldn't let California secede (well, they wouldn't), but rather I meant that despite the doom and gloom, Trump is not going to destroy the country, he doesn't have that much power. So California would have no reason to secede.
1. Yes they do owe that money, thus why they ought to pay it upon leaving.
Sure, I didn't say they shouldn't pay, but California would just sell bonds to cover it, so there's no real difference to CA residents, they still have the same debt they're just paying it through different bonds. The USA itself may be the largest purchaser of the bonds.
2. The fed gives 32.4% more than what the state tax currently is in California. In order to make up for that shortfall, the state tax would need to increase by the same amount.
But that would be offset by Californians owing no federal tax -- and since California is a net contributor of Federal tax, they'd see a reduction in tax rate. Even moreso because California wouldn't need to fund a global military, they need only fund local defense, so much of the military spending the budget would go away.
3. Look at how well that childish attitude worked out for Georgia, Syria, Turkey, all of central America. Do you really think Trump would push to aid people that left the nation because of him?
This is elementary math and reasoning. Do they have elementary schools where you live?
None of those countries border the USA --- the USA is not going to let a foreign power take over California, regardless of whether California is part of the USA or not because that would give that foreign power a foothold in continental USA. Even ignoring the geography issue, California would be one of the USA's top trading partners, so it's in the USA's economic best interest to keep California from being taken over by an aggressor. Besides, the secession negotiations would include a mutual defense pact, since it would be in both countries best interests.
While it's fun to talk about, a secession will never happen. Despite Trump's blustering, and even with republican senate and house control, it's exceptionally hard to make any broad governmental changes. Though I am a little worried about the Supreme Court.
If they do secede they need to pay relocation fees for everyone who wants to leave. I demand relocation fees.
One more, one more thing.. CA makes a lot of money because it's a port state with refineries and military bases. All that stuff goes with caexit too, so the economy no longer looks so good.
Why would refineries go? California will still have ports and will still refine crude into finished products that other states will be happy to buy. (though most of the fuel refined in California stays in California, so even if other states wouldn't buy California refined fuel, it wouldn't make a huge difference)
Likewise, the USA would continue to run military bases in California -- they aren't going to give up a huge Naval port, as well as the other large bases that all branches of the military have in California. They'd either pay for the land, or more likely, strike a deal to keep the bases in return for military protection of California.
A Calexit would never happen, but the economy would keep running mostly as it has... sure some states may choose to limit their trade with the state due to ideological reasons, practicality will win -- no one is going to give up their iPhone because it's designed in California. The iPhone is already made in China, an oppressive communist country that few would call a USA ally, yet few people want to give up cheap Chinese goods just to make a point.
How about Wow, a double win! I'm all for it, as long as they take their share of the national debt with them.
At 17.8 Trillion dollars and 37 million Californians, that would only be about $54,000 per person. After they pay for that, then increase their State taxes by 32.4% to make up for what the fed adds to their general revenue, let alone others like military or border security and let them leave.
I wonder how long a country would last where guns are banned, everything causes cancer, and safe spaces become a way of life when Uncle Sam won't back them up.
The national of $17T divided by 300M Americans means that the national debt is *already* $54,000 per person, Californians (and residents of all states) *already* owe that money, so seceding from the USA wouldn't add to that burden.
Since California wouldn't need to extend its military presence overseas, military costs would be a fraction of what the USA spends now.
make up for what the fed adds to their general revenue
Why do you think the federal government pays more to California in benefits than California pays in taxes? Hint: they don't -- it's mostly the red states that receive more federal money than they pay in taxes.
when Uncle Sam won't back them up.
Uncle Sam has no choice - if an aggressor tried to occupy California, the USA would have to protect them, or that aggressor would be right at their doorstep.
Yeah, this. OK so I know it's 8AM on the US west coast where my daughter lives, and in Japan where my MIL lives, and in the Czech Republic where my parents are. That still doesn't tell me a damn thing about what time it is over there - can I call them? Are they home? At work?
Call them and ask. "Are you asleep?"
That's what my parents did when I lived halfway across the world. No amount of sending them timezone charts would get them to understand that when it's noon for them, it's 2am for me. I finally had to put a silent ringtone on their number so they'd stop waking me up.
Slashdot Mirror
You will pay. You will not complain. You have no rights against the all-powerful CORPORATION. Unless you incorporate yourself.
I'm not free to cut the cord?
...or switch to Satellite TV (which I've done for *years* now... )
If it takes years to switch to Satellite TV, who would wait that long?
Kind of like the humble brag "Ugh I just spilled wine on my Harvard admission letter!", Uber is bringing attention to this to let more people know about this great new way to use Uber, while at the same time updating their completely unenforceable community guidelines to "discourage it" so if someone complains about getting hit on on a ride, they can say "It's not our fault... he wasn't supposed to do that, it's right there in the community guidelines"
Because a bot buying stock doesn't prevent you from buying it as well?
Sure it does -- in the same way.
Bots buying tickets buy them to sell them at a higher price. Bots buying stocks buy them to sell them at a higher price. If you're unable or unwilling to pay that price, then you can't buy the ticket/stock.
On the flip side, if Climate Change is your religion, and yet you live in low-lying coast land, you're kind of an idiot at this point. If you Believe, then topographical maps are free and you should be taking care of yourself and your family - live and work where it will remain safe, and make the move now, not after everything goes crazy. Heck, buy a bunch of safe property while you're at it, great money to be made when the waters rise!
I believe in Climate Change and the resulting sea level rise. I live about 10 feet above MSL (and about 2 miles away from the water) and my region recently voted to tax ourselves to help pay for mitigations against that rise.
But instead of paying those taxes, I'd rather pay a bit more in goods and services to cover the costs of reducing carbon emissions to reduce the rate of global warming and slow the sea level rise.
OP here, knowing the usual subjects would try and known be down a peg or two for throwing in the towel in trying to enjoy a tech site for nerds when it's nothing but a flood of butthurt liberal editors smearing our president every chance they get with propaganda I decided it deserves one final message.
You haven't said what you think this so called "propaganda" is -- the headline and summary are factual and don't even say that opposition to net neutrality is "bad", they just pointed out that the weakening of net neutrality policies is consumer un-friendly and will be a boost to large ISP's. That's hardly a controversial opinion and many conservatives think it's a good thing. This same article could be posted on a conservative news site and it would be applauded as a step in the right direction.
If you take offense at your own political party's policies, then maybe you're supporting the wrong party?
With the sensational leftist tabloid boogeyman headlines and clickbait articles, this isn't the site for me anymore. You've jumped the shark /. kindly go fuckoff and join all the other extremist sites while I go search for tech news that matters.
What part of "Trump Appoints Third Net Neutrality Critic To FCC Advisory Team" is not completely factual? You may not like the facts but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be reported.
It is not a bargain at all. Also that price is construction only, and fails to include all owner's costs in development, not to mention the capacity factor is far below conventional power plants.
Well yeah, it's a PV Solar plant of course it has a lower capacity factor than a conventional plant, you might as well just say "It's dark at night"
But given this is India, expecting them to build a modern combined cycle plant without natural gas infrastructure, or nuclear power without experience is too much.
You mean like the Sugen combined-cycle power plant in Gujarat, India? Or one of the 22 nuclear reactors in operation at seven sites that generate about 25% of India's electricity?
Even beyond that, systems that can be so completely broken are typically fragile systems, systems that break in ordinary use. As an example, here's a standard SQL injection, which was present all through a system I worked on recently:
SET lastname='$FORM_LASTNAME'
Sure that can be leveraged by an attacker, but what happens when the user's last name is O'Reilly? O'Reilly can't sign up for the service.
That example is typical. Code that's easily hacked is fragile, poor quality code in general, in most cases. Fixing security isn't JUST fixing security. Code that can't be broken is code that doesn't break.
Even worse, what if his name was "Robert'); DROP TABLE Students; --"?
It's a goddam computer!
Actually you're wrong. It's not the computer's fault. It's just doing what that thing between the keyboard and the chair told it to do. You need to train people how to not open email attachments. I'm frankly shocked idiots continue to fall for this shit.
Rather than making it more difficult for humans to use computers, why isn't the right thing to do: Train computers to stop being infected by someone opening attachments? Sandboxes have been around for years, and with hardware VM support, sandboxes can be entirely virtualized with little effect on performance.
I send and receive documents and spreadsheets with external users all the time - are you saying that I should just go back to 1990 era plain text emails because computers can't be trusted?
Amazon could solve this issue by only allowing reviews from people who have actually purchased the product on Amazon.
Sure, this would remove the ability to review products that you bought elsewhere, but I'm sure that's not a large percentage of reviews.
They could easily have it both ways - provide a checkbox to show only show reviews (and calculate the average score) for verified purchases.
Though this wouldn't get rid of the problem entirely -- companies that are willing to give away product in exchange reviews will just reimburse reviewers for the purchase price of the product, so they'll come up in the "Verified purchase" section.
Yes ... let's keep kicking those environmental issues down the road. Fourteen years should give plenty of opportunity to blame some other government when this (and many other distant promises) don't actually happen ...
If the the new Administration does ignore Global Warming (and indeed, rolls back the paltry reductions that have already been put into place), I wonder if that opens up the USA to huge reparation payments down the road when other countries are forced to make huge expenditures due to the climate change?
I can see the synergy between elderly people and IoT devices -- the elderly rarely use the internet, so so the IoT devices can use that otherwise idle bandwidth to run DoS attacks -- it's a win-win for everyone!
sadly, it's still a dream. As sending a note through an e-mail takes so much more time than handing over a piece of paper to someone, finding the information on a note that you've written is much easier than going through hundreds of e-mails, having connectivity issues, hardware issues and battery issues... a pen and paper is "cheap". there is too many things that are more easily done with pen and paper or printed on a piece of paper that we still have many years ahead of us that we will still retain the ability to use our writing skills, for the better or worse...
Finding written notices is only easier if it was relatively recent and you know roughly where to look -- just try finding that note you wrote down in a conversation with Bob 6 months ago. Paging through 100 pages of handwritten notes is going to take longer than typing "from:bob after:2016/4/17 before:2016/5/16 subject:widgets"
And if you're at home but left your notepad at work (or vice versa), then you're not going to be able to find it at all.
That said, I find I retain more information when I take notes on paper than when I type them. I still tend to take meeting notes by computer (since I often want to check calendars, etc), but if I'm attending a seminar or other session where I want to learn and retain new information, I take notes on paper. I rarely refer to the notes, but taking the notes helps me retain information.
They should manufacture phones in the USA and China, price them accordingly and sell them with a big American flag on the USA phones. I'm sure everyone in the red states will snap up the higher priced American phones and then manufacturing jobs will all roll back to the USA.
I've never bought a computer that I didn't upgrade.
I don't doubt that there are lots of people like you that really do want to upgrade their laptop. Unfortunately for people like you, there aren't a lot of you out there, and the market is probably going to shift toward non-upgradable laptops. Already the new macbook has outsold all competitors
And if providing upgradable laptops provides no real competitive advantage while also being a disadvantage - people like you can buy a small laptop now and upgrade it later when components are cheaper... so the manufacturer makes less money from the sale - upgradable laptops will become less and less common.
China has obviously suffered under the "Great firewall" that walls them off most of the internet.
Otherwise they would have learned by now: "Don't feed the trolls".
Buy or don't buy. There is no upgrade.
When I bought my last laptop a few years ago, I made sure to get one with plenty of upgrade potential -- extra drive bay, memory slot, etc. Since then, I've upgraded it exactly zero times, and still see no need to upgrade it.
I used to feel the same about buying a phone without a replaceable battery or SD card slot.... then I bought my first Nexus with neither.... I've been very happy with my choice and haven't missed the upgradability.
I'd imagine that a lot of people are like me -- they like the idea of having the option to upgrade, but don't actually *need* to upgrade so a non-upgradable laptop isn't all that unattractive.
Only the stupid terrorists buy books, the smart ones get the USA to train them directly.. And I assume they get free study guys with the training, no need to buy anything on Amazon.
Yeah, I can only guess that maybe it's a global setting, so you don't have to remember or worry about what quality a video is playing at when you're watching on your phone. Still, doesn't seem like much of a big deal.
The Netflix app (at least on Android) has settings in the Mobile app:
While it's fun to talk about, a secession will never happen. Despite Trump's blustering, and even with republican senate and house control, it's exceptionally hard to make any broad governmental changes. Though I am a little worried about the Supreme Court.
It's not the republican senate that is the problem, it is the democrat senate. The republican house would love for california to leave. The republican house plus the democrats from California could easily get the 2/3s needed to start the process. The problem there is that california only has 2 votes in the senate and there are likely a lot of democrats in the small eastern states that would not want a large portion of their liberal voting block to leave.
Ahh, sorry, I wasn't clear in that last comment -- I didn't mean I was worried that the US Government wouldn't let California secede (well, they wouldn't), but rather I meant that despite the doom and gloom, Trump is not going to destroy the country, he doesn't have that much power. So California would have no reason to secede.
1. Yes they do owe that money, thus why they ought to pay it upon leaving.
Sure, I didn't say they shouldn't pay, but California would just sell bonds to cover it, so there's no real difference to CA residents, they still have the same debt they're just paying it through different bonds. The USA itself may be the largest purchaser of the bonds.
2. The fed gives 32.4% more than what the state tax currently is in California. In order to make up for that shortfall, the state tax would need to increase by the same amount.
But that would be offset by Californians owing no federal tax -- and since California is a net contributor of Federal tax, they'd see a reduction in tax rate. Even moreso because California wouldn't need to fund a global military, they need only fund local defense, so much of the military spending the budget would go away.
3. Look at how well that childish attitude worked out for Georgia, Syria, Turkey, all of central America. Do you really think Trump would push to aid people that left the nation because of him?
This is elementary math and reasoning. Do they have elementary schools where you live?
None of those countries border the USA --- the USA is not going to let a foreign power take over California, regardless of whether California is part of the USA or not because that would give that foreign power a foothold in continental USA. Even ignoring the geography issue, California would be one of the USA's top trading partners, so it's in the USA's economic best interest to keep California from being taken over by an aggressor. Besides, the secession negotiations would include a mutual defense pact, since it would be in both countries best interests.
While it's fun to talk about, a secession will never happen. Despite Trump's blustering, and even with republican senate and house control, it's exceptionally hard to make any broad governmental changes. Though I am a little worried about the Supreme Court.
I'm ok with them leaving. Their cities are disgusting and riddled with homeless, construction, and traffic.
Yeah, who wants to live in a city where there are many construction projects -- cities should remain stagnant and never change.
If they do secede they need to pay relocation fees for everyone who wants to leave. I demand relocation fees.
One more, one more thing.. CA makes a lot of money because it's a port state with refineries and military bases. All that stuff goes with caexit too, so the economy no longer looks so good.
Why would refineries go? California will still have ports and will still refine crude into finished products that other states will be happy to buy. (though most of the fuel refined in California stays in California, so even if other states wouldn't buy California refined fuel, it wouldn't make a huge difference)
Likewise, the USA would continue to run military bases in California -- they aren't going to give up a huge Naval port, as well as the other large bases that all branches of the military have in California. They'd either pay for the land, or more likely, strike a deal to keep the bases in return for military protection of California.
A Calexit would never happen, but the economy would keep running mostly as it has... sure some states may choose to limit their trade with the state due to ideological reasons, practicality will win -- no one is going to give up their iPhone because it's designed in California. The iPhone is already made in China, an oppressive communist country that few would call a USA ally, yet few people want to give up cheap Chinese goods just to make a point.
How about Wow, a double win! I'm all for it, as long as they take their share of the national debt with them.
At 17.8 Trillion dollars and 37 million Californians, that would only be about $54,000 per person. After they pay for that, then increase their State taxes by 32.4% to make up for what the fed adds to their general revenue, let alone others like military or border security and let them leave.
I wonder how long a country would last where guns are banned, everything causes cancer, and safe spaces become a way of life when Uncle Sam won't back them up.
The national of $17T divided by 300M Americans means that the national debt is *already* $54,000 per person, Californians (and residents of all states) *already* owe that money, so seceding from the USA wouldn't add to that burden.
Since California wouldn't need to extend its military presence overseas, military costs would be a fraction of what the USA spends now.
make up for what the fed adds to their general revenue
Why do you think the federal government pays more to California in benefits than California pays in taxes? Hint: they don't -- it's mostly the red states that receive more federal money than they pay in taxes.
when Uncle Sam won't back them up.
Uncle Sam has no choice - if an aggressor tried to occupy California, the USA would have to protect them, or that aggressor would be right at their doorstep.
Yeah, this. OK so I know it's 8AM on the US west coast where my daughter lives, and in Japan where my MIL lives, and in the Czech Republic where my parents are. That still doesn't tell me a damn thing about what time it is over there - can I call them? Are they home? At work?
Call them and ask.
"Are you asleep?"
That's what my parents did when I lived halfway across the world. No amount of sending them timezone charts would get them to understand that when it's noon for them, it's 2am for me. I finally had to put a silent ringtone on their number so they'd stop waking me up.