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GMT is *not* a reference time zone. It used to be decades ago, but since GMT is subject to DST like the rest of Europe, it no longer serves that purpose.

Had you spent 30 seconds looking for a source to cite for this, you would have discovered you're simply wrong. Here are the actual facts, right from the horse's mouth:

Greenwich Mean Time or GMT is the clock time at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London. It is the same all year round and is not affected by Summer Time or Daylight Saving Time .
* * *
GMT is also a time zone, used by the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK) when Daylight Saving Time is not in use , from October to March.

GMT is still widely used as the standard time against which all the other time zones in the world are referenced .

These guys seem to have figured it out:

http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/

Ajax call to get server time, some clever .js to figure out DST and timezone. Probably accurate 99% of the time, which is as good as you're gonna get.

Or they could just link to http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/, which does not ONLY display GMT, but times for other time zones/daylight savings schemes as well, along with some other country-specific information. It syncs every 15 seconds or so with their time server, and counts down the seconds using JavaScript (it looks like), which is accurate enough for me to set my watch to every now and then, it required.

Another convention sometimes used is that, since 12 noon is by definition neither ante meridiem (before noon) nor post meridiem (after noon), then 12 a.m. refers to midnight at the start of the specified day (00:00) and 12 p.m. to midnight at the end of that day (24:00). Given this ambiguity, the terms 12 a.m. and 12 p.m. should be avoided.

This is what the NIST (USNO) have to say in regards to 'Are noon and midnight referred to as 12 a.m. or 12 p.m.?':

This is a tricky question because 12 a.m. and 12 p.m. are ambiguous and should not be used.

In hongkong or toyoko 0008GMT is the middle of the day.

Do you even know what GMT is? Greenwich Mean Time.... http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/what-is-gmt/

Greenwich England... I.E. 0008GMT is 8 minutes past midnight in Greenwich England. NOT Tokyo or Hong Kong.

I strongly suggest you learn about time and how it's measured on this planet.

er just a minute - what the hell is "European Russia"? Surely you don't mean Ukraine, Latvia, and other former Soviet states? Not a particularly popular terminology for that region :)

No, he doesn't mean that.

Didn't they tell you at school that Ural moutains are considered to be the dividing line between Europe and Asia?
http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/time-zone/russia/europe.htm

Well, I did it anyway :)

He seems to be right according to http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/time-zone/time-zones.htm (I assume that they're on standard time, being on the southern hemisphere and all).

Was the whole flight just under 10 minutes? or did that only account for how long it was being propelled (did it fall for a while?) Or was it actually just something entirely different?

GreenwichMeanTime.com and this thread from WordReference.com

Then there is this page from the National Institute for Standards and Technology. To quote the first line from the question about what is 12 A.M. and 12 P.M.:

The answer is that the terms 12 a.m. and 12 p.m. are wrong and should not be used.

Satisfied?

IIRC Slashdot uses GMT; It's long past noon GMT. On the plus side we've only got about 3 and 3 quarter hours to go http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/.

or... move to Arizona! http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/time-zone/usa/ari zona/
By fortune of our servers being in Arizona, I don't have to update 100's of machines! YEAH!

it's a freaking pain in the b-hind reading scuttlemonkeys items when he insists on linking every second f'ing word. do you want people to be able to read your blurtings or not? people writing like you are a curse on the internet that spells REALLY BAD AND ANNOYING NAVIGATION.

that harmless rant aside, nice stuff!

I like everything else I have read from Franklin, and in actuality, I think this may have all been tongue-in-cheek, but that most politicians are to dense to see it as such. I think it is just about as serious as his "Conversation with the Gout", which has not caused me to play less chess. I hate Daylight Savings, it's the one thing I miss about Indiana. Your all sheep I say!

So, do you seriously feel you fully have Franklin's support on this issue??? Teaching swimming, yes; this I'm not so sure of. If only Franklin had clearly marked his sarcasm as such.

I do like the other poster's suggestion of 1/2 an hour, although Newfoundland actually is in a time zone like that, so watch those bits of sarcasm.

Go Boilermakers!

Funny, this web site still defines it as GMT (which is the same thing as Zulu, UT, UTC, or WET). Of course, that is probably a British site... bloody Brits with their antiquated way of doing things!

We certainly do - we invented it!

The GMT Home Page is #1.

World Time = Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) - Current Time in every ... is # 2.

I think you will find, however, that in common technical usage, at least in the states, "Universial Time" is prefered to "Greenwich Mean Time" anyway. Less anglo centric.

GMT means Generic Mapping Tools.

I'm not sure how Germany fits in here (countries start with capital letters, just like sentences). The story is from Israel, where it's already April 1st.

'The UK is effectively metric now'

Yes. In fact, this was an agreement between UK and France that took place in 1875. UK accepted to use the metric system as the official one, while on the other hand France accepted to use Greenwich as the prime meridian (France was using Paris before).

http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/info/prime-meridi an.htm

It starts Saturday, 28th June 0:00 GMT. As the time zone hints, this year it is organized in Sweden.

GMT, (Greenwich Mean Time) -> Sweden?
Greenwich is in Sweden?

Too late. In most places, local solar noon hasn't been used as a time standard for more than a century. Depending upon where you live within your time zone, the local solar noon can be different from standard time by a half hour or worse--and I'm not going to mention the impact of Daylight Saving Time.

Correcting--or not correcting--the time through use of leap seconds makes a difference of less than half a minute per century. The leap second correction is too coarse for almost any scientific work, and much too fine for the average person on the street.

Why not have a leap minute, where necessary, once every two or three centuries? It will still be dark at midnight, and we reduce the hassle of dealing with time discontinuities by a couple orders of magnitude.

Honestly, who are these people at greenwitch to tell us THEY have central time.
Because that's what was agreed to at a conference in Washington in 1884. (this is what they decided.)

I've got one of those Intellimouse Explorers (the huge silver ones with the superfluous tail light and like three extra buttons; well, what the hell, here's a http://www.microsoft.com/Mouse/explorer.htm link) and sites that won't let you back out are an incredible annoyance. See, two of the buttons on there serve as Forward/Back (respectively) while browsing the web, and after about 20 minutes of using them, I was hooked. You wouldn't believe how simple (and remarkably intuitive) to navigate with your thumb. Now if I could just find a good use for those buttons in Half-Life... I mean, sure, it's easy enough to hold down the back button and select the page before the offending site, but that would require moving my cursor over six or so linear inches of desktop space. Isn't that just a little bit unreasonable? No? Ah well.