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Daylight Savings Change Proposed
AveryRegier writes "CNN is reporting that Congress has added an amendment to the Energy Bill to extend daylight-savings time by two months. They expect to "save the equivalent of 10,000 barrels of oil a day." How long it would take for the associated energy savings to overcome the cost to make, test, and deploy the necessary code changes? How would the cost of this change compare with Y2K? Does most date routines' reliance on GMT make this just an issue of presenting the right time to the user?"
It has been speculated, and fairly so IMHO, that Y2K was what initially drove the .com
bubble. While I certainly wouldn't discount releases of many previously classified technologies
and growth of the internet, there was a consider amount of capital put into hardware and software upgrades in the mid-to-late nineties.
Imagine what kind of capital would be required to change DST behavior on govt computers alone. We could probably convert CO2 and H2O back into hydrocarbons cheaper.
CSC, Accenture, EDS, et al are probably salivating at the thought of such a passage of law.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Here's a PDF of the amendment, as agreed, from the house.gov page on the session yesterday. Realistically, if it'll make that big of an impact, why not make Daylight Savings Time a year-round proposal? If this amendment is passed by the House, we will have a period of a little over 3 months annually (Dec, Jan, Feb) in which DST is not in effect. That seems ridiculous. Not to mention that if DST becomes year-round, the change in software becomes a static offset to GMT as opposed to figuring out when the annual switch days are. Even Windows allows you to set a time zone that ignores DST, so a company in permanent CDT would only need set their time zone to EST and not worry about changing the clocks again.
No DST this state (except for some Indian reservations). I suggest you all adopt our time now.
There is (should be) a study dated 1998 (which I was not able to locate yet) sponsored by the EU Commission which states that daylight saving time does not have the desired effect on energy consumption (which is taken as a common fact anyway here (de)). I wonder why the US should differ - anyone any idea?
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Don't worry too much about changing code to accommodate the changes as we have already showed that y2k was handled well enough. Plus it gives developers a chance to code things a little better to handle changes and no matter what it cost it isn't being paid in oil but in IT dollars that is good for my line of work.
The more daylight we have, the less electricity we use
Now if you really want to target Oil than look at the biggest percentage of usage. Change the wording to "The more companies adopt telecommuting the less gasoline we use". It's like looking at the national debt and cutting the smallest percentage item (IE NASA) and acting like that is going to help. If you want to make an impact on the something then target the highest percentage of the problem (like it or not Social Security).
This would not be anything like Y2K. The code to change the time for Daylight Savings Time is already there. This is just a change in the data. Plus, it is generally only the OS that needs to be changed. The only real problem would be embedded electronics.
Living on the eastern edge of a time zone, I would love for DST to be extended.
But isn't it "Daylight Saving Time" and not "Daylight Savings Time"? (ie no s)
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
The problem with standard time in the summer is that the sun rises before anybody is up (like 4 AM) and some daylight in the morning is just wasted. Daylight savings time moves dawn back to 5 AM and gives you an extra hour of daylight in the evening.
You probably see where I'm going with this: who in their right mind is actually awake at 5 AM to enjoy the daylight?????
Daylight savings time should move the day another five hours or so. Imagine if the sun were just coming up as I started thinking about getting out of bed by 10. At 11 or so it would have fully roused me and I could get up and enjoy the full day. At 2 or 3 in the morning the sun would be setting just as I was starting to grow weary of my hacking and start thinking about going to bed. I -- along with most other similarly minded geeks -- would be ever so much more productive.
Of course some of you might complain about the extra screen glare, claim that you don't get any natural light in your basement anyway, or state that you just plain dislike that burning yellow eye in the sky.
--
Rate Exchange Calculator and Currency Convertor
Nightdark Wasting Time.
why doesn't congress stop tapdancing around the real issue, and instead pass some well-thought out legislation to reduce wasteful energy use, implement a rational gasoline use tax, and other things that would actually address the real problem? Hm?
Sad how much control oil has.
United States of Oil Addicts. Not trolling, speaking truth.
I don't have the information necessary to make an observation regarding the net energy savings if any exists, but as a resident of Pennsylvania which runs from Lattitude 39 43' N to 42 N I would sure welcome the extra daylight.
I gotta say that driving to work in the dark and driving home from work in the dark is not a prticularly gratifying experience. In fact it's downright depressing.
Interestingly enough the times have been changed in the fairly recent past (according to the US Army:
During the "energy crisis" years, Congress enacted earlier starting dates for daylight time. In 1974, daylight time began on 6 January and in 1975 it began on 23 February. After those two years the starting date reverted back to the last Sunday in April. In 1986, a law was passed permanently shifting the starting date of daylight time to the first Sunday in April, beginning in 1987. The ending date of daylight time has not been subject to such changes, and has remained the last Sunday in October.
This will be programmer's bread and butter. Go ahead congress!
How long it would take for the associated energy savings to overcome the cost to make, test, and deploy the necessary code changes?
/. groupthink so blind as to think that making money is evil especially when it pertains to them?
AFAIK, most folks use the system time which means that only OS folks would have to worry about this. Besides, when would creating more work for IT folks be a bad thing?
Is
*sheesh*
The opposite of progress is congress
Does anybody know any FORTRAN or COBOL hackers for some contract work?
To lose that hour permanently - yuck.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
Why not just eliminate the pain, the confusion and drowsiness.
8 months of daylight savings, 4 months standard? What happens next year, when they get REALLY serious about the energy crisis. Will they extend it to 10 months of daylight savings, 2 months standard?
Sheesh. I'd much rather dump daylight savings altogether. If we should go to work earlier, do it, don't fake it with the "spring forward, fall back" nonsense.
Infuriate left and right
Seems like a kludge to use DST when you could just shift timezones where appropriate.
It seems to me that lighting is only a minute fraction of our energy requirements these days. Also I heard that DST causes major headaches for people like farmers where your cows have to milked at the same time regardless of what the clock states...
I personally wish we just abandoned the whole idea as it creates more complications than benefits. May be it's just me.
Just means I'd lose an hour of sleep earlier than normal, and get it back later than normal. Bastards.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
If memory serves, we did it for the entire year. If it was such a great energy-saving idea, why didn't we just keep it?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I'm sure some environmentalist will quickly decry this because of the negative impact it will have on wildlife...
With them being exposed to more light each day and all.
You'd rather piss away another 10,000 barrels of oil a day because fixing a bunch of software would be a pain in the ass?
Don't you want jobs?
Well, most slashdotters don't have any computer skills, let alone as programmers, but still?
Or is this just a case of "it behooves us to whine about everything the government does"?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Peak oil, perhaps?
Sounds like cost may not be the only consideration, but rather conservation of the oil resource and working to reduce our reliance on foreign oil.
Sure 10,000 barrels is a drop in the bucket, but we have to start somewhere. Seems like as good a place as any...
I would love DST all the time. This east coast getting dark at 4:30PM in the daytime really stinks.
Let me try and get this straight. We'd save 10,000 barrels a day. We use 20 million.
This is a savings of 1/20th of a percent. And I'm not able to make out if that savings ONLY exists for those 2 months or the year round. Not particuarly impressive either way.
Here's an idea. Let's start passing legislation and using incentives to promote recycling, efficiency, and alternate sources of energy. You know, going to the heart of the problem as opposed to screwing around with something that presents piddly savings and smells more like a publicity stunt.
As for the coding repercussions . . . I can't say for sure.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
So we can't move to more efficient energy than fuel, but we're going to have to [metaphorically] GO BACK IN TIME to preserve what we have? This is just sad.
Monster Zero is the reason we cannot live on the surface, but must live forever live underground like this.
(excuse me for the bad typing, i hadsurgery in my hand...)
this is the way you want to save energy? a saving of 10 000 barrels / day? if you look out on the streets, do all the people that drive SUVs need to drive them? this is an argument that also apply for eupoe, but goes double for the us. tax the hell out of fuel guzzling monster cars (almost the same size as monster trucks) and lower the tax waaay down on cars like VW Polo, MB Smart and hybrids. this also deal with a lot of other problems like parking. some snowy staes might be a little m ore lean on the tax, like snowy states. But theres no need for an Suv in LA, NY, Paris or Oslo.
Wouldn't there be a sanity savings from just sticking to one standard time? Nighttime to me just means you turn the lights on when driving. Since I tend to use about the same energy during the day and night, I don't see the point.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Everyone changes at different times as it is... some countries don't change time at all..
so it's really not a world decision.
ChiefArcher
The date of the change changes every year, so the systems in place to set up the time change probably aren't particularly daunting to change. I suspect that the oil saved in the first week would offset the cost to change systems, because most time systems are in a heirarchy. There will be few changes needed.
First they intrude into one individual's health care, now they want to bend time itself!
Is there nothing Congress doesn't assume it has control over?
.\.\att Clare
There's a lot of code out there that calculates dates and times that takes DST into account. It's not all based on what the OS is doing because you're not always calculating your local time. If I have code that figures out how many hours away a date is from now in a different timezone, my timezone's rules aren't what's important.
It's not a bank. You can't deposit some daylight for a rainy day. Stop calling it "Daylight Savings Time" because that's not what it's called.
[
Time changes due to daylight savings means having to change the time on several clocks on various household appliances. The time changes are also particularly jarring to the biological clock. I've noticed that with the recent one hour jump ahead that people have been leaving work one hour earlier than usual. Instead of leaving work at around 6:00 PM they are actually leaving work almost an hour earlier at 5:00 PM which gives them not zero hours of daylight left in the day (like it did a week ago) but two! I take that as a sign of fatigue caused by the time shift. I know I don't feel like working as many hours during the day as I did a week ago.
I fail to see how this would significantly affect energy consumption, and it *certainly* wouldn't affect oil consumption, as we don't burn oil for electricity.
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
The sun it's stealing our energy.
Most computers I'm aware of rely on the OS to provide date/time info to the applications. Older applications that queried the BIOS I would think are running on hardware so old that you would have to manually adjust for DST anyway.
I can think of dozens of applications I've written over the years that were at least potentially susceptible to Y2K issues (though fortunately, of the ones still in use by then, all were compliant). I can't think of any that involved code to calculate DST -- they just worked off the system time.
I'm sure there is a lot of real-time applications or other highly specialized stuff (ATC maybe) vulnerable, but I don't think it would have the potential for widespread effects that the date issue did.
My clock radio is probably boned, though.
Has any politician used the words "Conserve Energy" since the mid-70's ? LouSir
Why not construct a series of large mirrors in space, so that the sun could always be reflected back to the dark side of earth? Eliminate darkness altogether...
10,000 barrels of oil a day certainly sounds like a lot if you're planning to put it in my back yard, but exactly what percentage is it. Is it just a drop in the proverbial oil bucket. I imagine so. How would it compare to having cars get one extra mile per gallon?
I have an alternate solution I've proposed that will won't save much energy, but will make the transition to and from Daylight Savings easier on all of us.
/ 405041.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/jledgard/archive/2005/04/03
Might as well kill two birds with one stone!
It would mean a lot of these devices may not work correctly and it's not like i can upload new firmware to them. Creates a lot of electronic trash, er it has lead, so yeah, must recycle.. how many people that can't figure out to keep their systems from being r00ted are going to keep that stuff out of the landfills..
Don't some states (eg. Arizona) have different policies regarding DST (ie. AZ does not respect DST)?
It all depends on lattitude. The further south one goes the less difference between summer and winter.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
How does Daylight savings affect the use of energy? Either way, we sleep (using minimal electricity) get up, go to work, come home, cook supper and go back to bed after watching TV.
Please cure my ignorance and tell me how this effects power usage.
DarkMantle I been bored, so I started a blog.
And be done with it!!!
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
I'll go out on a limb here and guess that you don't have kids...
Daylight saving time.
"The more daylight we have, the less electricity we use," said Markey, who cited Transportation Department estimates that showed the two-month extension would save the equivalent of 10,000 barrels of oil a day.
Apparently they're also going to change how the Earth tilts on its axis. The weather doesn't care what time of day it is.
Leave it to American politicians to think this one up.
It's not just an OS thing. A LOT of other programs take DST into account for other timezones. And it's creating more work, but it won't be creating more jobs. We'll just be given the task to "fix it" in addition to everything else we have to do.
There is a problem .. this will increase levels of stress by messing with people's rythms .. also the time of non DST in months is reduced so there is less adjustment to it etc.
.5 million dollars ($50 a barrel).. times 60 (2 months) = 30 million dollars? is this transition worth 30 million a year when we spend billions on oil?
Have any of these issues been explored?
10,000 barrels a day =
But you don't have windows in your basement, so what does it matter?
Even the linked article got it right, why must people insist on calling it Daylight Savings Time?
Daylight Saving Time info.
As a panel programmer (among other things) for a security company, this would be a major pain in the butt. All of our security panels (and I would assume most others) have built-in DST changing abilities.
Having to reprogram each of our panels to change at a different time would be extremely time-consuming for a small company like mine. I don't even want to imagine what bigger companies would have to go through.
The security field is very time-dependant. One hour could mean having the police called thinking someone is trying to break in or having your premise completely unsecured.
I, for one, hope this change does not get approved. At least Y2K had the possibility of not causing problems. This will definitely cause problems.
This fall, why not set the clocks back a 1/2 hour, and forget the whole thing?
I know all about the origins of the practice -- let the kids have more daylight, save energy during wartime, etc. IMO, it just isn't worth the hassle or the lost sleep.
Chip H.
Why not abolish it?
Seriously, Daylight Savings is the biggest PITA. Either half of your company is late to work or half of them are early and won't get paid for that hour they're sitting around. Then they stand around talking to those of us who are on work on time, wasting our productivity.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
In every embedded system I have worked on, we always dealt with time in UTC or ticks from a predefined epoch. Presenting local time to a human was always up to the system communicating with the embedded system, as was converting time to UTC or ticks for sending to the embedded system.
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
"The official spelling is Daylight Saving Time, not Daylight SavingS Time."
Btw, there's lots of other cool info about DST on that page, e.g.: In the U.S., the changeover time was chosen to be 2 am, when most people are at home and, originally, the time when the fewest trains were running. This is practical and minimizes disruption. It is late enough to minimally affect bars and restaurants, and prevent the day from switching to yesterday (which would be confusing). It is early enough that the entire continental U.S. has switched by daybreak, and the changeover occurs before most early shift workers and early churchgoers (particularly on Easter).
Also, Hawaii doesn't observe DST. I guess they get enough sunlight as it is. Either that or something to do with being so much closer to the equator.
You could just wake the F up earlier.
Who cares? Now that we've made Iraq the 51st state we've got all sorts of cheap oil to burn. Look at those gas pumps! Don't you realize $2.50/gallon is CHEAP!?!?
Burn it all up, and while you're at it install some new lights to showcase your shrine to dubya.
do() || do_not();
The official spelling is Daylight Saving Time, not Daylight SavingS Time.
Saving is used here as a verbal adjective (a participle). It modifies time and tells us more about its nature; namely, that it is characterized by the activity of saving daylight. It is a saving daylight kind of time. Similar examples would be dog walking time or book reading time. Since saving is a verb describing a single type of activity, the form is singular.
Nevertheless, many people feel the word savings (with an 's') flows more mellifluously off the tongue, and Daylight Savings Time is also in common usage, and can be found in dictionaries.
Part of the confusion is because the phrase Daylight Saving Time is inaccurate, since no daylight is actually saved. Daylight Shifting Time would be better, but it is not as politically desirable.
Alcohol & calculus don't mix. Never drink & derive.
And you posted anonymously, and we all know only terrorists want to protect their privacy. Oh, wait...
What impact will using daylight saving time in Indiana have on computer systems? Currently Indiana (like Arizona and Hawaii) stays on one time all year; the Indiana State house is trying to change the state to use daylight savings.
You must be new here.
I work for a major company that sells carbonated water and the like. This proposed change could be entered in the systems in about a day, if the techs were lazy. It would take 20 minutes for the dispatch software, if Indiana joined up with daylight savings time, like their legislature was talking about a month ago.
Can we lose the hour in the middle of a work-day, and gain the hour in the middle of the night? That'd get my vote.
An added benefit of companies doing it themselves is that having different companies on different schedules, you'd avoid the big rush-hour gridlock; since you'd have some starting work at 5am, some at 10am, etc.
Here's what one of your members of Congress says:
Hey, why not just stop all the clocks at noon permanently?
Something odd is going on this year with DST. Indiana, which has long opposed DST, is seriously considering it again. That is, as long as the farmers keep their collective mouths shut. Anyone who has conducted business within or with a state that does not observe it knows first hand what hasles it can be. Indiana is a mess. Some counties near Chicago operate on their time, while some near Kentucky and Ohio operate on their respective times, while the middle of the state does its own thing. So within one state, you may have 3 different times and any given point.
Code revision is a fact of life. For MS, I can't imagine it would be too rough. For the option -5:00 Indiana, all they would have to do is un-grey the DST check box, and for the rest of the US all they would have to do is chang the variable that controls when the clock automatically adjusts for DST.
And I think Hawaii isn't on it either. Making it year around would be simple since US software already has to support these states.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
Don't the states have the right to decide if they want to extend their daylight savings (just as some states decide not to use daylight savings)? Only part of Indiana goes on daylight savings, so this is far from a standard.
Code already has to adopt to differences in daylight savings all around the US (and probably the world too), so why would this be harder to implement?
Or does it feel like most of Today's articles deserver to be April Fool's Jokes? Did they delay the really good jokes a week?
Got Apathy?
EU has daylight saving time of its own.
That's a great point, I'm going to go tell my boss off right now.
:)
Me: Hey, I quit. I don't need this stinking job anymore, congress just changed the length of DST!
Boss: Whaa?
Me: Yep, I'm gonna get rich!
Boss: Sure you are. How do you expect to make money on this?
Me: Laugh all you want, you'll just pay me extra when you need your clocks reset. I'm now a professional time changer! It's the new Y2K.
Nah, think I'll keep what I've got, you all take this opportunity if you want it
Give every house a bunch of those florescent light bulb that only consume 25W instead of 60W or 100W.
Give tax break to those that throw away those big TV or monitor that consume over 250W and buy those LCD TV or monitor that only consume 35W.
I remember back in 1973, during the first energy crisis they had extended Daylight savings time through the fall - it was a total fiasco... kids going to school in the dark, daylight not even happening until AFTER 8:30 am. It didn't last long. It caused more problems then it solved. But expending it even a month is going to cause problems. Who's cockamany idea is this?
And you think that George W. Bush would condone a savings in energy spending? A negative one at that!
He owned a oil company, attacked Iraq, and has friends in the Saudi government.... and how much is gas right now? I saw $2.29 last time I left the house (which was suprisingly today).
Get your Unix fortune now!
Studies have shown that most hackers work better at night, and actually use dawn as a kind of alarm clock "oh shit, suns coming up, better get my head down or I'll never get to work by 9" (I KNOW i'm not the only one who has thought that)
liqbase
Why not just do away with DST completely, and by congressional mandate, require all businesses (banks, stores, employers, etc.) shift their hours back one hour? Requiring such a shift by legislative means is no worse than DST, and it need only happen once.
As far as staying on DST and dropping the shift back to Standard Time, that is one thing that I cannot allow. Noon was traditionally the moment when the sun was directly over the longitude of the observer. With Standard Time, this was quantized in order to create a manageable time system -- this is a perfectly acceptable optimization which was necessary for an interconnected civilization.
Admittedly, we do not directly depend on sunlight as much as in times past, however arbitrarily redefining "noon" to mean "1:00 'PM'" is completely preposterous. Why not just go all the way to metric time while we're at it? (Has the Swatch patent expired yet?)
With the whole 2000 versus 2001 thing, I can let mathematics slide a little due to the sociological significance of changing four digits at once. Declaring that we use the wrong time in perpetuity? That would be the real life analogue of the urban legend about redefining "pi" as equal to the integer value "3".
SUV's, trucks, and 6+ cylinder engine cars for city commuting result in a ridiculous amount more of oil being consumed than anything related to Daylight Saving Time.
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
Didn't read the article yet, but to answer the question asked in the post, 10,000 barrels a day at say $60 a barrel equals $600,000/day, times 60 days equals $36,000,000 savings per year. The conversion cost is anybody's guess, but instinct tells me $36 million probably wouldn't even be enough for one average state. So figure a 50-year payoff period for the country? Forget it.
I don't understand why oil is used in a comparison for the amount of energy saved. AFAIK oil is not a major source of energy for lighting. I understand it to be used more for heating and gasoline. The use of the figure 10,000 barrels a day sounds like political spin to make it sound like a solution to the oil crisis, which it isn't.
Jeez, why don't they always change it on a Wednesday, so we don't blow a weekend each time?
More like, I'm living in arizona, and during the summer, I want the sun to drop below the horizon ASAP. In fact, for arizona, I propose daylight losings, where we spring back and fall ahead, so the sun sets an hour sooner during the summer.
Me. I get up at 5 and go running with the dog. It is actually enjoyable because there is nobody else around.
Because last time I heard, it was "daylite-saving" time. :)
vk.
maybe I'm just not understanding what this is all about, but it seems like they're saying that my extending daylight saving time we will get more sunlight... Obviously changing a rule about what hour it is isn't going to effect how much daylight there is. So how will this help with energy consumption?
The idea of DST is to have the daylight hours occur during the hours people are actually awake. Since most of us sleep 8 hours (or wish we did anyway) we are awake for 16 hours. During the summer there can be as much as 16 hours of daylight (depends on your latitude) so we can shift the clock to make this work. HOWEVER during the winter the situation is reversed. Some parts of the country will have as 16 hours of NIGHT, so it doesn't make much difference if you shift an hour, you still don't have enough daylight hours to cover the average waking day! In SFL, this might work, but in Moose Country you would come up short on one end or the other in March and November so why bother?
Well, then why not do it as the Romans did? Make the day hours longer in summer and shorter in winter (and night time changes accordingly). Ok, that will be a big change in all software (but then, this would be a great economy program!), and also you may not like that your work time is actually payed less in the summer due to longer hours (solution: take your holiday in the summer and enjoy the shortened winter working time). But it certainly gives the best usage of sunlight.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Taxing gasoline to cover road use doesn't make sense anyway. We should tax based on how much you use the roads and how much wear your particular type of vehicle does per mile. Of course, that's hard, and involves more than just checking your odometer since roads in different places are paid for by different groups, even in the same state. So we just keep doing it the same old dumb way we have been, and end up with conflicting efforts like this gem I just saw:
Oregon taxes hybrid cars because they don't use enough gas to cover their share of road usage. Of course, the federal government goes ahead and gives big tax credits for hybrid cars to encourage the conservation of gasoline. "Let's encourage fuel efficiency! Oh, crap... we based our road tax on fuel usage! Quick, discourage fuel efficiency by raising gas taxes for efficient vehicles!" Hooray for the government.
For example, changing Daylight Saving Time could prevent terrorist attacks:
In September 1999, the Palestinian West Bank was on daylight saving time while Israel had just switched back to standard time. West Bank Palestinians prepared time bombs and smuggled them to Arab Israelis, who misunderstood the time on the bombs. As the bombs were being planted, they exploded--one hour too early--killing three terrorists instead of two busloads of people, the intended victims. (from webexhibits.org)
I personally think the most importing things to do as a hacker are:
* get your sleep, plenty
* eat healthy
* work out
This helps me focus much better on actual work when I have to or want to.
The whole thing of losing an hour's sleep last weekend sucked.
... and use this money you're gonna spend (ahem, MY tax dollars 'hardly' at work) to promote better fuel uses. I heard some guy on talk radio talk about how there's some type of oil that can be made/grown any time we want (sounded like a byproduct of something else) that could be converted into gasoline with the right types of refineries ... and that there was more of this type of oil in the US than has EVER EXISTED worldwide. Forget the name of the stuff though, but wow! /rant off
If I were president, I'd move clocks ahead by only 30 minutes this coming fall and JUST FRICKIN' LEAVE IT THERE !!!
The Earth's rotation means we'll have to deal with some mornings or evenings being dark anyhow - heck it's still dark out at 6am in California right now, but it stays light until 8pm now. Big deal - I still have half of my commute in the dark one way or the other: in the fall my mornings will have a little more light and it'll be dark at 5pm instead.
my geeklog
why not stop messing with solar time and just set banking hours to be one hour earlier?
Let's just turn our clocks back 12 hours permanently and eliminate night altogether... daylight 24/7!
Seriously though, what difference does it for energy consumption make if we just move the block of time when people are up and actively using energy/lights etc. forward and backward? I mean don't people adjust their own schedules forward or backward one hour to compensate for the time changes each year anyway? It's not like we have one fewer hour to consume fuel during daylight savings. The clock is just an arbitrary construct anyway, and people are awake for the same number of hours each day, consuming away, right?
Some states (parts of Indiana, all of Hawaii, and Arizona) have already recognized the general silliness (YMMV) in switching clocks around for some nebulous net gain. The Navajo Indian reservations ignore DST, too.
I expect if this passes Congress, the states will just pass laws to reverse this for their own constituents. Naturally, the net effect of (all of) this will just be extended chaos...
If it's not already confusing enough for only SOME of Indiana to observe DST, whose bright idea was it to make India be ten and a HALF hours off from EST ??
The sun doesnt give us more daylight hours just because we reference time differently.
If. I. ever meet Ben Fucking Franklin, I WILL KICK HIS ASS!!!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Here in Indiana we may actually pass a bill to go on daylight savings time - and now they're going to change things again? Oh well, if the Indiana bill doesn't pass and congress extends daylight savings time, that will give us two more months of being on the same time as Chicago which is fine by me.
I remember reading a while back that daylight savings time is like cutting off your head and standing on it to try and make yourself taller. Always thought that was a pretty good description.
Daylight "Savings" Time isn't really a savings at all. Sure, you get an extra hour of sleep; but then you just lose an hour six months later. Instead, we should set our clocks forward one minute every day. Then, at the end of the year, we set them back 365 minutes. That's 6 hours of extra sleep, folks. We could do it at Christmas, as a Christmas present to the whole world. Happy Birthday, Jesus -- have a siesta on us!
-- from the Facts for You blog
We're only doing this now because of rising fuel costs? The more time that the sun is up after work the better! I loved it in Spain when I could see the sun go down at 9:30 pm -- it made the days longer and more enjoyable and productive. This should've been done a long time ago...
One man's Funny is another man's Offtopic.
Please note the following:
"The more daylight we have, the less electricity we use," said Markey...
Um, there's no more daylight. It just comes at a different time.
And if you want more light, get out of Massachusetts and go to Florida!
This all stems from our former life as an agrarian economy, without headlights on tractors. Please stop the madness. Some of we early risers don't like to have to wait until 7:30AM for the sun.
How about just banning vehicles that get less than 15 MPG? There is no excuse why we should be allowing vehicles that guzzle gas at such a god-awful rate on our roads given the current oil situation. All those stupid soccer moms can go back to driving station wagons and get their damn Lexus, BMW, Mercedes and Hummer SUVs off the damn road.
We should extend DST an additional six months -- then we wouldn't have to bother with the silliness of changing our clocks twice a year!
Or, better yet (to really save money), spring forward one hour every year. Now, since falling back costs money, we won't do that anymore. Just spring forward one hour annually, and watch the savings add up, year after year!
ShoutingMan.com
How does changing the time increase the amount of sunlight in a day?????? Does the sun know we've changed our clocks so it stays out longer for us? I've never understood time changes.
This is a U.S. law only. The U.S. Federal government has to make laws on DST covering the entire country or else states and local governments make their own laws. Three states currently get away with staying on standard time. We had a patchwork of DST laws across the country until President Johnson signed the Uniform Time Act of 1966. The public rallied behind it when it learned that you would drive through seven time changes in the 35 miles of road between Steubenville, Ohio and Moundsville, WV.
Instead of making everyone's lives more inconvenient by shifting a hour ahead, then an hour behind, why don't people just learn to shut their lights out in their house????
Quit being so damn lazy! Why change time when you can just change your F'ing alarm clock!?!?
I'm going to write to my elected representative and demand that we implement personal time zones! That way, I can always come to work at 9 AM, s20451 standard time (sST), regardless of what the time is in "new york" or "shanghai". This proposal will lead to energy savings by eliminating the need for alarm clocks and wristwatches.
My next project will be to change the length of the workday to three units of time.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
It's "daylight SAVING time", not like bank "SAVINGS" account.
Hmmmm 10,000 / 20,000,000 = .0005
We would save 1/20 of 1% by this action.
Sounds like a real solution -- why didn't we think of this sooner!!!!!
We save roughly a penny in a $20!
Systems which are misdesigned such that they store local time in hardware or system clocks should be fixed, although using local time implies that the user of the system isn't very interested in its accuracy anyway, so perhaps it doesn't even need to be fixed. In any case, replacing one brittle hard-coded rule with another only serves to perpetuate the problem.
Who is this mister Congress? Does he have a first name? Or is this about a woman?
just make everyone get up 1 hour earlier all year round and stop this stupid silliness of spring ahead, fall back. It's not good for our bodies to continue to change our schedules
Farmers.
Y'know....those vast swathes of agricultural workers who underpin much of the nation's food supply and therefore economy?
-Nano.
Why doesn't the US schedule a day where every rocket, jet, truck, car, motorcycle, go-cart, tricycle, etc all face east and at exactly the same time, they are all hammered full throttle/pedal? Maybe we can add an hour or two if we try real hard?
That would surely be cheaper than buying 10,000 extra barrels of oil a day. I mean shit, I couldn't fit more than 10 or twelve in my garage, even if I shut the door real fast on the last one!
Nuke Gay Whales for Jesus.
That's the tradeoff of not having a life, and being able to make everything revolve around work.
To begin with, if the financial gain is really important DST could be standardized across the whole of the US. In Indiana alone there are three separate regions where time and DST are handled differently from one another...
Weighing the price to make this change against the price of the oil saved is a fallacious comparison. Oil is a finite resource and will increase in value as time goes on. The cost of the oil will outweigh the cost of the change if we make the change in 2080, that's for sure.
r -h2-review.html.)
Maybe instead of asking whether we should change the clocks a few weeks earlier, we should ask if it should be appropriate to burn 100 gallons of gas per week in a 4wd vehicle with 10 inches of ground clearance (http://www.suvxccessory.com/xccessory/2003-humme
Why would you think this works? You'd just get up at 3pm and go to bed at 7 or 8 "in the morning".
This is apparently also the difference between people with and without children.
Guess you weren't aware that they have daylight saving times in nearly every country? Or are you just saying that all politicians are idiots? That I could agree with, but no reason to point out the American ones on this issue.
Because then you'd have kids going to school in the dark. As soon as one is hit by a car that's the end of that.
So, we implement a technical solution to prevent it. You see, there's this new cutting edge technology called "headlights"...
--
AC
NOW.
this is great. there's nothing more depressing than waking at 12pm on a winter afternoon and the sun's already on its way down. for me, sundown means the day is done for and my body can't do anything cept chill and smoke and watch tv till 2 am. it saves electricity and motivates my ass.. whats not to like?
... change to Daylight Saving Time on Saturday @ 2am instead of Sunday @ 2am? This would give an extra day to get used to the time change for the average 40-hour-a-week-worker-bee.
I, for one, would rather welcome our Arizona overlords.
Farmers get up whenever the damn rooster starts a-crowing. It the capitalist pig-dog industialists who want everyone to be syncronized so they can start their factories on time.
I'll make my opinion short.
Either extend it so it's year-round or don't extend it at all. It will break computer software. Although most people could upgrade, some can't. It's too much of a hassle. People won't like memorizing new stuff either. Just make it year round. I believe California was considering this once.
I think most of you have fixated on the oil and have missed what they are talking about, the bit about 20 billion barrels of oil a day is a red herring, nobody said ANY oil would be saved by this, they are just using oil as a unit of energy measurment. That being said, saving an equivelant of 60000 barrels of oil worth of energy a year is a good start and if it throws a little work towards us developers so be it. All the comments about "go after the SUV's insted" are not only overly obvious but are ultamitly off topic. Not only that but even if we where actually talking about oil why not go after both? Personally I prefer GMT anyway.
codohundo
Not Savings!! its not like: 1) Wait until appropriate time 2) Change clocks forward an hour 3) ????? 4) PROFIT!!!$$$$$ Its not SAVINGS its friggin Saving. Daylight Saving Time. ~Coward.
Oh, don't even talk to me about Daylight Savings Time. I'm still pissed that my state (Indiana) is actually thinking about joining in this moronic ritual.
:-)
Daylight Savings Time is like pulling your bedsheet up because your chest is cold. Now your feet are cold.
My proposal is that we make the daytime minutes longer and the nighttime minutes shorter during the summer. Tadah - sunrise is at 7 and sunset is at 7 all year round.
well ,y opinion is either make it al year or simply chuck it. it makes it a pain for us who don't buy into it, like me in saskatchewan. as far as i know, it causes no real benifits and only disorients people for several days after as their body clocks need to reset and get up ealier and goto bed later.
on that matter, does the savings of it even match the reduction of worker productivity in about 1 week after the daylight savings time slock change?
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
I like many others are sick and tired of this dumb ass tradition. Just do away with it, extending it is going to require too much hassle. I understand why it was implemented in the first place, but now it's acquainted and irrelevant. I see NOITHING wrong to keeping things set to standard time.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
No real point here. Just bragging. :-) And I didn't pay any markup because I am a godlike negotiator when it comes to things like that.
I'm getting about 19 MPG, though, as opposed to my old truck which gets 14. So, it helped a little.
I may replace the truck with one of those Lexus RX3xx hybrids if the waiting list ever goes away.
Why not eliminate time zones and have everyone use UTC? That would solve the problem and be much easier to implement since quite a few embedded systems use UTC anyway.
Back when Ford ordered a second hour of daylight savings going to school was DARK. My little self thought, I am not supposed to be out in the middle of the night like this. This proposal comes from people who see some benefit from 1 hour of daylight savings and think they can get more out of it. Some wells only have so much water. Don't do this to my kids.
Here are some of the things I was thinking about when I wrote this submission:
* Old Operating Systems users that never get updated with the patch. There are still a bunch of Windows 95 machines out there.
* User confusion when the wrong time is showing on their system clock (even though system time is still correct) or any other system that shows the current local time.
* Think of all of the Java Virtual Machines that will need to be updated. How many do you have on your system? I have several. At least upgrading these upgrade a bunch of other programs at the same time.
And yes, I now know that it is daylight saving time without the 's'. Thank you everyone for correcting me. You can stop now. My only consolation appears to be that Commander Taco got it wrong too. The title on the story isn't the one I submitted.
-Avery
Daylight savings time should move the day another five hours or so. Imagine if the sun were just coming up as I started thinking about getting out of bed by 10.
I have a simple solution for you that will fit your obviously laid back lifestyle, and does not require changes to any computers -- move to Hawaii!
Kind thoughts do not change the world
The last company I worked for had clients in 10-12 different timezones, all looking at events/meetings scheduled in other timezones. These were essentially financial conference calls/presentations, so displaying an incorrect start time to a user was a Big Deal. The OS is great for providing timestamps and other such things, but when you're displaying the same time to many different users, all wanting to see it in their local time, I can assure you it gets very ugly. Add to that having users in each of these timezones actually scheduling these events in their own timezones...ugh.
We didn't even bother to handle things like Arizona not observing DST, or Indiana's totally insane system, and it was still a collosal PITA. And this doesn't begin to touch on the madness of DST in other countries/localities (see: Israel).
And while we're on this subject of "daylight", we really should consider moving the November general election a couple months earlier into the year. Cause logically, some places don't have daylight when it's time to vote.
Come on, you know what's really happening.
In the spring the government takes away an hour of our time and holds on to it until fall when they give it back to us without giving us any interest.
This new proposal simply lengthens the amount of time that they get to hold on to our hour. It's simple economics. I'm not sure what they do with that hour while they have it all summer long. It's probably classified.
I agree with some of the other posters. Energy saved by DST is miniscule compared to other possible avenues to explore.
My curiousity: Why can't we just move to a single standard? One of the largest pains in my ass is constantly doing time zone math in my head. (maybe I'm just lazy)
Anyone else find it extremely annoying when the have to change the dozen clocks in there house twice a year. Every fricking thing has a clock in it these days. DST is completely unnecessary. What difference does an hour here or there really make, just make light bulbs more efficient if you want to save money. Actually we already have more efficient bulbs just make it so that there is a greater encouragement to use them.
Boston has by far the worst drivers I've ever seen in the US. Not only are they bad drivers, they are actually belligerent about it as if driving with one wheel overhanging the next lane is how you're SUPPOSED to drive.
At least the people in LA know how to drive their vehicle even though they might not have patience for your inability to get out of their way.
My office building has had motion detector controller lights for, like 10 years.
Uh, no... that's an entirely orthogonal issue. I (the parent poster) have 1 kid and another on the way - but with a workplace that allows me to work from home (or even telecommute from the daycare center if I really wanted to - thanks to modern technology like laptops and cellphones), it's not a big deal.
Sorry if this is a dupe (it's so obvious someone has probably already suggested it, though if so, I missed it):
How about we simply get rid of that entire "change-the-meaning-time-twice-per-year" idea? Yes, I know, kids, cars, dark. How about we start school an hour early in the winter months? The result is the same, but we don't have to deal with the confusion caused by the meaning of the current time of day changing.
Personally, I find it easier to remember that "I have to be at X at 7 tomorrow instead of 8, as usual" as opposed to "tomorrow, 7 will be what 8 was today, so I will have to turn the clock... back? forward? one hour tomorrow and then figure out where I'm supposed to go"
Before the pedants catch it: I meant "on December 21, the sun rises at 7:55 AM CST". D'oh!
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Report to Conference Room C.
You will be seated in the comfy chair and be forced to endure what initially appears to be a finite PowerPoint presentation, but you will eventually realize is a Kafka-esque random crapflooder.
It is loaded with current buzzwords about some n-tier solution, somehow integrating all 621 languages on 99 bottles, which project will become your life, assuming you scream in the proper musical sequence from a certain Partridge Family episode, which will turn off the presentation and unlock the door.
Good luck.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Answering the original question, I work in the power industry as a developer. I can watch the local load curve and do a bit of my own research about supposed "energy savings" by artificially making the sun set later in the day. BoooOogus. The savings would be low.
You all know this: The devil is in the details. The programming impact would be larger than anticipated. Power is usually tracking in "hour ending" and various participants use a 23 and 25-hour day when necessary, defined as "relative hour of the day". Because of this, date conversions abound and the the "first sunday in april/last sunday in october" algorithm is in quite a few places. The impact would be high.
I think it's political hot air. Why not just ask people to pay more for oil? The markets know how to react.
Actually, I have only been living here for 2 months. It is harder here, because even though we don't change time for DST, everyone else does. So you have to know what the heck time it is everywhere else, which is much harder than remembering what time it is where you are.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Farmers are irrelevant. Here in the State of Bulemia they and thier "food" are only a passing fad, coming and going from time to time, but always being run off.
In the Free State of Anorexia, our neighbors to the south, they and their noxious byproducts are not tolerated at all.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
Start school an hour after sunrise.
--
AC
An Economical Project
Definitely not a new idea.
More
This is largely a symbolic gesture. It let's congress do something which has little effect on the situation, but allows them to say that they "took measures" to save energy.
Proverbs 21:19
But having to deal with time changing and readjusting my sleep cycle (which is currently horribly, horribly fucked up right now - DST really messes with college students, espicially when you have a project due) is far more troublesome than going to work in the dark and leaving in the daylight or somesuch. I'm still not sure how the system functions under an unchanged state (do I go to work in the dark or do I go to work in the light? Do I come back home in the dark or in the light?). Currently, my sleep schedule means I sleep for about 3-3.5 hours when I'm tired, which is about every 12-16 hours. If I didn't have that stupid jump that occured a few days ago, I would've been much better off.
How about we all just iterate on a system of Universal Time. You'll adjust. Lunch might just seem a little strange.
Informatus Technologicus
Hell, why even have time zones? We can't we all simply run on GMT?
It's DAYLIGHT SAVING time. No savings. Sheesh.
I'm a computer.
I am surprised they are planning on switching around the dates instead of just getting rid of DST altogether. It is such a nuiscance having to switch the schedule around twice every year, For this most recent change many of us now have to go to work an hour earlier. Arizona and Indiana are forward thinking on this manner and have already ended DST. I wish it would happen in the rest of country.
Let's save money for the *whole year* and move everybody's timezone ahead by an hour.
Better yet, let's think globally and do it for the WHOLE PLANET! Everybody on Earth: set your clocks one hour back. Now: REVEL IN THE SAVINGS!
Isn't anyone worried about the environmental effects of this? With more daylight, global warming will increase, nocturnal animals will lose sleep, and plants won't grow as long. Doesn't anyone think these things through anymore? GreasyBloater
How about we drop daylight savings alltogether?
-R
Well, for one I am. It's the only decent time of day to be outside around here. Why, at 0400-0600 (the two hours on either side of sunrise) the temperature sometimes gets down into the 80F range.
Back in the early 60s the flood of Arizona newcomers convinced the Legislature to adopt DST. It lasted one year. As soon as the Legislature reconvened the first thing they did was repeal it.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Personally, I'd like year-round daylight savings time. No more hassle of springing forward or falling back.
As for the school issue, let me put it this way. Start schools no sooner than a couple hours after dawn, and readjust monthly. It shouldn't have to do with the clock. It should have to do with physical daylight breaking and how we biologically respond to it. Kids don't get enough sleep as they do today.
I love Arizona!
We set our clocks ONCE. Screw DST!
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
According to the cnnarticle, the US consumes 20 million barrels of oil per day, and this action would save extra barrels for the affected time period. So, for 16.6% of the year (2/12), we'll be saving 0.05% of our daily oil (10K/20M)....working out to 0.0083% of annual savings (0.166*0.0005)....wow, that totally sounds worth it! NOT.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Just because you set your clock forward or backwards does not mean that the sun will set any slower or faster? Is the whole point of changing time in the US all about the sunrise and sunset? If that is the case, how does this help?
no more trick or treating in the dark.
What is this sun of which you speak?
And, for the record, I do get plenty of natural light!
actually if they come in at 5 AM to clean, and are done at 7:30 AM, its kind of stupid for them to all turn the lights off so that all of you at 8 am can come in and turn them on again. i assure you the car you drive is probably wasting a lot more energy than the cleaning people.
But a lot of people here (in particular under windows) had little idea of what to do, simply changed the clock of the PC to 1 hour earlier/later and maintained the same time zone (what meant for i.e. mails that people could see the message as send 1 hour in the past/future). They could had switch the time zone to i.e. between gmt-2 and gmt-3, but was too hard, and modifying the registry of windows to tell that uruguay had daylight saving those months was totally offlimits.
Adjust your f?ing clock you lazy bastards!
No more clock touching!
Make the light hours "shorter" and the dark hours longer" Mutiply the seconds per hour by the cosine of the time. It'll result in a continuous shift, that really does save daylight! You'l have 18 light hours and only 4 dark ones.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Universal Time. It's been tried before, and tried again, and then even tried more recently in a different fashion from UTC and bizarre marketing fashion: Internet Time from Swatch.
Personally it would make the most sense to use the International date line as the time meridian no matter the "unit" of time you choose, but hey, apparently I'm a raving lunatic. I also don't care if "time X" means anything definite with regards to the position of the sun or whether I'm at work or whether the kids are in school. The sun would likely rise somewhere between "X" and "Y" time and go back and forth depending on season, and schools and businesses could either have set or moving times going with the seasons instead of "following the clock".
MORTAR COMBAT!
The congress is kidding themselves if they think passing some law is going to make me get out of bed any earlier. Hell no, that's just 3 more months that I'm an hour later (by the clock) to work.
The technical solution would be to have alter time at a much finer level, say the second, so that daylight hours and waking hours stay synced in a slow, imperceptible way, using network time servers.
The downside is that all clocks to be considered reliable would have to have a network connection to contact the time server. The upside would be none of this crude 'spring forward/fall back' crap.
Loose lips lose spit.
Actually, in Indiana it depends on what county you are in.
Clark, Dearborn, Floyd, Harrison, and Ohio counties observe Eastern Standard Time with DST (5 hours after UTC, 4 hours in the summer.)
Gibson, Jasper, Lake, LaPorte, Newton, Porter, Posey, Spencer, Vanderburgh and Warrick counties use Central Standard Time with DST (6 hours after GMT, 5 in the summer.)
The remaining 76 county all observe Eastern Standard Time year-round, with no DST (5 hours after UTC year-round.)
More here: http://www.mccsc.edu/time.html
Also, those parts of Arizona which are part of the Navajo land do observe DST.
more here: http://webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/
The "cost" of turning on a flourescent light being higher than leaving it running is an urban myth.
Yes, a flourescent takes more power for a few cycles when it strikes.
The total energy taken to strike the arc in the light is less than a few seconds of runtime.
www.eFax.com are spammers
So does mean president bush will serve longer or shorter term in office?
If they can operate a modern tractor they can certainly operate an alarm clock.
Arizonians, like myself, don't really care. We don't observe DST. I can honestly say after spending a few summers in Arizona, that we don't want any more daylight than possible. Infact, We would be willing to sell a few hours of daylight to other parts of the country.
There are no issues of kids getting hit by automobiles because of DST... infact, the soles of sneakers melt instantly on contact with Arizona asphalt. Concrete = Good. Ashphalt = Bad. That's how we resolve that.
Am I the only one that is bugged by "Daylight Saving" on principle? I mean, if you don't like what time you it is when you wake up, you don't change your clock! IT'S A CLOCK for god's sake! it's an instrument of measurement, more or less. You don't adjust it to you, you adjust to it. Otherwise, why stop at daylight saving? if we want to save even more money, maybe we should implement "sweat saving temperature" time in the summer, where we subtract 5 degrees from the temperature in order to cut our air con bills? But seriously, why can't people and businesses just be more flexible about work hours? this could solve the same problems plus reduce rush hour congestion, which would save much more energy.
there is only the door, the door, the door.
just move the clocks ahead a half hour one spring and forget about the madness for ever...
Arizona is on standard mountain time year-round; probably so that people can actually go outside during the summer evenings before they have to go to bed.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
Let's extend it by 6 months! That will save even more oil!!!
C'mon, you know you wanna.
That's backwards. The Big Res is split between Arizona and New Mexico. Rather than have part on DST and part on standard time, the Navajos keep all of the res on the same time, For whatever reason they chose New Mexico time, so the Res is the only part of Arizona that does DST.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Walking to school in the midnight blackness of morning during Buffalo's winter months with perpetual daylight saving time may have been fun as a kid. But finally everyone realized that having to fire up all those furnaces an hour earlier didn't save fuel.
Congress is on crack.
I left my sig in my other pants.
You realize that you are describing exactly what happens now, don't you? Your just assigning different numbers to daylight. Right now you can get up at 6:00am instead of 10, by 7 you'll be awake. You can enjoy the full day. At 9:00pm (or whatever.. its doesn't matter), the sun will start to go down and you can think about bed (you'll start getting weary now because you've been up since 6:00am). At 10:00pm you can go to sleep for 8 hours until you awake again at 6:00am. How is this any different than what you wrote above? I really don't understand this mindset with time. Time doesn't exist.. your just talking about assigning different numbers to a schedule that you already have. Go ahead and set your clock ahead 5 hours and live by that if you want. Everyone else will be getting up at 6, but you can *say* you got to sleep in until 11:00am and stayed up until 2:00am.
You create your own reality - Leave mine to me.
Am I the only one who is tired of losing an hour of sleep every spring and staggering around for a few days while I try to acclimate to the new time schedule? When I get that hour back in the fall, it does nothing for me.
I'd like to see a study on the lost productivity of workers and see how that compares with these supposed energy savings. As another poster stated: why not just change the hours of our businesses? That's all that's happening anyway.
As for the farmers, don't they set their own work hours? I'm convinced daylight saving time is one of the stupidest practices in American culture.
I take it everyone in the US is a robot, and not a cool robot like Bender either. That is to say, you all feel compelled to get up whenever the little mechanical beastie says it's "7 o'clock", and all your employers simply can't imagine having people come to work at other times.
IMO everyone should just change to GMT and stop arguing over nonsense. So, now thos of us in Michigan have to remember to get up for work at noon, and our TV shows start at 1am. But at least when you said the meeting is at 3pm, everyone knows when it is without having to pull out conversion tables. If you doubt me, try working for a company with offices in New York, London, and Tokyo, and try to arrange a conference call.
So yeah... change DST by getting rid of it!
Stop going to stores or to the city late in the evening when it's dark and go earlier in the day when it's light. That'll save plenty of oil without screwing up the time half of the year.
It will cost close to nothing to do the change. The date for changing from daylight saving to normal time (and the other way around) is supposed to be configurable by timezone (the date is different in different part of the world and some part of the world don't change time).
Europe just changed their rule to synchronize everybody on the same time. In the process they changed the date of the change (this year it was a week earlier in europe than in north-america). Beside the impact on peoples (some part of europe changed the time advance their clock 2 hours) I haven't heard anything involving cost in modifying computer software.
Why not just swich and stay with daylight savings forever? I haven't adjusted my own clocks since goin gfrom standard to daylight savings four years ago. I rather like it. My winter evenings have daylight until 5PM, compared to 4PM for everyone else standing next to me. I think its dumb and thus haven't participated in the last few changes back and forth. Sure, my friends think I'm wacky, but I still use an Amiga computer too, so think what you will.
:)
My job doesn't have set hours I need to be there, so no problem there. Meetings and TV schedules can be tricky at times, but I don't watch much TV anyway, and I'll catch the Alias episodes I missed on DVD when they're available. It mostly works OK, I just need to remember the rest of the east coast is mistakenly on central time for 6 months and I'm fine.
Wouldn't that save as much, if not more oil, and other resources, than this antiquated DST thing? I for one am ready to do my part. Seriously though, why not cut the 8-5, or 9-5, work day to only 6 or 7 hours? Would the US lose its dominance in...hmmmm, let me think...
Transportation Department estimates that showed the two-month extension would save the equivalent of 10,000 barrels of oil a day. The country uses about 20 million barrels of oil a day.
Anyone else do the math? 1e4/2e7 = 5e-4. That's right people - 10,000 barrels of oil is 0.05% of our annual consumption. Go back and read that again - it's not 5%, it's 0.05%.
If you're going to pick a point to lobby on, this is not it. Try something like, "it will be easier on people's health to not have to change wake up time," or "we'll be more like the rest of the world without a change."
If you want to save barrels of oil, pressure automotive companies to get their acts together.
http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/reality/2 005/0403.html
It would be more practical, globally, for there to be _one_ time zone, with acknowledgment for shifting "noon" and "midnight" times locally. Example: Noon being at 12 PM (that's right after 11:59 AM, for those semantically-challenged and too stupid to recognize it) in London, and six hours later, Noon being at 6 PM in Chicago. Yes, that would mean that Noon would be at 12 AM or therebouts in Guam, but the sun would be high in the sky there. This would eliminate confusion over setting of clocks, allow localities to manipulate opening and closing times for businesses relative to daylight (let's face it, in the retail business where I work, 20% of our call volume involves inquiries as to our current operating hours, which are static 3/4 of the year), and remove the clock-setting confusion (people in hourly jobs have to check the schedules to see at what time they have to work during the next week, anyhow.. just move it by an hour during the summer months if you're that hard-up). And with the invention of geosynchronous satellites, there's no need to set your clock by the local time at which the sun passes overhead (nobody's done that in _years_). It's overdue. Do it, and it'd be less confusing than the establishment of the 24- hour day clock was in the first place.
Its time for calendar reform.t ml
http://personal.ecu.edu/mccartyr/world-calendar.h
Once for all!
And while we are at it how about going metric too!
Just when I get used to waking up to sunlight, daylight savings time kicks in and I have to wake up in the dark all over again. It sucks I tell ya.
Works up here just fine.
http://home.comcast.net/~wwwstephen2/iowa.mpg
Gee, how much oil could we save if they just made the fucking CAFE standands apply to SUVs???
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Honestly, who cares if you go to work at an appropriate time instead of trying to sleep in when there's light a-burnin' outside. Get your lazy ass up out of bed during EST and get your stuff done before it's dark. Is it really that hard?
I see the little blighters wandering into school when I leave for work an 9:00 AM WTF is up with that?!!! I had do be in class by 8:30 AM when I was in school!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I just recently discovered that Mac OS X actually switches from EST (eastern standard time) to EDT (eastern daylight-saving time) 5 seconds before it turns to 2am on the first Sunday of April.
The clock ticked to 1:59:54 am and jumped to 2:59:55 am.
I once had a signature.
If we all moved south, think of the energy we'd save? (uh, that's north for those of you down under).
I have to be out of bed bright and early at 10:30PM to get ready for work. It gets dark about two hours before that.
Humans can get used to ANY tweaking of time. An hour here or there isn't going to kill anyone.
If they are going to mess with it at least draw the frikkin lines in SOME sort of logical manner. Nothing more fun than driving down the road in the USA with this conversation...
"What time is it?"
"Quarter til two."
[half hour later]
"What time is it?"
"Quarter after two."
[half hour later]
"What time is it?"
"Uh, Quarter til four now."
[half hour later]
"What time is it?"
"Quarter after, uh... THREE? WTF?!?!"
*head explodes*
that's all
demand side:
As costs go up, usage goes down. People take shorter trips. People buy better vehicles.
supply side:
As costs go up, new supplies become economically viable. Canada has huge oil shale supplies, with an energy-positive extraction process. We can grow biodiesel using algae already, and can do even better with a bit of genetic engineering. We can crack the chemicals in coal, like Germany did in World War II. We can work the other direction too, starting from natural gas. If we were really desperate, we could use nuclear power to extract automobile exhaust from the air and turn it back into gasoline!
If you're a farmer, you don't give a shit what the clock says. The cows need milking when he cows need milking.
The servers don't care what time it is either. The number is just a number and it keeps right on incrementing.
World adoption of flextime could save far more energy than getting up in the friggin dark.
What's all the fuss about?
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
As an Arizonan first and a programmer second, I think history is going to look back on DST as essentially equivalent to the (anecdotal) story of lawmakers legislating pi to 3.
Arizona doesn't do DST. I've only visited areas that observed daylight savings time, and it never ceases to amuse me. The conversations usually go like this:
Q. Why do you keep changing your clocks around?
A. To get more daylight!
Q. So changing your clock alters the rotation or axial tilt of the Earth?
A. No, see, normally it would get dark at 7. Now it gets dark at 8!
Q. But the sun doesn't rise until 8 or 9 AM. When you need to make your blanket longer, do you cut a foot off one end and sew it onto the other?
A. But...*gzert*...more daylight! More daylight!
Q. Why don't you just wake up an hour earlier, if you want more daylight?
A. *gzert* *pop*
(Okay, they don't actually short circuit, but they tend to run out of coherent arguments. It seems most people haven't really thought about this.)
Add to this my programmer's view of time (as a monotonically increasing quantity [relativity aside] unrelated to human foibles) and this seems a lot like Congress trying to legislate the tides, or apply our IP laws in Norway.
(Oh, wait. Heh.)
In fact get rid of options 1 and 2, and 3 would work just fine on its own.
This is ABSURD. (Please forgive my yelling.) What is "12:00?" The time people go to lunch. What is 11:00? (10:00 here in the midwest) The time that the news is on. Why change all the clocks, when what we are really doing is telling businesses to open an hour earlier/later, people to eat an hour earlier/later, and have the news start an hour earlier/later.
Why change the clocks? Are people really so tied to what the clock tells them to do?
Oblogitary Douglas Adams quote: "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime, doubly so."
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
As the US has transitioned from an agricultural to a service-based economy, it is less important for people to work when the sun is out. What about a schedule that has most people working from, say, 5 PM until 2 AM, sleeping 2 AM to 10 AM and having daylight hours free. Generally, places of business use lighting even during the day, while homes are better designed to provide natural lighting to their occupants. You come home from work at night, turn on the lights, and use your power-sucking TV/computer/etc. -- any sunshiny outdoor activities have to wait for the weekend. Yes, yes, my devious plan doesn't change things for the all-night hacking variety of /.ers, and I'm making quite a few generalizations here, but it bums me out to spend the entirety of many a sunny day trapped in the office!
why does daylight savings exist at all other than to force us through an unwanted bit of jetlag twice a year? it's otherwise totally pointless given most people are on flexible schedules. the idiots in congress would do better to ban all hummers immediately and enforce petrol consumption standards if they really wanted to save oil...
REPORT ALL OBSCENE MESSAGES TO YOUR POTSMASTER
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime, doubly so.
-ZB
The U.S. consumes 17 MILLION barrels of oil a DAY, and Bush's energy moguls have the brass to propose something like this for the sake of 10,000 barrels?? It's not even a blip on the radar as far as energy solutions are concerned.
Well, if we extend DST by 2 months to save 10,000 barrels of oil per day, then if we extend it by another 5 months we'll save even more, right?
But really, I'm just being selfish. My 9 month old baby still has not recovered from this sudden 1 hour change in his sleep cycle...
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Europe already has a great solution figured out... when gas prices hit $5/gallon suddenly cars get smaller and more efficient.
Increasing the cost and tax on gasoline to reflect the environmental impact and the impact of the US being so depedent on foreign oil, and the market will sort itself out.
Just get rid of it altogether. Who cares whether the sun is out or not...people will get up or go to bed when they damn well feel like it.
GET FREE APPLE STUFF!
If congress wants to save 10,000+ barrels of oil per year, maybe they should quit using private jets and driving limos. That will save oil.
--- Just say no to negativity.
Life is wonderful when you're capable of working at any hour of the day, and willing to do so, isn't it?
Why not just move the clock 1/2 hour (forward or backward depending on the time of year) and leave it there.
Then we never have to worry about daylight savings time.
Out here in the country the problem with daylight savings time is that the roosters get confused and don't know when to crow, the hens quit layin eggs, and the crops get burnt from all that extra sun. The guvmint should just mind its own bizness.
Yes, this site at webexhibits.org tells us the correct spelling and all that. Also the letter by Benjamin Franklin on the issue of daylight saving is an interesting read. In short, why the hell do we all stay up late at night, wake at noon, and complain that we don't have enough daylight? Just go to bed early and wake up early!
I once had a signature.
The real issue is for the Federal Gov't to realize that our Foreign Oil dependance is a National Security threat as well as an Economic one. We need a Federal program similar to putting a man on the moon to harness alternative fuel technologies. Only the public sector can drive the research against the vested interests. It would create jobs, increase security, and be a new technology that the USA can export to the rest of the world.
Extending Daylight Savings Time by 2 months will break computers (like Y2K) because new 'Timezone' rules will need to be programmed into every computer that manipulates dates. The estimated savings is 10,000 barrels a day when we use 20 million! What a short-sighted idea that totally misses the big picture.
More or less, I get up, turn on lights, shower, eat, drive to work, turn on lights, turn on equip., turn off lights, drive home, turn on lights, eat, turn off lights, sleep winter/summer/spring/fall Why would it matter if I was on daylight savings or not?
Yeah, our 8am meeting with the UK started at 7am my time last week- the only week we are 6 hours apart. Fun Fun Fun.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Ok i've done the "daylight" saving now where can i cash out!!
:
stupid hoomans.
-----------------------
season ending of Battle Star Glactica Boomer is preggy.so she's gonna have a
A) Hulon
B) Cyman
C) excuse to continue a lame ass show
General Welfare
This is such a tired old saw. How about congress gets out of the way?
Medically, Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) probably costs more in sick days, tardiness, and lost productivity, than the oil these clueless old fools think they are going to save.
How about instead of increasing daylight savings, congress does away with it all together?
I we're going to make changes to it.. WHY DON'T WE GET RID OF IT.
IMHO - day light savings time is just a "legacy" application left kicking around. If we're goign to make a change we should eliminate it intstead.
That would be me. Oh, wait, you said "in their right mind", didn't you?
Seriously, stop drinking coffee, and in a few months, you might find you're quite wide awake at 5AM - I stopped doing caffeine 15 years ago. Since then, my alarm hasn't had to wake me up - I'm always wide awake and ready to go before the alarm goes off (at 5am)
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
America's screwed.
IMHO does not exist dude.
Using the best knowledge of today to create the problems of tomorrow.
I know what you mean.
I think a more sensible move would be to pass a bill that makes the commercial buildings switch their lights off when they should. I am still amazed by the fact to see buildings completely lit at 2 in the night when no one is there. Imagine how much energy would be saved with that!!.
Signature is for people who have more than a dollar in their bank accounts.
to be really energy efficient we would switch the times when we do it
have daylight savings time in the winter and not in summer.
we want more sun in the winter to warm us up and less sun in the summer to cool us off.
this would help all of us consume less energy according to season.
Just when I can get up in daylight , bang , I'm getting up in the dark again. Let people mow their lawns on the weekend. Think of the fuel they will save not driving around saturday morning.
I grew up and went to school in Texas. I had to wait for the bus in the dark. Still here today, 20 years later!
:/
Our school started at 0730, I was at the bus stop around 0640. The argument that kids would have to go to school when it's dark out is STUPID!
I like DST. The more lite we have in the evening the better if you ask me. As far as it saving more in energy...which is worse, running the AC until 2230 or turning on a few 100watt litebulbs at 2130? I no live in the SF Bay Area now and we don't have AC so that argument is kida moot here
FTFA "would save the equivalent of 10,000 barrels of oil a day". What they are realy saing is we would save electricty (gereated from coal, wind, solar, nuke, and a very few oil powerplants), equivilent to that of burning 10,000 barrels of oil. Why did they phrase it that way? to make it sound like some how this would reduce the amount of oil.
I realy have to wonder also if they didn't use the same study that they tried to use in 2001 when the tried looking at this before.
Shut up you bloody Euro! WWII started December 7, 1941!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I think congress should conduct a study on the cost of having everyone wear night vision goggles instead of paying for lighting. You could even have a hand pump for generating the power. All the wankers out there would already be prepared to supply enough power for their units as well as their friends.
It burnses us. We hates it.
I do not understand why do we have to go and change the clock in order to start working an hour earlier?
Why not just change the business hours ?
Very informative - thank you for dismissing the urban legend!
That will save much more. In fact, it's been proven with the speed limit set at 55mph in the U.S. in 1974.
In fact, comsumers could have an impact if they would slow down just on weekends!
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Anyway, we need to come up with a plan for energy independence. Relying on a bunch of nations who think we're Satan for our energy needs should be giving our politicians the screaming heebie-jeebies. We need an apollo-type program to come up with and implement a cohesive plan to eliminate our need for foreign oil.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
What about SUVs that are polluting less than poorly tuned or inefficient cars? A discriminatory rule like this should cut along the line of pollution level instead of vehicle type. Emissions produce numbers, making it easy to categorize vehicles properly. What about new types of vehicles that blur the line between car and SUV?
SUVs are an easy target for environmentalists, and yes, on average, SUVs will pollute more than smaller cars, but it's individual emissions we need to really be concerned about. Instead of continually targeting SUVs (which are suitable vehicles for those whose jobs or lives require that form factor), target high emissions vehicles in general; also advocate that people have their vehicles tuned and checked periodically, dispose of vehicle waste and by-products properly, etc.
Do they actually believe that legislation can change the number of hours of daylight?
Do they plan on slowing the speed at which the planet turns?
If people don't come into work on time, changing a clock isn't going to fix it.
Why are the shifts we do twice a year just one hour anyway ? What is just so special about 1/24th of a day ?
If anyone is going to change his clocks anyway, why not act like real men, determine the optimum shift, be it 54 min or 89 or 124 or whatever, tell the populace the magic scientists said it was better and use it ? Why that arbitrary one hour shift. It's not like someone's gonna notice anymore after two days.
If we were robots we could even adjust each day, but that's extremistic.
I refuse to change my clocks, and stay on daylight savings time all year round. Let everyone else be wrong!
On the shortest day of the year it gets dark at 4:30pm here, and this just isn't right. Therefore it must be 5:30pm
For those that worry about sending kids to school in the dark etc.. just send THEM in an hour later! Why make everyone else suffer?
Contact the Senate energy committee & let 'em know!
http://energy.senate.gov/contact/contact.cfm/
This whole Sun centric clock keeping is a crock of shit and I'll tell you why.
When it's comfortable and there is enough light to see is the time for work. Moonlight, sunlight, it doesn't mnatter. In the middle of a summer day when it's hot one's body says, "take a nap". In the middle of a moonlit summer night when it's comfortably cool one's body says "go do some work or find some booty"
Fucking clocks!
Take a look at this http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap001127.html
Simply mandating that cities turn off every other street light after 2300 hours would save tens of thousands of barrels per day.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
the idea time system for me would simply make time 0 be midnight on the international date line. people seem to be attached to hours and minutes, as cumbersome as they are, so for the sake of argument we'll stick with 24 hours a day, 60 minutes an hour, and leap years, all that. So at 0 hours (or 12 AM if you desire that kind of clock) the people of Kiritimati are asleep, and the people in England are on their lunch break. Bizarrely, this would have the work day in England starting something like 2000 hours (8 PM) and ending something like 400 hours (4 AM). Yes, you might go to work for a regular "daytime" shift on a Tuesday, and come home on a Wednesday. It might possibly confuse people at first, but fairly quickly it would be known that Englanders work "8 PM to 4 AM", New Yorkers work "1 AM to 9 AM", and only the Kiritimatis would be able to say they work the traditional "9 AM to 5 PM" shift. But "4 AM Wednesday" would be the exact same "time" everywhere in the world and no time zone or daylight savings qualifier would be necessary.
/sarcasm) the schools and businesses of New York don't actually have to be set from 1 AM to 9 AM. Hell, it could be dark at 1 AM for God's sake! So there could be a seasonable shift of typical business and school hours to be from 2 AM to 10 AM, for example, if there were sufficient local demand (which school times being set would likely create).
Now (and here's the part where it gets tricky!
Anyway the mere fact of surrounding ourselves with clocks is a bizarre and uniquely human thing. Most creatures use, oh, the Sun to determine when to do things like crow, eat, migrate. But not us, we use the almighty clock and then stand bamboozled and baffled when we have little problems matching up what the clock says to where the glowing yellow source of life on this planet happens to be, and invent all kinds of torturous schemes and strategems to force our clocks to "work".
MORTAR COMBAT!
Fucktard Wasting Oxygen
Instead of having to fiddle with the clocks twice a year due to some holdover thinking from a more agrarian era... Why not just change our time to 1/2 hour between standard time and daylight saving time?
Since we're currently on DST the idea would be to move our clocks back 1/2 an hour (in the fall as usual) and then leave them there from here on out. No more stupid switching our clocks foward/back twice a year to give us an illusion of having a longer day.
"But what about the chiiiillldren?" I hear you saying. Let the chiiiillldren go to school at a reasonable hour like 9AM - many highschools are starting to do this anyway so their students can get more sleep and learn better.
Arizona has the right idea: they don't mess with their clocks.
Some years ago I had a bug in a Windows NT system caused by DST handling. The problem only surfaced in the period between when the US and Europe went on/off DST. There's a period of about a week when they are not in sync. The symptom of this was that system events displayed via the standard Windows GUI were different than when accessed through a character mode terminal. Same data source: the NT Event Log. After some debugging to make sure it wasn't our code and some back and forth with Microsoft I discovered that the libc.dll code subtraced the hour for non-DST (or added for DST, I forget which. . .this was a while ago) at some point in the code and then further down in the code did it again (oops). The pure Win32 API did the computation correctly.
We got the DLL code and considered fixing it there but I didn't want to be in the DLL maintenance business so we pressed MS for a solution. In the end MS Support came up with a computation that used big decimals and turned the timestamps into pico-seconds since 1,000,000 BC (or something like that) and then back into MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS format. This worked reliably in both applications.
Every time I hear of time-zone questions I think of this story.
Good idea. And, with the current administration, very appropriate.
(He sez while ducking to avoid Bush Backers taking aim...)
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I am still sitting here scratching my head trying to figure out how this could be of any benifit at all. Every office I have worked (I work for the USAF in sunny California) leave all their lights and all their computers running 24/7. So no savings there. Next arguement, wont need to use oil for heating, true, we would have to run the A/C longer. Which one uses more power? Gas heat, or electric A/C? The last "Power Crunch" here in CA, we had rolling black outs during mid day, when A/C is most used. I can't even imagine how the people up on the hill would think this proposal would make any significant benefit. Maybe I am just too uneducated in these matters. On a side note about gas. Today, gas prices in my area are now up to $2.89/gal. Gas has gone up more than 30cents a gallon in the last 2 weeks.
If you (general "you") see a third party you like better than the Republicans and Democrats, start advocating them now, not only in the 6-12 months before Election Day like we usually end up doing - by that time most people have already started making up their minds because it's "election time" again, and the old "I'm not voting for them because they won't win anyway" kicks in.
DST is stupid. In fact, time zones are stupid. I say we get rid of both, the we can straighten this out. Who cares if the sun rises at 5:00PM? In fact, AM/PM would be silly. Sun rises at 17:00 round here, I have to be at work at 18:00 and get home 8 hours after that. Nothing has changed, except when I pick up the phone and call halfway around the world, both parties can immediatly know what time it is. It's NOW. It's now every where at once (effectivly, on earth anyway). Why does now have a different label depending on where that damn ball of fire is in the sky?
I can't remember where I saw the statistic, but I remember reading that the number of accidents involving motor vehicles sharply increases the week after either DST change. Basically, on the day that people "spring forward," drivers and pedestrians are more exhausted and less likely to be reacting quickly enough. *shrug* And honestly, doesn't the "10,000 barrels of oil" sound like an exact rehash, right down to the amount, of the original DST proposal?
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Not really an urban myth. It was actually true in the early days of flourescents, and that's how the "myth" got started. Modern designs are much better.
However, turning the bulb off will shorten its life. It seems that bulbs only deteriorate when powering on. So one can calculate the break-even point based on bulb and electricity costs.
Many more communting accidents happen in the pre-dawn hours. Also, the idea that crime is reduced (because "everyone" comes home from work during the early evening), favors people with conformist work schedules, and severely impacts people with sleep disorders.
If people want to adjust their work schedule they should be allowed to do that. Start coming in at 7 instead of 8, or whatever. But to make the clock change mandatory stinks like so much state control of the basic aspects of life.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
The RIAA and Dolly Parton have huge lobbyists in DC who got buy-in that it would just be cheaper to change DST instead of mess with the working hours.
Their analogy was to the failed attempt at going metric in the 70s, and what an embarrasment that was.
Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and (apparently) 10,000 barrels of oil a day richer.
Just when you think government can't possibly get any stupider.
1) Auto industry finds a loophole in CAFE standards
2) Oil consumption skyrockets
3) Bush administration introduces tax breaks for massive passenger vehicles
4) Oil consumption increases further.
Suggested solution: change clocks.
You just can't make this stuff up. If its not illegal yet, some US TV studio should really do a knock off of "Yes, Minister."
If we really want to save energy, why not make school and work weeks only 4 days? Then people wouldn't need to travel on Friday (just leisure travel). Sure, normal work day becomes 10-hours for most people, but you get a 3-day weekend.
:)
A company I worked for did it for summer hours, allowed people to do it if they wanted to, and I wanted to
Save a life, sign your organ donor card.
"Relying on a bunch of nations who think we're Satan for our energy needs"
because USians just want to give freedom to the opressed and only by coincidence all the opressed live in land soaked with oil
well, you can kiss my ass with your freedom theories
and yes, you USians are evil
I've already decided to start voting Libertarian in all local and state races. It's harder to do at the federal level though, because Congress are a bunch of partisan whiners. Perhaps it is best to start voting for third party Congresspeople before trying to get one into the Presidency. Baby steps, you know.
I was told by someone who was heavily involved in the government analysis (yes, there was government analysis) of the last major change to Daylight Saving Time, that there was very considerable lobbying by the candy industry to move the end from the last Sunday in October to the first Sunday in November. Their reason was an extra hour of trick-or-treating, which would have greatly increased candy sales in October.
This is not a legal opinion, no representation is expressed or implied.
How bad can it be if your computer is one hour off? If you're really bothered by it, you change the hardware clock manually (since Windows assumes the hardware clock is in local, season dependent time anyway, and PC Un*xes can conform to this). The DST season used to be different between European countries, and a few years ago this changed. I don't remember any problems over it.
This is not comparable to the Y2K problem.
Your computer will not suddenly think that your grandgrandmother is only 2 years old. It will not think all you're files have changed. Most applications care about days, years, and about the relations 'earlier / later / younger / older'. These things are not affected much by a one hour time shift, whenever it may take place.
Sure, time ought to perfectly monotonous, and therefore all timestamps should be in GMT (local time should only be calculated when presenting it to the user), but this has never been the case on Windows systems, are we seem to be getting away with it.
The present time zones are just a holdever from the 1800's to suit the railroads.
In this internationial economy, everyone should just use GMT.
I eat my lunch at 16:00Z on the Atlantic coast while you could eat your lunch at 19:00Z on the Pacific coast.
How many parts of the country run their A/C at all during March and November?
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
If it were practical to do this, the sun would always rise at 7 am, and sunset would be 7 am + however many hours of daylight there are. Heading into the summer, I'd have more daylight hours after leaving work (at the summer solstice, the sun wouldn't set until after 11 pm), which would be excellent for my happiness.
Of course, even better (and easier) would be a move away from the ridiculous notion that everyone should be at work at the same time, and that the wall clock should mean the same thing everywhere in the world. Think about the first point: if people went to work at different times instead of all leaving their homes at 8 am, current roadways would be more than sufficient to handle all traffic: no rush hour; more even levels of traffic.
And the second point: why this arbitrary reliance on a particular number on the clock to denote the start of the day? Why can't the sun rise at 4 pm or at 11 pm or at 3 am?
Let's just move to GMT, free up workers from the 9-5 rush hour chain, and everyone will be happier.
[ home ]
When air conditioning wasn't readily available people were smart enough to build houses that didn't need them. In fact, in parts of the world people still know how to. That's an area where the US could use some technology transfer from, let's say, Mali.
I'm suprised that they haven't decided on the obvious solution, make people work longer hours.
My other first post is car post.
Just pick one type of time (DST or standard) and stick to it?
"Do I dare disturb the universe?"
If modern software engineering was competent, it would be a few lines of code per platform, most of which would auto-update themselves. Again, this would have been implemented during the Y2K thing.
Unfortunately, software engineering is an oxymoron. It will cost millions of lines of code per platform, millions of new bugs, no regression tests will be run, about 10,000 projects will fail, there will be half a dozen Strategic Air Defense false alarms, and at least on giant poo geyser at a sewage treatment plant.
We should jump 12 hours and work and night and sleep when its hot
Here in Brazil we change it twice a year. I mean, every year, the government changes the date DST begins and then the date it ends based on a number of spurious factors. Mostly, I think, some politician discovers his wife bought the wrong air tickets and then pressures whoever to change it. Well, maybe not that, but it sure looks like it.
Get the tzdata for Brazil and check it out some time. Real funny. Hah Hah.
As a matter of fact, one something like that did happen. The Papa (yes, the one who just died) was arriving in Brazil in the first or second DST week, and international TV stations covering it found out they bought the wrong time slot on the satellite. So, screw us, they changed DST's date.
Because of all that, honestly, US plight is ridiculous. No decent system works with local time instead of absolute time, and Windows doesn't work anyway (EVEN if the date didn't change here every year, they mixed the sundays it begins/ends -- hell, does Outlook work with DST yet?).
(8-DCS)
What does that have to do with "gas-saving"? SUVs generally get bad gas mileage. That's the complaint, not how much pollution they generate.
It seems obvious that it is a good idea for the EU to switch to daylight saving time all at the same time. So obvious that EU had to adopt a directive saying so nine times. The seventh time they got the date defined in a unique way. The eighth time they defined the hour. The nineth time they finally figured out that they had to define the hour and the time zone to make the switch (otherwise Britain and France are out of synch for one hour).
So it is has already been practiced, switching rules. Go ahead.
Wasn't April Fools last week?
Typical government, always running behind schedule...
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
...they could stop building so many fucking SUVs!
"We shall party like the Greeks of old! You know the ones I mean." - HedonismBot
With the invention of Daylight Savings, we realise that politicians will lie to us even if we merely ask them what time it is.
I work in the power industry, and I can tell you that having 23 hours one day and 25 hours another day causes much trouble for a computer programmer who needs to keep track of every hour. It's a lot of extra coding time, and there are many ways of doing it. The extra two months shouldn't cause too many problems, as all you need to do is change the day we switch from DST. But having one year's DST change be in a different month than another year will cause problems or a least confusion.
Why can't we change to daylight savings time and stay there forever? Kind of like Arizona. Also, I'd like to see the details of the studies that say we'll save electricity from changing the times around.
Other than whether many states don't just put gas taxes in the general fund...
Gas taxes aren't quite a "pay per use" with regards to roads. Even if you don't drive, you still gain benefits from public roads. Do you get products delivered to you? Do you bicycle? Are you in an area with ambulance service? Do you buy products at a store that has goods shipped to them? It used to be people very rarely bought goods that came from more than a day's walk away. That was about how far you could ship produce economically.
Plus, don't hybrids tend to be light cars? You'd think that a hybrid vehicle would probably put less wear and tear on a road than a tractor trailer, pickup truck, or SUV.
Though, I'd expect in most parts of the U.S. (those with seasons), most damage to roads comes from the weather - not cars. (If that were the case, you'd expect everybody to pay equally - not a gas tax)
Hawaii is 20 degrees from the equator, the sun rises and sets at almost the same time of day every day of the year. It's also why Hawaii has the same temperature ~80F every day of the year.
"While I certainly wouldn't discount releases of many previously classified technologies and growth of the internet, there was a consider amount of capital put into hardware and software upgrades in the mid-to-late nineties."
A lot of money was thrown at programmer to deal with this issue..a lot of money.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Congress has added an amendment to the Energy Bill to extend daylight-savings time by two months.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Now that I'm an adult, I actually like DST. Sure it's a pain in the ass to set the clocks -- and I still don't like the getting up early, but it's only 2 days a year. Plus, whenever I travel between the east coast and the west coast, I have to adjust to the 3 hour difference anyway, so 1 hour is nothing! Having an extra hour of daylight in the evenings is really great -- when I come home from work I can still go running in the daylight; or sit in the hammock in the yard; or go to the outdoor pool (it stays open later). Sleep is great, but having "more" evening after work is even better.
1. Congress can do this: raise an army and navy, build post offices, etc.
2. Congress CAN'T do this: give titles of nobility, pull habeas corpus, etc.
3. Oh yeah, they can also do anything necessary and proper to further the goals of the constitution.
I can't say if the entire nation operates like this, but the California power industry used to use a billing system based on "Hour Ending". Every power transaction took place in a 60-minute window so rather than saying "time at which this even started", they simply counted the hours.We used a standard database backend (timeval) and stored the actual starting time and then converted to-and-from the HE value.
This is nightmarish around DST. On the "fall back" day there are actually *25* hours in a day. Thus, in Hour-Ending, how to deal with this? Answer: the 25th hour, existing as a singular instance all year is thus decreed to be the second three such that time runs: 1, 2, 3, 25, 4.
Likewise there was a missing hour on the "spring forward" day to accomodate this and make sure the world didn't explode. In essence this made every conversion PST/DST-specific with special handling for the extra hour. That the timechange occurs in the middle of the night rather than, say, midnight makes the conversion-moment determination that much more fun.
Do this UST->HE and HE->UST for a few functions and you will learn the un-triviality of DST tomfoolery.
If its such a big deal, just have everything happen an hour earlier. Today you went to work at eight, but tomorrow you will go to work at nine. Won't that be so much better?
Wouldn't one solution be to give December and January off in the school year, and just have the days made up in Summer?
Also, what could be done is to increase the school day by an hour or so during the late-Spring, and try cutting the number of school days out.
If both of the above is done, couldn't that work?
stop drinking coffee? I've never drank coffee and I'm still dead tired. When you have to be a "day person" to work 9-10 hours and then talk with friends/relatives/significant other who are "night persons", you find yourself on a lack of sleep. It's not about ridding yourself of caffine, it's about actually having time to get that full 8 hours sleep. And in the good ol' US, that's just crazy talk thanks to computers helping us do so many tasks for work....*rolls eyes*
I'm an adult amateur athlete (ultimate), and it's either a hassle or not possible to get lights for weekday evening play in the winter. I get more exercise with DST, presumably saving health care dollars as well. This is a latitude-specific solution, but here in North Carolina USA we could play more than 10 months of the year if we only had DST in the Winter.
DST All Year!
Verbum caro factum est
ah... 10am, bed, what a nice combination. :)
I get 7 hours of sleep most nights. Or 5-6, at least. I still wake up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed every morning.
If you're not taking caffeine, and have a hard time waking up, it's likely your diet sucks little green horny toads.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
As a fellow Arizonan, I also find DST to be puzzling.
I once worked for a company who had certain people who worked outside. To spare the workers some of the summer heat, they simply changed the work schedule for summer, starting an hour earlier than the non-summer schedule.
Also it's a minor PITA trying to figure out when to call out of state since their start/quit time relative to us is always changing.
Actually most people know it doesn't really extend the daylight... people are pretty stupid but not THAT stupid.
I just like it because Im a lazy bastard and wake up late in the day anyway- so it virtually makes no difference to me.
This is terrible! All that extra sun is going to be really hard on my lawn! And it will causes droughts and crop failures from the extra hours of sun! This could be a worse disaster than global warming...
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
See, that would make sense.
So we cant have that.
Understand now?
emt 377 emt 4
10,000 barrels saving out of 20 mil barrels is only 0.05%, that is hardly a drop in the ocean and will not achieve anything. the only real way that we will get anywhere is if we start scaling down on gusseling suv's, big cars that burn through gasoline in return for an illusion of safety. alternatively, and this is what i have done, is people should move back into the cities and use public transportation thus dissipating the cost of fuel per person to almost nothing. there was a good article in the new yorker magazine written about the efficiency of new york city because everyone uses public transportation and although the city consumes tons of energy, there's also 10 mil+ people living here and thus it is actually much more efficient than someone living out in the middle of nowhere and has to drive 10 miles each way to rent a video in a ford explorer.
--
http://unk1911.blogspot.com
Not that I would have invaded Iraq in the first place. And actually as the duly appointed representative for all things USAian, I would have started an Apollo-like program to come up with and implement ideas for American energy independence after the oil embargo in the '70's and none of this unpleasantness would have ever have taken place in the first place.
Barring that my regime would implement strict mandates for public transportation, emission controls and gas mileage and would be taxing gasoline up to twice its current price in the states to fund my aforementioned Apollo-like program.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
then we'd have been in a better mood because DST would have just given us an EXTRA hour!
Tyranny isn't the worst enemy of a democracy. Cynicism is.
Everyone just do everything one hour earlier. There you go. No expensive code changes required. ;-)
I live north, way north, so far north in the summer we have days with no real night.
Just get up with the sun and go to bed when it's late, learn to deal with a world where work starts at 10am not 8am. It's stupid. China does pretty good with only one time zone and no daylight savings time. People will get used to it. Stupid daylight savings time.
While I'm on the topic how about metric time? I propose 1 day length days and decimal time so noon would be 0.5!
mwahahaha
ok I'll shut up now
Everyone on the western edge of a time zone thinks this is stupid. I spent most of my life on the west edge of a time zone. I went through 2 winters in high school walking to school in the dark. My kids now go to school in the semi dark today. I do really like the late evening twilight Those on the eastern edge of a time zone probably won't mind. The last time they changed DST I had to deal with a slew of bug reports (for Lucid Common lisp if anyone cares). I then discovered a failry nice declarative format for describing when to adjust the time. It really shouldn't be a big programming deal. Most slashdotters don't ever see the sun anyway.
I get more daylight with DLS because daylight does not exist for me when I am asleep. Perhaps to the sidewalk in front of building the time is just getting moved around (per your blanket analogy). But to me, since when I awake is based on a clock and not on the sun, the extra hour of daylight does indeed come out of "nowhere."
That's a nice and cute pretend argument. It doesn't change the reality that for the majority of people, they have indoor jobs and spend the morning hours getting ready and going to work and indoors at work. It's not an extra hour of daylight, it's an extra hour of USABLE daylight for most people. That's why it's nice. I'm not arguing whether or not the annoyances of DST outweigh the "benefits," but your argument against it is just a little silly and misses the point. You argue semantics when some people obviously seem to like it!
I see what we REALLY need! Instead of having time zones based loosely on longitude, we need time zones based on latitude as well. Then, all the people who gripe that the sun rises at XYZ am during the summer will be happy. Because obviously, they wouldn't possibly move between the tropics and STFU.
In all seriousness, as much as I hate daylight time I hate hearing about the sun rising too early based on your latitude. Frickin' move if it sucks, why burden everybody with your obscure desire to have the sun "rise" at some arbitrary definition of "late enough".
In what way will moving the clock an hour two months more save anything? Contrary to what our idiot politicians may think, increasing daylight savings time does not create additional daylight, it just moves the start and stop of night over briefly. That time of year, the day is about 11 1/2 hrs long, so how the hell will shifting when you wake up or go to sleep affect anything at all? The work day is bright, and we still use lights at home?
This has to be the stupidest idea I've ever heard, I bet it passed with an overwhelming vote.
What studies? I'd love to show those to my boss. I was up 'till 6:30am Monday morning coding... he's been pulling all kinds of tricks at work to try to get me to be more productive at the office, and to have to work less from home. I appreciate the tings he's done to try to make my life more comfortable but I've suggested to him that maybe programmers just work better at night. It'd be nice to be able to cite a study.
Let's cover it...
a) I'm not a morning person
b) My work hours are relatively fixed (roughly 9-5)
c) I'm a photographer, and I like working outside
That pretty much means I spend all winter awaiting the arrival of DST so I have light outside after work.
On the other hand, going to DST full time will actually cause me to burn more oil, since I'll spend more time in my car wandering about.
Sweden made a similar change a few years ago, and I can't remember any significant problems.
you don't create wealth by changing the date. if that were true, then we could just randomly add bugs to code, and we'd all get rich fixing them.
people said the same thing about the tsunami. they said the economy would grow because of all the great new construction projects. if thats true then why don't we have the government just bulldoze new york city every 10 years? that ought to generate heaps of wealth.
Actually UTC is the correct term for the "Universal Time" not GMT, altough it is the same time.
From Wikipedia:
For most practical and legal-trade purposes, the fractional difference between UTC and UT (or, GMT) is inconsequentially small, and for this reason UTC is colloquially called GMT sometimes, even if this is not technically correct.
if thats true then why not just randomly insert lots of bugs into our code. the whole country will become enormously wealthy. in fact everyone should add defects to their products so we can all make money fixing the defects.
i don't think making bad products is a strategy that will create wealth.
Let's redefine miles to be 2640 feet! Who needs a hybrid?
I've replaced all my 100 watt bulbs with 13watt flourscent bulbs and I've noticed a difference on my power bill.
I have also rebuilt all my pc's with processors that can run in Cool-n-Quiet modes (XPC's) and such and I noticed another break on my power bill. In the case of PC's you dont need more wattage you need quality power supplies.
...we don't have Daylight Savings unfortunately. Most other states here do, the lucky sods. So like a lot of others here, we start early and finish early. We're effectively working DST hours. Myself, I start 7:30am and finish 3:50pm. Works for me!
For extra fun, the next time somebody asks you what time it is, give it to them in Zulu time. This is especially fun with DST, since the distance from GMT changes in the states. Makes it much easier to screw with pilots the day after we switch onto/off of DST.
I can picture a world without war, without hate.
But can you picture a world without DST?
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
You can even stagger the 4-10's. One week it's MTuWTh, the next it's TuWThF. Then you get 2-day weekends half the time, like usual, and 4-day weekends the other half.
With more draconian measures, we might be able to save as much as 000.05% of our daily usage, which is a much biggerer amount.
ban SUV's
:)
thats right. BAN those f--king things.
people that drive them, drive recklessly, and they burn far more gas than my 4 cylinder car does.
Remember 'what would jesus drive' ?
get rid of SUV's and gas usage will plummet.
force more economical cars. wont hurt me, but it will hurt the in-debt poor average greedy american.
Probably not nearly as long as you'd think. Keeping the clock set to the right time tends to be the job of the operating system, and OS's have had the problem of variable daylight savings times fixed for quite a while now.
I remember that when Sydney hosted the 2000 Olympics, we moved the timing of Daylight Savings around so it wouldn't disrupt the Games. I didn't notice any banks closing or planes dropping out of the sky. I didn't even have to manually change the settings on any of my computers: they just got the new settings in some random software update.
Charles
The more I learn about the Internet, the more amazed I am that it works at all.
The at the equinox, the sun rises at 6AM. After the time change, that's 7AM.
I'm already in the western half of my time zone, and the sun tomorrow will come up at 6:44AM, after the adjustment.
I do understand that you can't make the sun shine longer, but your stuff about when the sun comes up is just lies.
Given that we work 9 to 5 instead of 8 to 4, moving an hour of sun from the morning to the evening makes a ton of sense. It really can save power.
I say just increase the gas tax for non-trucks or delivery vehicles. Having more innefficient vehicles pay more is fairly natural since they tend to be heavier -> cause more road wear.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
It seems to me that we still have the traces of sunlight close to 9:30PM in AZ. If we did DST, we'd be pushing 10:30 in the middle of the summer.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
mod parent up, Jesus H. Christ, as the most sensible thing anyone's said all day!
they'll want us to unplug our clocks at night
That is a good idea but we should use UTC, not GMT. Remember that while UTC is measured by atomic clocks, GMT or UT1 is measured by the actual position of the earth in space. Atomic clock time is what the banks, radio controlled wall clocks, and computers (with NTP or SNTP) use already.
I've lived here for 6 years and love the fact that I don't have to play the fall back/forward time game! It's very nice to be able to leave work in the winter while it's still light (it doesn't get dark here until 5:30). The only bad thing is that my family and friends in other states can never remember what time it is here. I've read where our legislature wants to change this to be more business friendly...however the issue has been on the voting ballet for several years without successfully passing. People here don't want to have to join the game, but now it's out of the voter's hands -- I'm sure we'll be playing this stupid game next fall!:( I too, am sick of all the businesses that leave all of their lights on during the night and weekend! Whenever I work late at my office I go around and shut down most of the lights, leaving a couple on for safety purposes. I've always been turning lights out around my house because my father taught me how to conserve due to the fact he lived through the Great Depression. If we all did this just think of all the energy we'd save!
With the extra sunlight, won't the earth get hotter, and so make global warming even worse?
will the a/c
-d
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Common-rail diesel engines using B100 fuel produced from US-grown rapeseed crops and corn-based ethanol. Done.
Well, maybe it wouldn't cover ALL of the oil we import, but I bet it would be a helluva start, and we already know exactly how to do it.
someone who cares please explain it to the idiots that modded him up. im not going to explain it any more than i would try to explain that gravity is a force or something.
The cost of extending daylight savings time is measureable in human lives.
Lest we forget, this idea was tried once before. It was reversed when it was realized it meant school children were having to walk to school or wait at bus stops in the dark, and that school busses were running around transporting kids with drivers whose circadian rythems still said it was night time. Eventually the danger to human lives and the sheer idiocy of it overwhelmed the idea.
Further the record of the attempt actually demonstrated that it didn't save energy at all. Since businesses, schools, homes and other facilities had to turn on the heat earlier and turn on lighting earlier it actually cost energy.
Governments attempt to attempt to change the sideral day are foolish. Let them stick to their junkets and leave the physical motion of the planet and the precession of it's axis to nature.
I have never seen a workspace in a home or elsewhere which operated with lights off. Similarly, with many households having a person home during the day, I have not seen many with the air conditioning off.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Not all of indiana refuses to observe DST. A few counties do.
The whole idea is stupid anyway. There are still 24 hours in a day why pretend by changing the clock around.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
so under your plan I have to adjust my watch a few minutes every damn day?
That sounds wonderful.
Did you think before you wrote that?
Nothing has changed, except when I pick up the phone and call halfway around the world, both parties can immediatly know what time it is.
I'm not sure if this is a good idea. I mean, it sounds reasonable: Saving 10,000 barrels of oil a day, and basically not having to do anything to do so. I think that the costs of switching over to this new method will outweigh the benefits, however.
One of the biggest problems with this is that not everybody would follow it. Many locations don't follow Daylight Savings Time now. I think that this will make things even more confusing than they already are.
I say that since so many events depend on time, and such inconsistancies cause many problems, that we get rid of it altogether, but that's beyond the scope of this topic, so I won't get into it.
INACTIVE ACCOUNT
Most of the people that I have talked to that know a bit about the history of DST agree that Ben Franklin was not serious about a clock altering proposal. Quite the opposite in fact: He jokingingly concluded that DST would be the Parisians reaction to a proposed tax on candles.
You should direct your scorn at William Willett.
Which makes it even harder the get the kids to sleep at the needed time.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Yes! *Finally* I'd be able to arrange something at X-time and not have to mess with four different timezones at the office!
People think I'm nuts, but I honestly have no problem going to work at 1400Z and eating lunch at 1800Z. People in a given area (not necessarily bounded where the timezones are now) would simply adapt to given on/off times. People on the east cost of the US would likely start work at 1600Z, for instance.
Here in Sydney (and most of NSW) we have had a number of changes. The dates have gone back and forth during the 80s and 90s. Also for the Olympics in 2000 we started Daylight Savings 2 months early. Just for that one year. It hasn't changed since 2000.
Uhh... good ideas, but definitely not simple. Think of the logistics of implementing 1 or 2. The tax part would be good although I doubt it would do anything to reduce oil consumption. It would just put more money in the governments coffers. Although I'm certain it would push the big 5 to start pumping out more hybrids and spur research into more alternative fuel sources.
I think a fun thing to do would be to repaint the lines on the roads so that SUVs could no longer fit. Use the extra space for bike lanes.
And I think bike lanes should have jumps and other obstacles installed in them, which are just fun for bikers, but would totally demolish any cars that think they can drive in the lane.
Actually why stop there... as long as we're dreaming, I think we should install nerf or water balloon cannons along side major freeways. When they detect a car with only one occupant they fire at will. Imagine the awesomeness.
There have actually been quite a few changes to daylight savings time over the years. Therefore, I think the best code changes to make in software are to make daylight savings time into a preference that the user can set, where the user determines when daylight savings time goes into effect and when it comes out of effect. Then, you don't have to worry too much about all this junk.
Oh, and I really think that only the operating system needs to be modified. Practically everything else gets its time from the OS.
We need an apollo-type program to come up with and implement a cohesive plan to eliminate our need for foreign oil.
:)(Caution: For humorous application only. Do not take seriously. If taken seriously, call a comedian immediately. Do not induce vomiting. The comedian will do that for you.)
I have a simpler plan: walking, bicycling, good insulation, look for and buy efficient appliances, don't commute in the SUV. Use that for vacations. Use a more efficient vehicle for daily drives, stop subsidizing the oil industry to keep the price below the alternatives, vote for politicians that aren't industry shills, vote for good public transportation. The petrol companies buy from those nations because it's cheap. There will be no change until the profits from the way we do things now dry up. The companies don't care who hates whom. The resulting wars just add to the profits. Even though we use only 1% of all the water on the planet, we are preparing for war over that, instead of looking for an effective way of harvesting rain. The simple fact is that war and hate generate cash flow.
I'm sick of springing forward and falling back!
You think it's crazy up there? Here, the daylight doesn't vary by more than two hours. DST is nothing more than useless time shifting. I'm not sure if it's a result of NAFTA, but I'm pretty sure that it's just to keep our clocks synced with the Americans. There is no reason to change the clocks if you live between the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn.
Better yet how about we ALL just start going by GMT!
I thought about that, and then how am I going to know when the sun goes down in Austrailia? What time do they crash at night? For me it's easier just to ask what time it is over there. I'm not sure which worse, one time zone with the sun rising and setting at every hour, or the 24 we have now and the sun doing its thing at pretty much the same "time" everywhere.
GMT's the One True Timezone anyway.
Hogwash! Heathen! Heretic! The international date line is the one true timezone. GMT is just another attempt by the Brits to control us all
What?
Extending DST back into March, and especially prolonging it through November, is futile. On the winter side of the equinox dates, there isn't surplus daylight going to waste. You get up before dawn and start turning on lights as you get your kids out of bed and get yourself ready for work. You turn up the heat, because those pre-dawn hours are the coldest time of day (or the "set-back" thermostat does it for you). It's still dark when you leave for work, and it's already dark when you get home. If anything, DST should end a month earlier than it does now: no later than the end of September. At that time of year, setting the alarm clock for 6am means you wake up at dawn (think "equinox"). Enforcing DST during winter winter days means more people will be be and about before daybreak. That's counter-productive for energy savings!
Getting everybody to use GMT would complicate the issue of "what time it is where you are?" still further! All that will happen is, isntead of you saying "It's 09:00 here, what time is it where you are? Oh, 17:00", you say, "It's 09:00 here, what time is it where you are? Oh, 09:00. Great. So what time is really? Are you having your lunch? Going home from work? In bed, not due to wake up in two hours?" because you don't know and now you can't even GUESS.
What I do think should happen is there should be options in instant messaging systems, MSN, AIM etc., where you can enter your personal time zone. Then, at least, you can display the local time for anybody you are talking to automatically and save an awful lot of hassle.
qntm.org
No. See this is actually a throwback to when lots of kids actually did farm chores. Paw didn't need ta hire no hands 'cause he had 10 youngins to do the work. Cain't hav'em off learnin' while thars chores ta be done. Pitchforks, plows, and real back breaking work. Didn't you ever wonder why school kids got three months off in the summer? Not a problem these days though. Large corporations do all the farming (and a good share of tax cheating) with illegal immigrant labor while kids think milk comes from the grocery store and parents wouldn't dream of letting little Johnny handle anything sharper than a plush foam bat.
Ahhh progress! It's great to live in an age where you get to be a wage slave to your 'pay till you die' interest only Smart Loan(TM). I'd hate to live in such a backwards age where I had to own land and raise my own food. So much nicer when I get my beef from farms where the livestock is bathed in and fed their own feces.
I hate Daylight Savings Time.
I had a conversation with some Chinese graduate students this week. They said, "we tried this for one, maybe two years - then we stopped it. No one liked it. Do Americans really like it?"
I replied that no one I knew liked it - in fact no one I knew had a feeling warmer than great disdain for it.
I've read enough of the comments that cite energy savings and doubts about those savings. All I can say is, unless the savings are staggering (much more than I have seen cited), it isn't worth the trouble. All of my co-workers, employees, students and clients are tired, grumpy or simply call in sick. The work done frequently has to be redone once inspected (if the inspector catches it, of course). The productivity hit, the lag of folks who forget about the change, and the accidents that happen from sleepy people just is just not worth it.
Daylight Saving(s) Time already killed one industry: Drive in theatres.
In the summer the sun is ALREADY going down later (as well as coming up earlier) than in winter. Daylight saving(s) time pushed sundown still further back. Result: People who had to get up for work or whatever were on such an early schedule that they couldn't stay awake to watch a movie or two after sundown. Goodbye drive-ins, hello indoor multiplex theatres (and flea markets on the defunct drive-ins' lots).
In the summer there is ALREADY no shortage of daylight. What is short is night.
So IMHO what we REALLY need is (drumroll please):
Nightlife Saving Time!
Move the clocks BACK an hour in the summer!
With the sun going down at a reasonable time we'll all be able to party properly again. Think of the boost to the economy from THAT.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"who in their right mind is actually awake at 5 AM to enjoy the daylight?" More than you think. For over five years I got up at 5 to 5. Before that, for a couple of years I was in Idaho Falls where the local radio station played Reveille every morning at 5 AM. They expected someone to be getting up. Now I get to sleep until 6 AM. Total Decadence! As an unrelated aside, if it's over 40 at 6:30 AM, I'll take the motorcycle (at 52 mpg). If it's under 40, I take the truck (16 mpg) So pushing the ride to work closer to sunrise (when it's coldest) will force me to burn more gas, not save gas.
Feh. It's not hard to change the timezone setup (on Linux, at least). /etc/zoneinfo just has to have the right settings, and you're good to go.
10K from 20M? That is 0.05%. I think there are other places that we can save 10K barrels a day! How about more fuel efficent cars?
All OSes allow for changes in DST regulations - remember (oh, sorry, it's slashdot) there are more places than the USA. For Linux, look at /usr/share/zoneinfo/ ... update the appropriate file, and go on as normal.
If you want difficult, look into Easter!
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
Sheila Danzig has a clever suggestion. The Pacific and Central time zones should remain on daylight saving time, and the Mountain and Eastern time zones should remain on standard time. This would effectively reduce the number of time zones in the continental United States from four to two, it would reduce the time difference between the coasts, and it would end the pointless fiddling with clocks.
The last real nationwide problem was Y2k. The problem was known about for quite some time but nobody cared. Only after private enterprises decided they couldn't possibly put off the expense ANY longer, was there any real push to fix the problems. What did we do to escape it? Three prongs of government answers
* Protection from liabilty to software makers
* Tax write offs for y2k related expenses
* Extra pressure from the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low to encourage capital expenitures like y2k fixes.
I don't have to tell you how many businesses came close to missing it, and how many accidentally missed a few edge cases. We should all thank god it was a reasonably simple task of reviewing code. If the next crisis to befall us is diminished oil (we should be so lucky), there are major crucial differences between these two. Major political players in several states are invested in oil, and would profit less by reducing demand for oil. Compared to y2k, alternative energy requires a lot more work, and ingeniuity. We have to re-imagine everything from transportation and shipping to manufacturing processes, all of which require copious amounts of oil or oil derivatives. The only saving grace here is that oil supplies are likely to diminish slowly, and costs are likely to rise in step. Should OPEC decide that America represents a small enough market (compared to EU, Russia India and China) to consider embargoing the USA for its political hostility (ousting OPEC regimes and all), that would be the end of the saving grace.
The Libertarian liberated-market philosphy says that we should endure this. The y2k crisis was not a disaster, and we should expect no less concerning oil. If worst comes to worst, a disaster would provide tremendous incentive to find a solution immediately. Unfortunately, that analysis also implies widespread unemployment, with subsequent trickle down consequences. From a utilitarian standpoint, its much better for everyone involved if we address this problem before it matters, not after.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
This is not an account you have at the bank. It is not Daylight Savings (with an 's') but, rather, Daylight Saving Time.
because too many kids get run over while waiting in the dark for the school bus if you don't change back during winter.
OK, just kidding.
\\ got nothin'
--something witty
The chances of my ever stepping foot in the state of Texas remain unchanged at 0%.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
How cool is it for it to be dark for trick-or-treating? Apparently, it will now be light out. Where's the fun in that?
In Saskatoon, which is southern Saskatchewan, the sun rises at around 09:50 in December towards the longest day of the year. It sets around 16:20.
:p
With ~6 hours of daylight, there's nothing you're saving. Saskatchewan, thankfully, is one of the few places in North America which does not follow DST. Of course, in the summer, the shortest night is roughly 4 hours.
I'm not even going to mention how stupid it is to have DST north of 60 degrees.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
that's something satan would say
This is my plan for making the world a better place. If we are going to have more DST, let's also have more uniformity in our months. 13 months with 4 weeks of 7 days each. Every year has 1 day equivalent to a leap day. It can be the last/first day of the year. It doesn't count as a day (like Monday-Sunday) but just helps to keep things together. With this idea, you have the ease of knowing that the first of the month is always on Monday (or Sunday) no matter what month it is. Each month is uniform and no more of these 31 days? 28? 30? How many days in April? August? January? All that just seems to be needlessly complex. Anyway, that's what this change of DST makes me think of...
If everyone used synthetic motor oil instead of petroleum based oil we would save a lot of money and reduce our dependency on other countries.
This company has the right answer:
http://www.amsoil.com/redirect.cgi?&zo=533525
Libertas in infinitum
Nonsense. In the summer months, the sun rises earlier (and sets later too), so getting up earlier makes perfect sense, because the day DOES get longer. A blanket obviously doesn't get longer, so it's a lowsy analogy.
Because just being awake doesn't cut it... You need stores to open earlier, your own work schedule to start an hour earlier, etc. Changing all clocks is by far the easiest way to change everything.
The fact that most people haven't spent hours of their lives pondering the reason we have DST, doesn't have anything to do with the validity of the idea.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
In Europe the daylight savings moment was already changed a few years back to align all european countries to the same date. (Before we had a month or so where europe had a difference of two hours with the UK).
The change went by very quietly, albeit that there were some jokes about Windows, because IIRC Windows 98 had just shipped and it had the daylight savings change hardcoded into it, which was now happening at the wrong time. So at the apppropriate time, it presented a popup, "Look I've changed the time for you, ain't I great?" And the user just cancels it and changes it back and changes it again at the appropriate time.
Anyway, if you really have applications that depend on synchronization, they should have been using NTP. Maybe daylight savings will effect it negatively, but then this would have happened over time anyway, as the clocks would go out of sync.
Don't worry, it's all just 1's and 0's anyway...
"I think history is going to look back on DST as essentially equivalent to the (anecdotal) story of lawmakers legislating pi to 3."
The Romans managed to put a dome on the Pantheon at a time when they taught their engineers that pi was exactly 3 1/8.
"So changing your clock alters the rotation or axial tilt of the Earth?"
No, changing clocks changes whether or not you're awake for said hours of daylight.
Besides, local noon drifts whether you change your clocks by an hour or not. The reason we use mechanical timepieces to begin with is because the sun is an unreliable source.
"A. No, see, normally it would get dark at 7. Now it gets dark at 8!
Q. But the sun doesn't rise until 8 or 9 AM."
Yes, but you still punch in at 8 reguardless, so daylight hours in the morning that would otherwise have been spent hitting the snooze bar or cussing out the driver in front of you are moved to the evening, allowing you to enjoy dinner outside.
"When you need to make your blanket longer, do you cut a foot off one end and sew it onto the other?"
It's a matter of pulling the blanket up to your chin (and off your feet) because your feet are too hot.
"Why don't you just wake up an hour earlier, if you want more daylight?"
Because that hour will be wasted with thoughts along the lines of "I gotta go to work in an hour." Think about it: if we all enjoyed looking foward to your day's work, everybody would wake up at 0300 or so and go to bed as soon as they got home. We want our time home to be perceived as a winding down, not a spooling up.
I believe people are quite capable of adapting to the seasons of their own accord.
But, considering the US uses 30,000,000 barrels of oil per day, that 10,000
accounts for a whopping 0.03%.
There is (should be) a study dated 1998 (which I was not able to locate yet) sponsored by the EU Commission which states that daylight saving time does not have the desired effect on energy consumption (which is taken as a common fact anyway here (de)).
I heard an item on the radio here in the Netherlands saying that we save something like EUR 70.000.000 a year in energy expenditures because of daylight savings time. I'd like to see some good, scientific research on this matter. Someone must know whether we are, or are not getting any benefits from daylight savings time!
do you need an SUV when you could actually walk or cycle to work?
Our office lights are on regardless of day/dark.
The grocery, same thing. Fast food.. Yup same useage. Still drive the same distance, still caught in the same traffic jams..
Car lights? Got me on that one...
I really dont see that much of a savings happening. regardless of government spin.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
... humanity had natural adjustment and savings. Why can't we have it today, with present technology?
We could work shorter time in winter days, when daylight is short and make up for it in the summer.
Or, if that's too radical idea, then at least, make adjustments of "official time" each day a bit, over the whole year.
I call sheninigans. You said above that you wake well-rested.
I'd take the oil and run.
Get a life, not a lifestyle. - Hikem Bey
I think if there was some incentive to gas stations to provide free compressed air again (along with decent built in tire pressure gauges) perhaps it could incentivize people to check their tires more often. At least up here in the US Northeast, many folks drive around in the winter on low tires. Between the cold temps and charging people for a couple minutes at the air compressor, few folks bother -- even though it would pay for itself in measurably improved gas mileage.
Maybe I'm ignorant, but I'm not getting how DST translates to saving barrels of oil. I guess we get our hydro from water up here, although ther eare people heating with oil products, etc... but regardless of DST, when its cold, you heat. Making a change to DST will in no way be anywhere near a y2k type experience. Maybe the US thinks it can kick start their economy by making such a change. If Microsoft can do it, why not USA.GOV? Simply put, this change is USA only. Y2K was worldwide. DST won't stop programs from working, Y2K crashed and burned. variance in who is on DST or not is something that already exists (inside the US and outside) so this is an implementation thing. Y2K involved re-engineering. DST moved time by 100 years, DST 1 hour. I think a simple solution would be to adjust everyones who is on a DST program to fall back only 30 minutes the next time and not change ever again. I doubt that the reasons that we have DST are anywhere near as valid as they were when it was created. Society has grown/changed and we need to keep up with the times.
And why isn't this moderated higher? It went down to the heart of the matter: legislating savings instead of instigating them by education.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
If we can't handle changing our clocks, we could always introduce an alternate system of Daylight Savings Relocation, whereby every Fall everybody on earth has to move toward the equator to get more daylight, and every Spring they can move away from the equator again. It's worked for birds for millions of years.
Apparently Franklin overestimated his country's ability to take a joke.
I say, if we're going to turn satirical essays into public policy, we should start with Swift's "A Modest Proposal"...
Did I say overlords? I meant protectors.
Why not abolish DST altogether? It would probably help people with seasonally affected disorder too.
Bypass Compulsory Web Registration -- http://bugmenot.com/
Most people have various triggers for the conditioned response of getting tired and wanting to go to bed. For some people it's just darkness, other's maybe the evening news. For a while I played Pink Floyd's "Pigs on the Wing" (both tracks, none of the ones between them) each night as I went to bed. They're short, but it got so I would be unconscious before the second one finished.
To this day my strongest trigger is still dawn. When it gets dark it may not be very late, but when the sun comes up you know it's friggin' late.
~Lake
The DBM earlier said the government would save up to P144 million in energy expenses under the four-day work week program for employees of the executive branch.
Keeping in mind that that's only a few million dollars US, but this is also only a 2-month change to 4-day workweeks, and a much smaller country. Having worked this shift before, I have to say it's nice to have 3-day weekends, especially if you can choose if you work monday or friday, and it really doesn't take that long to get used to the extra 2 hours.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
Here is a past propsed solution, Renewable Energy From Algae. We just need to make it cheap enough that every one can have their own biodiesel garden in their back yard and produce at least a fraction of what they need to drive with. We could have commercial operations to produce the rest.
printf("Goodbye cruel world!\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b\b");
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Difference between North and South Korea. The lights end at the 38th parallel. As does civilization.