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One Step Away from Changing Daylight Savings Time
An anonymous reader writes "Congressional leaders from both parties have signed off on a proposal that will change daylight savings time in the United States as early as this year. All that is left is a signoff by President Bush. If the proposed solution becomes law, DST will be extended two months, from March to November. With many IT applications relying on accurate time information and many having automatic adjustments for DST, how will the IT world handle this change? And with the proposal reportedly taking effect this year, is there enough time to implement change?"
I don't think it will be a huge deal to patch all of the software out there that relies on this. The main problem will be things like VCRs, TVs, watches and such that change the time for you automatically.
It's nice to see the American government coming up with a solution like this instead of concentrating on and suggesting alternate energies.
Really warms the ol' cockles of the heart.
DST is already bad enough from an Orthodox Jewish perspective, because we our holidays and sabbaths start at nightfall, and this makes "night" exceedingly late for much of the year.
:(
The specific case which shows the problem is the Passover Seder, which has to begin after nightfall, and there's about 2 hours of stuff before eating. Right now, about half the time, Passover falls during ST, and starts at a reasonable hour. With this change, it'll be much harder to keep children up to participate.
-David Barak
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Just like how everybody laughs at our school systems due to the fact that zero of the American school systems teach any foreign languages until high school while other countries (actually nearly every) teach anywhere from 1 - 3 NEW and NOT FLUENTLY SPOKEN languages to their children right from the get-go (or nearly so).
Well, I went to public school in the US and I learned Spanish and German starting in the 4th grade.
This is the thing about the United States that people from other (smaller) countries don't seem to grasp... and as you illustrate, even a lot of Americans forget it. It's a huge country, and it's very regional. There are 50 states. There are tens of thousands of school districts within those states. Every district does things differently. Is it fair? No. But you can't generalize like this about the US, about almost anything.
I'd be willing to put money down that there are more fluent Spanish-speaking Americans than fluent English-speaking Spaniards, even as a percentage of the population.