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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?"
What I'd prefer is that they passed a law making the hours between 9:00 am and 5:00 pm shorter.
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.
I used to live in a non-DST state. And you know what? It was great, not having to wake up an hour earlier or go to bed an hour earlier, and not have one or two time-keeping devices with the wrong time a month later. It was a real headache this year because I had to travel, and keeping track of time zones is hard enough without worrying about DST.
Heck, I'm not a believer in time zones, either. Let's adopt one time standard and adjust schedules accordingly. I don't need to be tricked into waking up in the morning.
Badly. No.
Score yourself at home. How did you do?
"Surprisingly enough, daylight-saving time was thought up by Benjamin Franklin, not drunken voters. According to http://webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/, it seems that one day Benjy got bored and wrote a little something called An Economical Project. It was an essay mostly about "himself, his love of thrift, his scientific papers and his passion for playing chess until the wee hours of the morning then sleeping until midday," and it was meant to be a joke.
However, an Englishman named William Willett (how can you take someone with that name seriously? Come on!) was apparently too dense to realize that Franklin was joking. Therefore, he thought it would be a novel idea to set clocks back for 20 minutes on each Sunday in April, and then turn them back on the Sundays in September. Eventually, daylight-saving time came to be as we now know it."
Taken from here
"What is the answer?" (Silence) "In that case, what is the question?" --Gertrude Stein
This isn't a problem; simply get Hallmark to create yet another holiday. Something catchy like, "Don't burn your house down" day to help people remember to change their batteries (maybe even with a pocket to hold replacement batteries).
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
The biggest problem with this change is that Daylight Savings Time will now last much longer than Standard Time. Since it would then be DST most of the time, Daylight Savings Time should be renamed "Standard Time." Of course, that leaves the problem with what to call the old "Standard Time." My suggestions are as follows:
- Daylight Wasting Time
- Congress Has Too Much Time on Their Hands Time
Now if there were only a way to automagically delete all occurrences of the word "automagically." What are you: Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer? Does our world frighten and confuse you? Your cell phone updates from the network because of software. There aren't little demons in there doing it.
What an idiotic idea!
I understand the theory that by changing people's work habits relative to the solar day, we may be saving some energy. I think the reality of it is rather less impressive than the theory, and certainly doesn't justify the expense and hassle, but it's undoubtedly there.
Too bad changing DST is the stupidest way to do it. As has been mentioned before, DST impacts way more than just work schedules. It's buried deep in various applications where it doesn't belong. It's hard-coded into embedded systems where it can't be changed. It's stuck on old software installations that will never see an upgrade. Changing DST is bad enough, but a half-assed mix of new-DST machines and old-DST machines is just a recipe for disaster.
If the government really wants to save energy by changing work habits, there are enormously better ways to do it. Tax credits for corporations that stagger their workers' start times by a significant margin would save way more energy than this DST nonsense, and it wouldn't have the unpleasant ancillary effects that changing the definition of time of day would have. Unimaginably large (you can look for the true numbers as well as I) amounts of gasoline are wasted in rush-hour traffic across the nation. Tax credits for starting 1/3 of employees 2hr earlier than normal and 1/3 2hr later would motivate employers to do it, and reducing the time people spend idling their cars on the freeways, or worse, driving in stop-and-go traffic, would save tons of fuel.
Tax credits (or some other incentive) makes people happy because the government's not forcing anyone to do anything they don't want to. It would have very few unintended consequences. And it would save many times more energy.
The reasoning that leads to a change in DST is just tortured. The government wants people going to work at a different time. So rather than ask (bribe, punish/bribe, whatever) businesses to employ people at different hours, they change the meaning of 8am, and screw up the entire country. Where's the logic in that?!
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
I have always hated the switch- They said it was for farmers, but that is ridicerous. (Farmers get up when the cows need to be milked- it doesn't matter what a chronometer says.)
My solution? "Fall Back" a half hour one year, and just leave it there permanently. Right in the middle....
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
Wow, it's pedant day on slashdot! The point, Captain Obvious, is to provide the most daylight during waking hours for the average diurnal person.
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
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise!
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.