Slashdot Mirror
Extra Daylight Savings May Confuse the Gadgets
CrimeDoggy writes "In the energy bill to be signed by the President today (August 8), changes are to be made that extend daylight savings time. The bill would start daylight time three weeks earlier and end it a week later as an energy-saving measure. Many devices such as VCRs, cell phones, and watches would still operate on the previous schedule, potentially causing problems."
Super. It's about time we monkey with the way we reckon time again...after all, we had almost gotten used to the current insane standard.
I would propose a rather radically different option...eliminate time zones in the U.S. altogether. That's right, no time zones at all...everyone can just use GMT. I'm not advocating that everyone go to work at 09:00 GMT...business can determine what hours they want their employees to work, based on the amount of daylight available at that particular time of year, but the time standard would be the same everywhere. That way, there would be none of this bullshit confusion about 'what time is that here', or 'what is the time there'. It's GMT. The same damned time everywhere.
We're already a global community...it only makes sense to adopt a global time. Of course, asking the country that still uses Imperial measurement units to spearhead this change might be asking a bit much...
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Overtime for all to prevent the coming armageddon!
The change has already affected /.! The front page said the story was posted, but the story itself thought it wasn't! This is just the beginning of the chaos this change will inflict!!!
"You're older than you've ever been, and now you're even older."
(Yes, that's an opinion. Feel free to disagree.)
Is'nt this the right time to flash DVD player with OSS firmware?
This is so short-sighted it's not even funny. Coming into effect in 2007, as the article states...does anyone actually think that that's enough time to update everything that depends on human time?
I'm all in favor of changing things around, sure...but in under a year? More like 8 months? That's not nearly enough time to switch our major infrastructure over to use the new daylight time.
AccountKiller
Who else thinks this is a phenominally stupid idea! If anything we should just get rid of Daylight savings, it costs us tons of money each year to be out of sync with the rest of the world.
I love to slaughter the english language.
Blah. You mean that people might have to learn to use the most basic features of the devices they own? Gosh, golly, gee, no!
If anything, the tech sector will love it... People that are *so* annoyed by having to manually change their times *twice* for each switchover will be happy to upgrade to a newer unit that doesn't cause such a horrible thing to occur.
The rest of us will either do the difficult subtraction/addition in our heads until the device fixees itself three weeks later or will just do it ourselves.
This is going to be a nightmare for transmissions between the US and Canada if Canada does not follow. Everything will have to change to accomadate this timezone change.. Probaly going to waste more resources dealing with this.. SHIZA!! MrJynx
What is this "VCR" you speak of?
Mark A. McBride -- OmniNerd.com
I predict an increase in demand for VCR chronometer repair
You'll have another hour to fix it.
I'm so glad the current admininstration has decided on patriarchy. We wouldn't want to have input on our government.
Just so you know I'm not just a complainer, I did send a letter to my congress people. They sent me back form letters telling me that they agreed that becoming less dependent on foreign oil was important and were glad I supported their position. It's fun having non-representative democracy.
Hopefully this will cause more states to take the good example of Arizona and just do away with the daylight savings sillyness altogether.
Bush hopes to save an enormous amount of energy by doing this! This measure will help his old buddies in the Texas penal system to cut costs on electricity used during executions now that they wont have to run the lights at the same time the chair is put in extra crispy mode!
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
patch the TiVo and PC PVR...
My microwave can be an hour off for eternity, but if I miss that INXS/hulk hogan/tommy lee reality show, heads are gonna roll!
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
Any database which is national or inter-national in scope (and is set up properly), stores its dates/times in GMT, then converts to the user's time zone.
:-)
All of these also need to be changed.
I smell $$
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
It seems that this is the one that people are concentrating on. Nutty stuff, really. I keep thinking about how we're killing the environment, that we can't get our President to even mention the word conservation, that we are making little to no progress toward using alternative energy sources, and on and on. But the fact that my cell phone might get confused by the new Daylight Savings Time is what we're hearing about not just on /. but on all sorts of other media outlets.
/. is news for nerds and tech oriented. This story fits that. I'm not saying that this story doesn't belong on /. (Got that?)
Alright, so I'm going off on this. I understand that
What I'm trying to say is that somehow this is the BIG idea in the energy bill as it is being reported and it doesn't deserve that status.
The Energy bill is a mess the likes of which haven't been seen since the Patriot Act. That's where the focus needs to be.
Oh well.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
Shouldn't the whole physics and time measurements be regulated by a scientific body rather than a group of political morons? Maybe I'm crazy.
...I don't have to bother with daylight savings. The heat sucks but hey it's a tradeoff.
Nothing is impossible. It just hasn't been figured out yet.
I'm still waiting for someone to point out a really good reason why we need DST. All it does is irritate me having to deal with resetting clocks.
Furthermore, what the hell does this have to do with energy conservation? I'm still going to turn the fracking lights on when it gets dark; I don't look at the clock and go "hey, it's 7, time to turn on all the lights."
this is my sig
Does canada have to go along with this Daylight stupidity? The current one seems just fine to me.
did you forget to take your meds?
Tell me again why we really need this change. Daylight savings time was fine the way it was, heck if anything get rid of it, would make my life easier. It wont make a positive change to anything, it will only make things worse, with changing VCR tims and so on. And what about automated time systems like rail systems and so on?
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
"''It is unfortunately going to add a little bit of complexity to consumers," said Reid Sullivan, vice president of Panasonic Consumer Electronics Co. ''In some cases, depending on the product, they may have to manually increase or decrease the time.""
Wholly mother of god....
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
My VCR just blinks 12:00 all the time? So what's the problem again?
Fastduke
Of course stuff that is hardcoded with the old DST dates is going to have trouble. Yeah, that's a lot of gadgets. What can we do about it though? Most of those gadgets are not upgradable, so you're going to have to change the time on them twice a year now (once they figure out how to turn off the automatic DST updates).
I wish the president would have had the gumption to just extend Daylight Savings Time to all year long and ditch the date changes entirely. Nearly every device can be configured to ignore DST changes and it would have saved the world a lot of confusion each year.
I read the internet for the articles.
Scare tactics always work in US. Tell them, doom is near and people will do anything, even hire you ;)!
Some VCR's can set time themselves based on teletext (Ceefax for the brits). Alarm clocks can set themselves based on a radio signal. Anything connected to the net can use NTP (or NET TIME for the 'softies :-) Frankly my life will not come to a halt if my microwave shows the wrong time 3 weeks a year. Next story?
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
So some devices won't adjust at the right time. So what? Many devices with clocks really don't need them to be THAT accurate.
Humans can adjust to the difference, or perhaps even MANUALLY change the clocks like we all did 10 years ago, and mostly still do today.
Will it be an inconvenience? Sure. Will it destroy life as we know it? Probably not.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
Oh no, I can't buy anthing at amazon.com because everytime I try to login it tells me my session has already expired for being inactive for 60 minutes. BFD indeed.
Just to clarify, it's "daylight saving" time...No "s".
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
cus I get tired in the afternoon
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Some US states have no DST, yet these devices work fine in them, why because you can turn off auto-DST and manage time manually.
Suckers. We here in the beautiful state of Arizona don't bother to save any daylight.
Of course, this is mainly because the idea of saving another few more hours of 100+ degrees is none too appealing. But still...
Haw haw!!!!
"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography." -- Ambrose Bierce
By allowing companies to make the most use of daylight hours during which they do not need to light their facilities as much.
In reality? No clue.
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
If you really want to make sure your program is recorded you sit there and press RECORD. Between changes in schedules, events that go overtime etc. it's not always reliable. If you want that, get a Tivo.
My watches don't know from DST in the first place. Apparently there are still some benefits of being old-school.
More importantly, Windows and OSX both get patched so frequently I can't imagine they won't be able to slip the fix in before then.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
This change is intended to save the country energy (and presumably keep energy costs lower). It's a bit of a stretch to believe it will really have any effect. Gadgets being out of sync and operating systems failing to keep accurate time will be inconvenient at best. By the time we add up the cost of writing, shipping, and installing patches or just compensating for the incorrect times, does anyone really believe we'll end up with a net savings? Won't the programmers and hardware guys who have to work extra hours to develop fixes easily eat up the supposed difference?
This is the USA's solution to global warming. Apprently this will save something like 100 000 barrels of oil each YEAR! wow! what that, 0.00001% of yearly consumption?
Am I the only one whose VCR clock is currently flashing 12:00 anyway?
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
It doesn't seem to be universally known that DST rules vary not only across the country but around the world. Starting and stopping times vary by country, and as we all ought to know there are places in the US that don't have it.
What does that mean?
This is a non-issue. Most products either don't deal with DST (VCR's, clocks, etc) or are driven by outside signals (automatically set radio clocks, TV clocks, cable boxes, cell phones), are easily updated (all computer software, which already has to ask the OS for the translation).
It'll be a rare product or a buggy program that is badly affected by the problem. This isn't Y2K all over again. Its a trivial fix for most things and won't even be broken on half the stuff the panic articles about it talk about.
Think this is bad? Wait until he signs the bill to outlaw evolution.
--saint
8:59, First time I've ever been early for work. --except for all those daylight savings times, lousy farmers!
Well, I have my fallout shelter ready.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
Year 2K Bug - Programming results in 2byte date code, causing chaos when first two digits of year change. Mass blackouts predicted.
Outcome - Last gasp for COBOL programmers.
Year 2K5 Bug - Legislation results in 3 week time change, causing chaos in out of sync watches, cell phones and computers. Mass mis-scheduled meetings predicted.
Outcome - You cut out of work early to play softball in the park. Boss does not notice.
-- Bird in the Bush: The Renewable Energy Blog http://www.birdinthebush.org
i think i will enjoy my extra hour of daylight for another 4 weeks a year. I don't give a shit about daylight in the morning, only the daylight remaining after I'm done with work. It's not about energy, its about maximizing useful daylight time for most of the population.
.... that: now that we are at it, let's do the following. abandon all that nonsense SI-stuff, instead, we measure everything - the time, the space, our problems - in 'quicks', where one 'quick' is defined as the movement (or the time) the sun spends for moving around the earth once. since this takes some time, we should further divide it into 'microquicks', which is a 1,024th of a quick and into a myonquick, which is a 1,024th of a microquick. thus, a quick is either the distance or the time the sun spends orbiting around the earth once. in a perfect circle.
If you don't learn from history,
then you are an idiot by definition.
--- Vadim Yasinovsky
Slashcode needs to implement a new category, "Super-duper friend" with a +3 bonus, just for people like you.
At least this will give us all an excuse to show up an hour late for work once a year.
"But look! My cell phone says it's 8:57! I'm early!"
domain combinatorics
This is bound to confuse everyone in Indiana, as well. http://www.sciencedaily.com/upi/?feed=TopNews&arti cle=UPI-1-20050719-14180600-bc-us-daylighttime.xml
"Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony!"
For best results, tell them to do it to protect the children from terrorists.
...Daylight Saving Time, not Daylight Savings Time...
call me dumb, but i don't understand how. if it's cold, i'm still going to turn on the heat, if it's dark i'm still going to turn on the lights.
What do these gadgets currently do in Arizona or other places that never go on Daylight Saving Time in the first place? Personally, I think we should just say "screw it" and put everybody everywhere on GMT/UTC/Zulu time. Of course, as it is I still get calls at 4am from people in the GMT time zone that don't appear to be able to handle the concept of subtracting 8 hours from GMT To get PST (or 7 hours to get PDT).
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
this is really just a way to give the economy a quick boost. now everyone needs to upgrade all of their gadgets to ones that work with the new time. :P
always mosh clockwise
I don't see why we even bother..
Arizona and New Mexico(?) seem to get by just fine without having DST at all. As far as I know, the reason for it was for schools so that kids are going to school in the light or something? But really, does it matter that much? It's just a time adjustment plus or minus one hour... Seriously, why do we bother? Does it really make that much a difference in our lives to change the clock forward or back one hour? I'm all for abolishing DST period, it's silly and unnecessary, let's get rid of it.
Wrong. If you check the box, Windows will automatically set your clock ahead one hour or back one hour based on the current pattern of first Sunday in April and last Sunday in October. It won't know to do it the last week in March and the last week in November unless the code is patched.
I don't know the stats for, I'd imagine a large percentage computers out there are probably running 95, 98, ME or 2000...all of which Microsoft end-of-life'd and will no longer support.
I stopped using the auto-adjust thing back when dual-booting systems were the norm and each OS wanted to keep knocking another hour of my system clock when I rebooted into it.
I predict a big rise in popularity of those Internet Time programs, and would not be surprised if Microsoft threw something like that into Vista.
-JoeShmoe
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
How many people actually have watches that change there timezones automatically anyway?
As for OSes, they already have the concept of different time zones having different Summer / Standard time changeover dates. I seem to remember Microsoft once released a tool (in the Windows 95 Kernel Toys) that would let an end user edit there own timezones, it can't be that hard to change them. I guess it'll be more of an issue for people using older unsupported OSe, but you can set the time manually, and disable the automatic changer (if it has one).
Software errors would be bad programming, assuming one set of time zone changes when there's already different ones in use around the world.
As for VCRs etc., I'm not so sure. In the UK most modern VCRs set the time automatically from the TV signal (using the clock on the teletext service I guess), so they update whenever the TV stations do. I guess US ones might do it differently, I don't know if the US has any kind of time signal to use. But it can't be that hard to change it manually.
So it's mostly "you'll actually have to manually change things when the clocks go back / forward", just like people did before things got too clever.
10 PRINT "LOOK AROUND YOU ";
20 GOTO 10
..steal the election, invade Iraq on a false premise and now this. Honestly, isn't there anything else for Bush to fuck up before he's gone?
Too bad we can't have the adulterer back. Heck, I'd even take the funny little Texan....
Or maybe you logged in 60 minutes from now.
when it should be flashing 1:00, super. but FINALLY we will be able to work in our corn fields longer thanks to a generous concession by the W. who cares about daylight savings? not me, but then again my schedule sucks no matter what time of the year it is.
Anybody who has ever used regedit.exe can tweak these values themselves. That would be, what, about 0.1% of the Windows user base? Repeat after me: "Not everybody in the world is an engineer!"
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
So, in other words, you have to update system files in order to get it to work? Nope, that doesn't sound anything like "would need to obtain updates" at all!
:)
Sorry, just feeling sarcastic...
Tis a convenient pre-election move to put tech people back to work just before the election!
The energy it will save will be the energy it will take to make the Republican party look good.
For a group of people who crucify each other over the correct number of spaces to indent code by, you would think that more attention to detail would be paid when it comes to proper nouns where there actually is a right way and a wrong way to do it.
Please write to your representative encouraging more of this so we get more work. Examples:
- Extend every fouth weekend to three days and abolish public holidays instead.
- Change private sector work hours from 9-5 to 10-6; change public sector hours from 9-5 to 8-4 (so workers in each sector can use the services of he other without taking time off)
- Rename every 10th day to 'Happy Day' and require that all correspondence sent on that day include a Ren and Stimpy logo
- Sack all political representatives, replacing them with a HUGE I.T. system that implements e-voting on every issue (think of the computer work this will require!)
And finally, the most ridiculous of all:
- Introduce a national ID card scheme
Hooray! Think of the lovely money! Write it all in Python!
Er, what I meant by wrong is that even if the values are stored in the registry (which freakin nearly everything is anyway), the only way to change it is to modify the registry, i.e. load a .REG file or similar, i.e. a patch.
"Normal" users aren't even supposed to know what Regedit.exe is, which is why Microsoft hasn't had a shortcut to it since Windows 3.1 or something.
-JoeShmoe
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Its obvious that Bush is trying to screw the Vampires by messing with their work schedule.
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
My Real-Time Clock Game Boy games are doomed!!!
Insert Sig Here
Just a minor quibble: it is Daylight Saving Time, not Daylight Savings Time.
Thank you, that is all.
Rhapsody in Numbers
If your VCR clock is wrong, the terrorists have already won!
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Folks, this doesn't go into effect until 2007. Keep your pants on.
Have you ever wondered How to Take Over
Hey Duhbya, think how much energy you could save if you made daylights savings ALL YEAR LONG!
Hey, laws on this scale are so massive that you really can't take in the larger sense of them at all. That's how all the pork sneaks in -- in the form of incentives encouraging oil companies to explore deep drilling techniques they would have tried anyway, for one example here -- and Jane Voter can only wonder "How big is so-many billion dollars? Is it more or less than we spend in Iraq in a given week?" The sense of perspective just isn't there.
(Which is partly how the idea that "the welfare state" is responsible for out-of-control spending can be perpetuated. A sense of proportion about the federal budget would tell you Eisenhower's "military industrial complex" has a lot more to do with that. But I digress.)
What the media's doing is seizing on a detail that's meaningful for people. We can understand what this one would do. With the larger fiscal and economic consequences, we do have a shocking lack of real public debate about stuff like this bill, but that's because it just doesn't have a clear storyline to it. My VCR won't start screwing up if Exxon gets one more egregious handout.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I only use GMT!
"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography." -- Ambrose Bierce
Doubtful.
Also work in the childhood type 2 diabetes epidemic, the obesity epidemic, child molestors moving into one's neighborhood, drugs invading one's neighborhood (especially meth and meth labs), illegal immigration, hackers, rising gas prices, aggressive drivers, world overpopulation, cell phone cancers, cell phone induced car crashes, rude cell phone users, bad cell phone service, ridiculous cell phone rates and buggy software.
Have I forgotten anything on the scare and annoyance hit-parade?
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
clearly the administration is in the thrall of Big Time!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Daylight Savings Time is a way for those of us too poor to afford an airplane ticket to be able to experience the joys of jet lag.
Typical government, they have Datlight Savings in the half of the year that already has plenty of daylight. I'd really like it to not be dark when I get off work between xmas and new years eve.
But DST in the winter makes too much sense.
Except for Inspector Gadget, who is on the case.
Resetting the time on an electronic device is trivial.
What matters is the rationale for doing so. Having Time Zones make sense, since we are still creatures of light/dark cycle rhythms. Adjusting that schedule did make sense when agriculture was a major player and may still be needful. But changing the period of DST on the supposed rationale of saving money is pretty much like the supposed "savings" generated by changing a payday from the last day of the month to the first day of the next month -- it works exactly once.
Same with this really bad idea.
At $250,000 a year, It would be cheaper to buy a new VCR.
"Normal" users aren't even supposed to know what Regedit.exe is, which is why Microsoft hasn't had a shortcut to it since Windows 3.1 or something.
Of course, there was no registry until 95 so I don't think they had a shortcut to it in 3.1. Of course I don't believe they've ever had a shortcut to regedit in any version by default. You can always create one yourself.
[Removes tin foil hat.]
What if the whole "this will save power" is just an excuse? Isn't 2007 when we are supposed to be switching to all digital broadcasts and isn't the broadcast flag supposed to be coming out around then (if Congress passes it since its out of the domain of the FCC now)? What is this is all a ploy to irritate people because their VCR's (which they don't use much anyway, anymore) and TV's are out of synch for a few weeks, so they have to go out and buy new equipment? I'm sure most people won't care, but this might be one little more annoyance that would push Joe Q. User to upgrade his equipment, and further lock himself into the media conglomerates will?
[Puts on tin foil hat.]
Don't most cellular phones get their time from the tower they're connected to? So how is this a problem with the phones?
Also, at least with Sprint, my free calling period depends on the time in the timezone I am in, which is clearly displayed on the front of my phone.
I also like the line: ''It is unfortunately going to add a little bit of complexity to consumers," said Reid Sullivan, vice president of Panasonic Consumer Electronics Co. ''In some cases, depending on the product, they may have to manually increase or decrease the time."
You know, my grandparents have a house full of this weird looking machines that require you to manually increase or decrease the time with daylight savings time now. I wonder if the people at Panasonic have ever heard of these devices? Consumers have had them for a long time, and seem to have adapted quite well to adjusting the time on them for DST.
What?
And I wish the world were so nice that we could all use metric things and other 10-based units to match our number system.
Dr Superlove 300ml. I use my powers for awesome
Time is an illusion, at lunchtime doubly so.
It's the new Y2K, the hard coded daylight saving times built into our gadgets will cause a global meltdown!!! Nuclear reactors will initiate cooling sequences an hour late!! Food supply chains will be broken!!! There will be mass pandemonium!! Dogs will be sleeping with cats!!!
Thank god my bomb shelter is still prepped, and that freeze-dried food is still good.
If DST gets you down, head to Saskatchewan or some of the areas of the U.S.A. which remain on Standard Time all year round.
Why not just scrap daylight saving time altogether?
in the 1700's Ben Franklin rightly surmized(sp?) that by increasing the use of daylight during the summer, less candles had to be made, transported, and used thus there was a fairly good bit of savings.
In early 1900s, if more daylight led to less electric light use (a sizeable portion of the electric bill) then there would be significant savings.
In modern times however, it is but a blip on the monthly electric bill, with AC units, refrigerators, freezers, TVs, etc all demanding almost constant power draw. Lights simply aren't a huge area of savings anymore.
Even more so this could actually INCREASE our electric costs: I have a programmable thermostat, that I set to be warmer in the summer when I'm not home, then turn on so it's cool when I return from work. Now I'm home more hours during the hottest part of the day which in turn uses more power for my AC unit which is wildly more expensive to run than a few lightbulbs.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
I predict a big rise in popularity of those Internet Time programs, and would not be surprised if Microsoft threw something like that into Vista.
Actually, Windows XP has internet time-synch built in already. Right-click the system-tray clock, pick "Adjust Date/Time," then check out the "Internet Time" tab.
Windows NT 4 and Windows 2000 also include internet time-synch services, but require some poking around with the service manager and maybe even the command line to turn them on. They can be tricky to get working properly with a strict packet-filtering type software firewall, though, since Windows runs about 20 zillion processes under the name "services.exe," which you definitely don't want to give blanket firewall permissions to.
the "twelve o'clock" flashers. And they don't care enough about the problem anyway.
The rest will wake up or go to sleep when the TV tell's 'em to.
This is a non-issue.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Why is it so easy for lawmakers to make a change to the time, yet they can't make the freaking change to the metric system to be like "the rest of the world". I wish we (speaking as an American) would convert to the metric system. Even though it doesn't negate the S.A.E. completely, it will overtime take its place.
YOU'RE WINNER !
Another lame blog
How is this going to save energy?
How about this?.
It's simply a convention that gives most people more daylight time outside of work at some times of the day - I can't see how morality has anything to do with it
So really, we could just go with one long continual time string. Don't change it at all. Let's just do away with changing the time all together. I have to disagree with TMM. Some folks would have to work in the dark, on things that would require daylight, like most construction.
Time is comparison of movement to other movement.
who would have thunk that ?
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
I've worked on a number of embedded systems, and we've always made daylight savings an adjustable feature. After all, it varies by country (or even region) and can be changed by government mandate. And furthermore, the US has changed the definition less than 20 years ago. There is precedent for this. There really is no excuse to hard code DST.
I am not a crackpot.
Oh no! Y2K all over again! *Dons tin-foil hat*. The internet will evolve into a super intelligent virtual being weilding the massive power of unpatched systems, PDA's, Tivo's, Microwaves, Blenders and DVD players.
But only for 1 week a year.
Either leave things alone or get rid of it completely. The money saved won't be worth the time and cost it takes to implement the changes.
In AZ we don't observe the current daylight savings time, so I expect we'll ignore the new one too. So my gadgets and gizmos will all continue to work, ignoring DST as usual. I'm sure there are other places that ignore DST too, feel free to move there if AZ get full.
You can lose something that is loose, so tighten the loose item so you don't lose it.
Machines with incorrect daylight savings programming will display incorrent daylight savings time! Story at 11, movie at 12
I suspect trains are done in much the same way. Logically, it would seem they would almost have to be to account for delays, etc.
Merde, il pleut encore!
Not trying to alarm people, but doesn't it seem odd. What does most people do if something doesn't work correctly? They go buy a new one. If their VCR or DVR fails to record their favorite show because the time is off, a lot of people will simply buy a new one after resetting the time becomes a 'hastle'. Then the new VCR, DVR or whatever, assuming that congress eventually rams through the broadcast flag, will abide by this. Out with the old, in with the new....
DST doesn't even need to exist... now the dipshit is signing stuff that will change it.
Great! Um, can we get a fucking president that's not a complete dipshit, please?
Jesus fucking christ.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
And it's equally possible to extinguish both...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
And they don'ty listen to any arguments, pro or con. Maybe we should listen to the cows and not Bush.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
After the DST change, how will accounting records for the past years be handled ? The OS or software will have to remember the DST rules both before and after the cut-off, to do date conversions in a meaningful way.
If the machine has been keeping GMT records (as it should most of the time), then viewing old records would show an incorrect time on some of them, if this is not taken into account.
If it kept local times, then the interval calculations will be off (I imagine those require conversion to GMT to make any sense).
... will welcome our 'Smart Gadget' overlords.. I pray they rule us more efficiently than their lesser, more confused brethren..
YOU don't get it, Grandma WON'T do it. You can't figure that out and you call someone else an idiot? I guess you just proved the recent study results that incompetent people are too stupid to realize they are incompetent.
And what exactly is wrong with this other solution? We shoudln't change the definition of the gallon to make our cars appear more fuel efficient and similarly we shouldn't change the definition of the time to give the illusion that we can have more time for barbecuing. We can have more time for barbecuing by going to work earlier and coming home earlier. Why is that so difficult for people to grasp?
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
This is why I prefer sundials: no battery to run down, no time zone to adjust, no firmware to upgrade, perfectly accurate.
/Seinfeld/.)
Doesn't work at night, but that's only a couple of hours. (With apologies to
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
I wonder if anybody who reads Slashdot has ever taken the time to read a real history book and learn the true reasons behind the creation of Daylight Savings Time? The Freemasons and Illuminati are a group determined to get world domination and they are based in Sweden. Back in the early 1500s they managed to dupe many prominent American founding fathers such as Ben Franklin and Kurt Russell into believing this idea about "conserving daylight."
.. moving the clock back one hour is not going to generate any extra daylight! Farmers always get up at the beginning of daylight anyway, which is when the cock crows.
The original plan was that this would give farmers more time to plant their crops. (The justification today is that we will consume less energy, but this was the year 1500 and electricity had not been invented yet.) But even the farmer idea is silly
The true story is horrid. It's dark and scary. The idea was to get the American people to slowly and gradually begin to accept the idea that time is not absolute. First, they were able to get people to screw around with their clocks twice a year. Now, they've managed to convince us to change when we do that. Eventually, the Freemasons and Illuminati hope to get us confused to the point where everybody believes that every day is February 2nd -- Groundhog Day.
Since one of the popular activities on Groundhog Day is planting trees, people will stay home from work and plant trees instead of going to the office and being productive. And since they will have tricked us into thinking that every day is Groundhog Day, planting trees is all that we'll be doing, day in and day out! Since people will stop going to work entirely, our economy will soon crumble. Not only that, but with all of those trees planted, sunlight will stop hitting the ground here and will cause all of our crops to die, starving the whole country en masse. Then the New World Order will be upon us and the Hindu god Kali-Mah will take over.
This is their true agenda, world domination and the destruction of America, Daylight Savings Time is their vehicle for this agenda and I encourage you to vote no on this bill and this is a run-on sentence.
In arizona, laugh at the rest of the country, twice a year, now we just have to do it a bit later and earlier than usual.
"See, we plan ahead! That way, we never have to do anything now."
There are an awful lot of gadgets - like my digital thermostat, my microwave oven, my electronic kitchen timer, my cable box, or my cell phone - which incorporate clocks to no obvious purpose.
These clocks become one more thing to futz with when DST comes or goes, when the power fails, or when batteries die. When I want to know what time it is, I generally look at my watch, partly because I can't trust all the myriad clock-gadgets to have the right time all the time.
I'd really dig it if gadget-designers stopped throwing a poorly-designed, hard-to-set digital clock into everything they made. Some gadgets (like a camera or a PDA) have a legit purpose for including a clock, but usually it's just a bullet point for the box.
If you want products that will last forever, be prepared to pay out the nose for them. If you only buy one VCR in your life, it might cost you $1000 or more.
Not to mention that technology moves so fast nowadays that investing in anything that isn't "disposable" carries a boatload of risk.
No thanks. I'll take cheap, disposable items any day.
"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography." -- Ambrose Bierce
Actually, I think Win31 did have a rudimentary registry, used for file associations and such. The rest the registry wasn't there yet. HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT exists today for backwards compatibility, though it's the same as HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes.
Er, what I meant by wrong is that even if the values are stored in the registry (which freakin nearly everything is anyway), the only way to change it is to modify the registry, i.e. load a .REG file or similar, i.e. a patch.
Not exactly true. Windows 98SE has a timezone editor included on the CD-ROM, though it's not part of the Windows install (it's in the Resource Kit Sampler IIRC).
Yes, but how will this break Windows?
-- often wrong; never in doubt
Maybe I just take things too seriously, but can we rebel against this? Seriously: I think I will observe the standard international time, and just see what happens. Yes, I'll need to take it into account while shopping. Oh, and I'll use more energy than everyone else. :-) Seriously, did the American people want this?
And while on the topic... who thought up this crazy 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and 24 hours in a day.
:-)
:-)
We need metric time damn it!
Metric-60 is the answer my friend.
We Just need to switch from base-10 to sexagesimal (base-60). Degrees, minutes, seconds (angle) and minutes/seconds (time) will already be set. Just start using 60 hours in a day instead of the archaic 24-hours we're used to, and switch all the other units to base-60 as well, and everything will be hunkydory.
Oh, and dump daylight savings time too. It's even more annoying than base-10. Of course, some people will need to grow an extra fifty fingers to keep count in base-60, but I look at that as more of a challenge in bio and genetic engineering than a "problem" per se.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
They should have made Pi exactly 3. This will reduce the need for calculators and save power.
The next stimulus bill should extend the year by a few months. With the addition of Georguary and Rumsvember everyone's yearly income will increase and make us all richer and stimulating the economy. No ones tried this before right.
We can also redefine the mile in the next NASA spending bill and bring mars close enough to the earth to reach with the shuttle, saving billions.
What I don't get is why doesn't anybody realize that this could save energy? I'm not sure how important the environment is to people on Slashdot, but if there's a way to reduce energy consumption, shouldn't it be done, even if it takes a little while to work out the bugs? After all, a saving only a little annually would compound, and after 10 or 20 years, we'd be much better off. If daylight savings time is changed to be more in-line with the sun, all of you (who live in the US anyway) would have much lower electric bills, since you'd turn off your lights earlier.
It's obvious that we're never going to get everybody to recycle, so this seems like the logical thing to do. It forces people to save energy on a larger scale.
call me dumb, but i don't understand how. if it's cold, i'm still going to turn on the heat, if it's dark i'm still going to turn on the lights.
OK, you're dumb. (Sorry, I had, too).
It's a simple idea, really. Let's say most people go to bed at around 11:00. At dusk, everyone turns on their house lights. With daylight saving time (DST), dusk is 8:30, so lights are on for 2.5 hours. Without DST, dusk is an hour earlier, so lights are on for 3.5 hours. (What is really happening with DST is that we are sleeping through less daylight in the morning. In the winter there is no daylight to waste in the morning so this doesn't work).
Having said this, I'm not sure the savings works out as well as the above would suggest. DST means that people like me have to run our AC's an hour longer at the hottest part of the day, wasting more energy than we save. (Presumably, the other place I would spend that time is work, at that will have AC running whether I'm there or not).
This is all part of a giant media conspiracy. By the time the new TVs, VCRs, and PVRs that compensate for the new DST schedule come out, they will all be so encumbered with oppressive DRM that you won't be able to record a program to watch later while skipping commercials if your life depended on it.
Daylight savings time *never did* make sense for agriculture. You can't set the cows back an hour.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Most cell phones these days have the capability for upgrading firmware, which you could either download over the wireless or take into your wireless carrier's nearest store and have them do it for you there. I'm sure all cell phone companies will come out with updates for the phones that automatically adjust time for daylight savings.
As most probably already know, the bill has been signed and is now law.
At least when Y2K came along, not everything needed to be fixed or replaced.
This will affect nearly all computer systems in some way -- either a BIOS change, OS patch, or the like -- and many consumer electronics devices will be essentially broken. (I've been putting off replacing some of the stuff but now may have to in order to get the clock to work correctly.)
And we're doing this to ourselves for some dubious energy savings that would be dwarfed by any serious effort to save energy (like tightening the CAFE standards, promoting hybrid vehicles, etc.) Just another half-baked idea born of, perhaps, five minutes of debate in the Congressional halls^Wmen's room.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
What???! Your microwave isn't connected to the internet? What's wrong with you? Time to climb out of the stone age my dear friend... You'll see that we have learned wonderous things in this Brave New World...
Gravity Sucks
fuck, my watch and children. (Note the comma! (I don't have children anyway))
Question everything
Having said this, I'm not sure the savings works out as well as the above would suggest. DST means that people like me have to run our AC's an hour longer at the hottest part of the day, wasting more energy than we save. (Presumably, the other place I would spend that time is work, at that will have AC running whether I'm there or not).
This depends on where you live, of course. The new months on which DST will occur under the energy bill will be on the months in which I don't even use an A/C.
Summary:
VCRs and DVD recorders have built in calenders that will have to be overridden by users who have no idea what they're doing. Confusion ensues. Computers can be patched. Oh yeah, and that one Y2K thing; that was funny.
The end.
Someone please, tell me somthing I don't know.
This sig rocks the casbah.
That's not true. The president talks about conservation a lot. But...
Conservation is stupid. Conservation is simply artificially impoverishing yourself. There's no benefit.
You're saying:
Why? For future generations? So they can grow up and not be able to accomplish their goals because they have to conserve too?
What's the conservation endgame?
I remember seeing this a while back on slashdot (ahh, there it is).
I can't find it in the discussion, but IIRC, the change would make a 1% change in energy consumption.
I pity the foo that isn't metasyntactic
...he's unemployed and lives in his parents' dark fluorescent-lit basement, you insensitive clod!
If the reason (witch it is) there implementing this plan is save billions of dollars of energy costs, i have news for them... your (our) situation is more farked up than this that will save us.
- get off fossil fuels
- forget the beach houses and their nice views start building off shore wind farms
- screw the closed minded enviromentalists, the open minded ones want nuclear power and want it now!
- instead of thinking of it as power companies spending money to green their plants, think of this as a new growth industry the green industry.
Thoes are REAL solutions to REAL problems.. daylight savings time as a solution? only the goverment could think that up
The More Knowledge you have the Luckier you Get- J.R. Ewing
The name of the service you're looking for is w32time.
I happened upon it because I wanted to set up my w2k boxes at home against an internet time server. If you stop the service (net stop w32time), you can configure it using the net time command (google it - my batch script for setting my home pc is at home...) then you net start w32time to get it rolling again. You can set it against an NTP server as well....
I have recently had trouble with my WindowsXP media box getting the proper time, so I set it against one of the NIST servers.... works like a champ!
Karnal
Uh, comparing this to Y2K seems a little extreme to me... Y2K was a big deal because it sounded scary to the average non-programmer person and there was nothing they could do to fix it. Taking 10 minutes to change all your clocks twice a year is not a big deal. The world got on fine before all our electronics became self aware and started adjusting themselves automatically for DST.
Thank Buddha Bush wasn't President for the new millenium. Who knows how he would've handled Y2K. Maybe an excuse to eliminate computers and go back to chopping wood?
http://webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/franklin.htm l
Here, franklin calculates the money and pounds of wax required to burn candles into the evening, while sleeping through the perfectly good hours of daylight in the early morning.
The lifestyle and architecture of modern man very rarely makes efficient use of natural light, to our peril: financially, healthwise [mental and physical], and societally.
That said, i really cant do anything to get to work much before 9:30. The earlier i get up, the longer i sit around the house.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
the daylight savings time. The one hour change atumn and spring is causing more problems than keeping a fixed schedule all the time.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Are you on the same medication I am?
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
Energy consumption? How about you guys stop burning all the friggin' oil?
Not that it's your point, but cell phones will be fine because they get their time from the provider. I'm sure you notice that the phone auto-corrects when you fly to a different time zone?
Let me spell it out, since everyone missed the point of my original post. An update from Microsoft is not necessary to adjust when Windows makes its DST adjustment. While its very likely that they will release a patch for supported systems, all the Windows platforms that have been EOL'd are not going to see this update.
There are a lot of instructions out there that show even the most novice user how to make a change in the registry, so my point remains that this data is stored in such a way that it can be easily modified. And for those who have a grandma who can't fathom regedit, I'm sure some Windows programmer will throw together a small program to do it for her.
Either way, my point remains... saying that an Update from Microsoft is necessary is not true. There are several ways to make this change that do not involve Microsoft.
We have an excuse!
Late for school?
Late for work?
Caught reading root's mail?
Blame the change!
Here's my essay on the Time issue. I demonstrate how it saves nothing, and actually causes measurable harm. IT is a certainty that VCRs and Watches that are auto compensating to DST are not going to get the time right now for a month of the year. I live in SK, I know this, since I don't change my clocks anyway in the year I'm always on DST.
==
Time for a change? - USA changes their Daylight Savings Law
The USA has decided it's high time to take time by force. Just watch them, this time the US federal government is passing a bill that extends Daylight Savings Time into March and November, which gives American children about another 60 days to get up and go to school in the dark, while making sure business executives have more daylight hours on the golf course after dinner. "Supporters say extending daylight saving time would save about 100,000 barrels of oil a day because offices and stores would be open while it was still light outside and therefore use less energy." - boston.com "A government study [conducted in the mid-1970s] estimated the additional energy savings at the equivalent of 100,000 barrels of oil a day, or about half of 1 percent of the nation's daily oil consumption." - suntimes.com When was the last time you saw an open store not using their lights when it was high noon? What business turns off lights when it is bright outside? Besides professional sports I can't think of one.
OK, I guess you have to start somewhere, and every little bit can help right? Well let's take a look at their numbers and put them into perspective. 60 days of savings X 100,000 barrels of oil = 6 million barrels of oil saved. How does that amount compare to what is typically used in the USA in a day? "Gasoline demand has averaged almost 9.5 million barrels a day over the last four weeks, 2.5 percent more than the same period last year." " Oil prices today are 46 percent higher than a year ago." - bloomberg.com
What that means is that after 60 days, the USA will have saved less than 1 day's worth of oil [using the conservative 100,000 barrels/day estimate from the 1970s study]. Is it worth it? Maybe.
If you consider the wild media claims that billions of dollars are spent every year after cleaning up after a computer worm or virus attack, the expense at reprogramming everything computerized that is time sensitive is going to be astronomical. The man-hours to reprogram everything is going to be much greater than any time wasted on malware. It's like a self-imposed Y2K problem that has already been fixed, and we're going back to tinker with it in the guise of saving oil. You could say that the US legislative branch has put in motion a ticking time bomb. This bomb is going to blow this November, and is a potential cash cow for Microsoft [a heavy Bush supporter by the way], IBM, and many other computer programmers. Although it will leave your "smart" VCR or DVD player guessing the wrong time for two months out of the year thanks to its hard-wired clock programming. And it will burden airlines with yet another scheduling nightmare to worry about. And hurt the Canadian transportation industry if we don't standardize our time with the new American DST system.
So this boils down to a huge waste of time, over an obviously insignificant amount of oil. Before the US government decided to plunge North America [and their other trading partners] into temporal chaos, it'd be nice if they considered the negative consequences of their actions. And it would also be nice if they took meaningful steps to reducing oil consumption such as strict fuel milage laws for new cars. But they don't have time for that I guess.
==
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Reckon it as miliseconds from 1972 to make people freak out even more.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
This has happened many times before in the fairly recent past - the last time in the US was in 1987.... and "summertime/DST" rule changes happen around the world virtually every few months. OS and application developers that have international deployments are already familiar with this issue.
If device developers haven't figured out that rules change over time, shame on them. You have two years to push your new rule into your systems. If people don't patch their systems for one reason or another in two years, well, then I guess they have a problem.
"Why not? That's what the oil companies got!"
Even supposing that oil companies did get "taxpayers to pay for your entire" project it still wouldn't make it right for taxpayers to pay for entire home-improvement projects.
If some company gets more subsidies than they should, then we need to decrease those subsidies, not increase competing subsidies.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
People actually set their VCR clocks? I've always found the blinking 12:00 a reliable and constant presence in an otherwise busy and changing world.
Time is time.
The debate went on here too. It was comment that it would allow 1 more hour in the evening to play golf.
I suggested just getting up an hour earier and leaving work and a hour earier. That way you do do not screw up everyone elses clocks.
They looked at me all confused and said it would be law and everyone would get that extra hour of day light.
My comment was: "When did the government get the power to control rotation of earth?"
No matter how you cut it their is just a specific amount of day light for a given day. Instead of screwing with everyone's clocks so you can get game of golf in just leave the clocks the same all year round. The individual can work their schedule out so they can benefit for the day light. Next time I will put his golf clubs where the sun does not shine!
Hell as a computer person I usally go 3-4 months at time in (especially in the winter) with out seeing day light at all!
Ahhhhh... Done venting.
My Sig indicates the end of the comment I posted.
What people fail to realize is that you cannot easily operate without both global and local time. Most local events are scheduled according the solar day, and so having local time provides you with a more accurate measurement than just "morning, noon, afternoon, evening, night".
However, it is immensely useful to have global time to schedule things across timezones.
If people were accostomed to using both in appropriate situations, scheduling problems would be greatly reduced.
The other thing that will help to avoid confusion is if everyone just stated their timezone by the GMT offset, rather than a generic name. EST or EDT tells me nothing about what daylight-relative time it really is in New York.
So you're the latest lobby behind Bush's antics!
"What's the conservation endgame?"
There isn't one. That's the point. As opposed to the endgame for not conserving, which is resource exhaustion.
I find your question so absolutely hilarious that I just had to reply.
(Note that "conservation", in sane circles, does not mean "abandoning everything but solar power", the way some nut-jobs (on both ends of the spectrum) seem to think. It means intelligent management of your resources. "Sustainable resource consumption" would be a better term, but that's doesn't roll of the tongue as well.)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Hey, can you remove that blinking 12:00? I can't figure out how to get the damn thing to tell the time!
1) This doesn't kick in until 2007. There is plenty of time to phase this into new software and devices.
2) From an article on foxnews.com:
---begin quote---
Israel, for instance, bases daylight time on the lunar Jewish calendar, and Palestinians change their clocks at different times as an assertion of independence. Windows doesn't even provide an auto-adjust option for the time zone covering Jerusalem.
Moti Tzur, a sales manager at Sakal Electronics Ltd. in Jerusalem, says the constant changes do little to confound manufacturers, sales representatives or consumers.
"We get up and change the time on the VCR ourselves," Tzur said. "These things come with directions."
---end quote---
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
I can barely believe the fuzz slashdot (or Americans in general) are doing about this issue.
I am in Brazil, and here daylight savings time has never been a "stable" issue - I often've found my boxes to go an hour early ablut two weeks after the daylight saving s time was efective (and I had by them updated it by hand).
No one ever got injured by issues like this - this is no y2k - which also proved to be not much of an issue.
-><- no
As the media makes a mountain out of a molehill on this one, I cannot help but be reminded of Y2K. Yeah, there could be some hiccups. Yeah, TiVo might have to be patched. Yeah, I might have to adjust the time on my five year old watch and then adjust it back once it auto-adjusts a month later (or would it be earlier?).
There is plenty of time for technology makers to solve this 'problem'. But rational thinking will not win out. Products not labeled "2007 Daylight Savings Compliant" will sit on the store shelves with consumers afraid not to buy them. Marketing teams are going to eat through their budgets on this one, recreating product package complete with a new-fangled, neon colored sticker proclaiming compliance. Not to mention the TV ads they're going to have to produce.
It will be a Y2K scare all over again. I better start restocking the bomb shelter and stockpiling weaponry.
Ah! You're missing the point of this law! The point isn't saving energy. The point is increasing RETAIL SHOPPING HOURS.
As a large retailer, we know that core shopping happens during daylight hours. As the sun sets, people start clearing out of the retail stores.
In most parts of the country, retail stores open at a fixed time, either 9AM (or 10AM in some areas). Almost no stores open at "sunrise".
Therefore, core shopping hours are from a 9AM until sunset. Maybe the store is open until 9 PM, but in general shopping activity slows way down at sunset. This is just a known fact in the retail industry.
By changing the clock, sunset can happen later relative to clock time. Therefore, if we add a month of DST, we add about 30 hours of prime-time shopping to our annual retail calendar!
To a retailer, this is huge news - this is almost like adding 3+ full shopping days to our calendar at almost zero cost.
My management was amazingly happy by this rule change.
In Brazil, we have long learned to accept the fact that no gadget (Windows included) knows when the DST starts or ends correctly.
Twice a year, Windows PCs set to automatically adjust for DST get it wrong and confuse users.
This is because the government keeps changing the dates every year.
For debian (don't know about other distros) there is even a package to track the Brazilian DST start/end dates and adjust the system correctly, called tz-brazil!
Joao
...prefer to shift with my right.
Even though it's an automatic.
The one thing they give us, everything else is discrimination...
Like the big metal scissors in school, that only right handed people can use (because the school is too cheap to buy decent scissors)
Or computer mice. One of these days, I'm going to start randomly switching the buttons on the mouse (within the OS) on people.
Books! They say the ending is better than the beginning, so we end on the right side of the page! MORE DISCRIMINATION AGAINST LEFT-HANDED PEOPLE!
RISE UP WE MUST, FELLOW LEFTIES!
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
How about this
Now it doesn't matter what time it is, and we can save not just energy, but brain cells, creative souls, careers, and lives! (exercise saves lives)
-- "By the age of 70 they will have spent 7 to 10 years of their lives watching TV." -- The Kaiser Family Foundation
Daylight Savings was originally implemented by Ben Franklin (simplified version: "to get farmers out of bed and milking the cows"). When was the last time Daylight Savings had an impact on your life, except twice a year when you change stuff or check it? Or give you an annual convenient excuse to roll into work an hour late?
And it's just plain Dadaism to think it has anything at all to do with energy consumption. Do y'suppose Bush actually believes he controls the seasons by moving the clocks and calandar pages around? Wouldn't surprise me in the least.
Yes, 1% per day.
Anyway, not a direct reply to you, more to the grandparent (but what the hell?)
According to the NIST website, the oil savings for increasing DST by one month is 300,000 barrels per year.
If I recall correctly, the proposal increases it for three weeks (75%), meaning a savings of 225,000 barrels of oil. At $63 per barrel or so (and we all know that it is high right now), that amounts to a yearly savings of $14,175,000. Now, I mean, if you're going to hand me $14 million dollars, you'll instantly become my best friend in the whole world--but in the scope of a multi-trillion dollar yearly federal budget, it is less than spit in the bucket. $14 million out of ONE trillion dollars is roughly 0.0014%.
Incidentally, the pay for a congressman in 2004 was $158,100 per year. At 535 Congressmen (435 Congress + 100 Senators, and technically leaders and the speaker get more), if they gave up one month's pay each (hey, they're shifting DST roughly a month right?) it would save $7,048,625 Roughly half. And they just gave themselves a pay hike.
It's just an example of how simple $14 million is to come up with in the federal budget. I won't even get into pork projects or $75 screws. Anybody claiming this is anything but an extremely minor energy/money savings, or an extremely (extremely!) minor reduction in our "dependance on foreign oil"--that's the phrase of Bush's presidency, yes?--has an agenda.
I'm curious what Bush's is. That part I haven't quite figured out.
Since this article is about gadgets getting confused, potentially requiring new ones be purchased if it is that annoying enough, and/or new DST rules being included in things like operating systems, I would wager that the cost of fixing this "problem," to both companies and consumers, is likely far greater than doing nothing.
Hurray, Congress!
stop messing with 'time'. this is the official global standard for working hour scheduling: for all people working inside buildings, and require lighting other than natural light, they should start their working-day after sunset during summer; for winter, day starts after sunrise; for all people working outdoors, start their working-day after sunrise; also, lets schule the working hours by zip code to meet the traffic speed and reduce air pollution. ++ all future building design must utilize natural light during day time by all means (light tunnel, optical reflection, etc.).
You can't blame Bush for not doing anything in his power to help the economy. As long as you are forced to buy new crap and send your old, perfectly working stuff to the dumpster, it's all good man. The only way this economy can be happy is by generating massive piles of unneeded trash and waste, because, well, we can't find any other way, any other system, to live our collective lives, conserving resources, and only consuming what's really needed, not based on artificial demand, but what demand stems naturally.
I haven't had the chance to read the entire article yet, but a quick web search on the author from my previous link led to this PDF document from a study by the State of California back in 2001. This study is filled with many statistical analyses. So, I assume that some of those will help explain the argument. Again, I have NOT read this document yet.
Scare tactics always work in US. Tell them, doom is near and people will do anything, even hire you ;)!
. . . by the way, did I mention that I'm an antiterrorism expert?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Ok, so that argument is a little silly, but I'm sure someone out there would advance it. ^_^ But seriously, in terms of morality, it's been proven that DST results in more accidents due to sleepy drivers and joggers who no longer have daylight during their normal exercise hours. The increased fatalities caused by this arbitrary change in time could be seen as a moral issue. *shrug* Or some might see it as Darwinian selection. Those who are fool enough to jog without lights and reflectors (Och... and don't even get me started on people on designated bike paths who are jogging or walking in pitch darkness with no reflectors or lights...) are eliminated. ^_^ And the computer geeks will survive. The benefits of a sendentary lifestyle...
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
You mean that this is just a plot by teh evil corporation overloads?
That this bill introduced by the BUSH administration in the end MIGHT be saving the corporations more than the average consumer? NO WAY!
The system had the verbosity of HTML combined with all the readability of compiled assembly viewed as bitmap images
I completely disagree. I think Daylight Saving Time is the answer for the whole year. Why are we only on it during the summer? Why can't we 'save' time year 'round? Below is a list of the 1st of each month for 2005. First time listed is the current system (in parentheses are always on DST). Keep in mind that almost everyone is awake between 4:00 PM and 6:00 PM, yet going off DST makes it dark then. Not everyone is awake between 7:00 AM and 8:00 AM. March, April, November, and December are very good examples.
Janurary 1st:
Sun Rise: 7:18am (8:18am)
Sun Set: 4:29pm (5:29pm)
February 1st:
Sun Rise: 7:03am (8:03am)
Sun Set: 5:04pm (6:04pm)
March 1st:
Sun Rise: 6:25am (7:25am)
Sun Set: 5:39pm (6:39pm)
April 1st:
Sun Rise: 5:33am (6:33am)
Sun Set: 6:15pm (7:15pm)
Move clocks forward one hour - on DST
May 1st:
Sun Rise: 5:46am (5:46am)
Sun Set: 7:48pm (7:48pm)
June 1st:
Sun Rise: 5:17am (5:17am)
Sun Set: 8:18pm (8:18pm)
July 1st:
Sun Rise: 5:18am (5:18am)
Sun Set: 8:29pm (8:29pm)
August 1st:
Sun Rise: 5:43am (5:43am)
Sun Set: 8:09pm (8:09pm)
September 1st:
Sun Rise: 6:15am (6:15am)
Sun Set: 7:25pm (7:25pm)
October 1st:
Sun Rise: 6:46am (6:46am)
Sun Set: 6:33pm (6:33pm)
Move clocks back one hour - off DST
November 1st:
Sun Rise: 6:22am (7:22am)
Sun Set: 4:45pm (5:45pm)
December 1st:
Sun Rise: 6:58am (7:58am)
Sun Set: 4:20pm (5:20pm)
The only difference comes during the winter (since this would always be on DST). We essentially lose an hour in the winter and gain it in the late afternoon. Not everyone wakes up before 8:00 and I can't think of a single person who would go to bed before 6:00 PM, so everyone is gaining access to the late afternoon/early evening light and only some people are losing the morning light (many people are still asleep). Why aren't we on Daylight Saving Time all year? I would prefer that much more than having it. We wouldn't have to mess with changing clocks or (re)programming our devices and we'd have more light in the early evening.
It says:
Studies done by the U.S. Department of Transportation show that we trim the entire country's electricity usage by about one percent EACH DAY with Daylight Saving Time.
Being that an entire day is about 1/3 of a percent of a year, I don't see how 1/24th of 1/365th could add up to anything measurable. But these are rough, back of the envelope calculations here, I have not done a real study, and no real data was found on the website referenced.
From the link...
Studies done by the U.S. Department of Transportation show that we trim the entire country's electricity usage by about one percent EACH DAY with Daylight Saving Time.
So if we have daylight savings one-hundred eighty days in the year, our energy savings for the entire country will be... 180%! I think this is a great idea!
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
Resetting the time on an electronic device is trivial.
I used to work for a company that build devices that sent time code signals, especially for radio, TV, and military applications.
Yes, setting the time is trivial. But until you make that change, the time is wrong, and all kinds of devices are out of whack (especially the ones that play pre-programmed commercials based on the time), so the device needs to be programmed to do the change automatically. We had the standard DST setting, but now all the users will be forced to custom program it to change the DST date correctly, since the standard program is no longer correct. And since this is just a little device sitting in this big complex system, every radio and TV engineer is swearing under his breath (or possible very loudly) at these people.
The funny thing is, I remember the 70's energy crisis where we had a year or two with full-time DST. They decided that the energy saved in the evening with later sunsets was used in the morning with later sunrises, and thus was a wash. Go figure. But since the Bushies seem to be igorant of history in general, it's not surprising.
Of course the cynic in me says they did this only to get the public all riled up about something trivial, and thus ignore the massive tax giveaways to large multinational corporations. But good old likeable GWB would never do something like that, would he?
Hopelessly pedantic since 1963.
... for CDMA-based cell phones. They won't be confused by a change in daylight savings times start/end date. At least, they won't be confused as long as the network providers change the DAYLT flag at the correct start/end dates.
...). Assuming the broadcast includes the DAYLT flag, those devices should be fine as well.
Certain other gadgets get time from the a broadcast source as well (PBS cable channel, US atomic clock,
Again,
How does this help? So instead of saying "its 8am there" you're utopia would say "It's 1pm, minus 5 hours for sun, there"
Just saying the relative time there conveys all needed information: You want to know at what point in their day the people in another area are.
Turn off my TV? But, I can't! If I don't have the TV on in my house, who will raise my son?
Try the link in my post here.
"Stop the apocalypse! Hire me"
;)!
Scare tactics always work in US. Tell them, doom is near and people will do anything, even hire you
If you don't hire me, the terrorist have already won(?).
-Valiss
the real meat of the bill? Oh wait, there is none.
See http://www.energybulletin.net/7473.html, http://uspirg.org/ and others.
Were that I say, pancakes?
If you don't hire me to reprogram your VCR, the terrorists have already won!
This study concludes that normal DST reduces total energy use in california by around 0.21% annually, and that adding in a summer "double daylight saving time" would result in a total annual reduction of 0.33%. I have to question whether such a trivial reduction is worth the hassle.
Just to clarify, it's "daylight saving" time...No "s".
This is a common misconception. You deposit one hour in the spring, and in the fall you withdraw. The interest is unfortunately low, but non-zero, as the hour you withdraw will be a teeny-weeny bit longer due to the slowdown of the earth's rotation.
You fall into the trap that so many others do of failing to think of the long term and thinking only in the short.
Living in a world free from pollution and cancer is nice, but the only thing that can save the human race from extinction is a space program and a rather good one at that.
Meteor impacts are inevitable and the earth is actually covered with thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) impact craters and we will more than likely get hit with a big one in a few thousand years or so.
That and the sun will die or explode eventually... So no matter how much we give the environment, it's going to all to turn to space dust as the red giant blows solar winds that strip the earth of it's atmosphere.
On the bright side we have a few billion years to get out of the solar system.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Aha! There is the fallacy. In my house when I walk into a room, I turn the lights on. Daytime or no. So do (I assume) a lot of people. This is nothing but a red herring to throw off the ignorant public so they don't notice the billions of dollars this bill gives to oil companies. And its working!
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
I wish my watch (also a Casio) would automatically adjust itself. Computers can do it (even when not online), so a watch should be able to as well. Plus the "adjust" button on my watch is a nightmare to press, really need 2 hands to do it (before you tell me to just take my watch off, it's too much trouble, the band's broken so my watch is zip-tied on).
On the bright side we have a few billion years to get out of the solar system.
...
And with a decade left to go, we'll still be saying "Our kids will fix it". You just watch
i am a soviet space shuttle
Imagine if it was TWO hours instead of one? Who needs fusion power when you have the power of bad math and misleading statistics?
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
The change to dayligt saving is first effective 2007. From the bill: ...subsection (a) shall take effect 1 year after the date of enactment of this Act or March 1, 2007, whicever is later.
I can't imagine the problems this ass-hat idea would cause if put into effect, especially wrt international time differences which will now vary according to the time of year (those parts of the year when the US will now be on Bush time vs world time).
I'm sure multinational businesses, airlines, etc, are going to have a ball with this.
What next? Bush passes law to make everyone wear orange on tuesdays and walk backwards on the weekend?!
Conservation is stupid. Conservation is simply artificially impoverishing yourself. There's no benefit. No, conservation is about using your resources efficiently. Just look at the Japanese. They have no oil or coal resources of their own and have to pay through the nose for all their energy and material costs. This hits their bottom line hard. The Japanese decided to conserve. Their manufacturing industry uses signficantly less energy than ours. They recycle everything. They designed their cities so that 70% of the population can take public transit. As a result, despite crippling energy and material costs and a ten-year long "depression" (thanks to the damage done by land speculation), they still had the second largest GDP of any nation in the world until China took off and now sit at third. What's the conservation endgame? There isn't one. That's the whole point -- to not have an endgame. Why should acting efficiently without waste have an endgame? The alternative is global economic meltdown and brutal war over the scraps. Fresh water rights are already becoming an issue in certain parts of the world (particularly the Middle East). Arable land will become more and more at a premium as desertification increases due to global warming. Energy costs will soar as people turn up the air conditioning to avoid death by heat stroke (see the deadly heat have in the American Southwest this month). We may in fact be looking at peak oil production right now, and there's no effort to make better use of what we have, and it's only a matter of time until the largest nations decide that the only way to continue their way of life is to deny others access (see the recent Unocal purchase block). Ever hear of the tragedy of the commons? Did you know that the Middle East -- the so-called Fertile Crescent -- used to be forested and well farmed? The flag of Lebanon has a cedar tree on it because the things used to grow all over the place there! However, an unsustainable lumber industry destroyed the forests to the point that they could no longer regrow and the area is largely a desert now. A little conservation here could've left us with a forested Lebanon today. We're seeing the same thing with many of the ocean's seafood species. We're overfishing several species to the point that they're in danger, and our methods of fishing for some species (like dragging nets for shrimp) are destroying many others. A little conservation here could mean that our grandchildren know what seafood tastes like (assuming we haven't dumped enough mercury from our coal plants to make it unsafe for them). Conservation is about having enough to work with in our life and for not stealing the future from our descendents. It's about treating resources as what they are -- finite though in many cases renewable -- and acting with the wisdom to get the most out of them that you and your descendents can.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
One word: hackers
Ugh. I forgot to switch it back from when I was originally blockquoting material. Here's my post in readable format:
Conservation is stupid. Conservation is simply artificially impoverishing yourself. There's no benefit.
No, conservation is about using your resources efficiently. Just look at the Japanese. They have no oil or coal resources of their own and have to pay through the nose for all their energy and material costs. This hits their bottom line hard. The Japanese decided to conserve. Their manufacturing industry uses signficantly less energy than ours. They recycle everything. They designed their cities so that 70% of the population can take public transit. As a result, despite crippling energy and material costs and a ten-year long "depression" (thanks to the damage done by land speculation), they still had the second largest GDP of any nation in the world until China took off, and they now still sit at third.
What's the conservation endgame?
There isn't one. That's the whole point -- to not have an endgame. Why should acting efficiently without waste have an endgame?
The alternative is global economic meltdown and brutal war over the scraps. Fresh water rights are already becoming an issue in certain parts of the world (particularly the Middle East). Arable land will become more and more at a premium as desertification increases due to global warming. Energy costs will soar as people turn up the air conditioning to avoid death by heat stroke (see the deadly heat have in the American Southwest this month). We may in fact be looking at peak oil production right now, and there's no effort to make better use of what we have, and it's only a matter of time until the largest nations decide that the only way to continue their way of life is to deny others access (see the recent Unocal purchase block).
Ever hear of the tragedy of the commons? Did you know that the Middle East -- the so-called Fertile Crescent -- used to be forested and well farmed? The flag of Lebanon has a cedar tree on it because the things used to grow all over the place there! However, an unsustainable lumber industry destroyed the forests to the point that they could no longer regrow and the area is largely a desert now. A little conservation here could've left us with a forested Lebanon today.
We're seeing the same thing with many of the ocean's seafood species. We're overfishing several species to the point that they're in danger, and our methods of fishing for some species (like dragging nets for shrimp) are destroying many others. A little conservation here could mean that our grandchildren know what seafood tastes like (assuming we haven't dumped enough mercury from our coal plants to make it unsafe for them).
Conservation is about having enough to work with in our life and for not stealing the future from our descendents. It's about treating resources as what they are -- finite though in many cases renewable -- and acting with the wisdom to get the most out of them that you and your descendents can.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Triangular Earth Calendar
I think the 60 week years will appeal to you. Divisibility and symmetry of the calendar is one of its greatest assets. Being based on triangular numbers, it is the most whole number divisible calendar available, as it scales up at base 10, so you don't have to learn anything new to apply it to a decade, century, or millennium.
It is, however, based on decimal time, with a day equalling a unit of 1, and time being a decimal of that. With standard language, time can always be represented as a factor of one, such as 1/2 of a day, 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, etc. That's just a bit hard to make a clock out of, though.
I8-D
Of course, you're right, the path-dependency or "QWERTY" effect would be almost impossible to overcome. It would be better, though. Much better than base10 time.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
I think the main problem with daylight saving time is that while sunlight is symmetrical around 12 am / 12 pm, our use of that time is skewed so that the center of our waking day is in the afternoon. DST is an attempt to force the "waking midday" closer to solar noon, but it would take more than one hour to do that, with our typical use of time. On the other hand, why should it be forced? Why not let people and businesses decide how they use their time?
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Wow. You just demonstrated perfectly the fallacy of the broken window. Congratulations.
The economy is not renewed by over-consumption. It does not get better by throwing things away and buying more. It is renewed by efficient production - that is, production that fulfills the most urgent wants and needs of the populace. The demand is totally natural - once our most urgent needs are met, our secondary needs and wants can be met. After that our tertiary needs and wants, our quaternary needs and wants, etc. My demand for a specific flavor of toothpaste only follows after I have already successfully fulfilled my other needs - food, shelter, and a toothbrush. It is not artificial...it is just what I can afford to focus on in a society of such wealth.
Liberty in Our Lifetime - http://www.freeme.org/
Bit tinfoil maybe, but some good points...
[1] I'm a Master Mason.
[2] My wife's and firstborn's birthday.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Wow.
Be careful...you're validating my stereotypes of poor spellers.
I am SO PROUD that you managed to spell "Eisenhower" correctly. And propaganda! Good job! Now you just need to work on the paranoid delusions and the whole "I before E except after C" rule.
You're making progress. Gold star!
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
well it depends which side of "the pond" you are on.Its like asking where to find an elevator in the UK, where there they call it a lift. its also the same a Trucks being called Lorries over there. there are countless examples. FAG! oh I mean Ciggarette. that's probably spelled wrong also. but I'll let my editor Moffie call my agent, so he can call my secretary, then she'll fill me in!(FYI: I am a rocket science project manager, and DR. Moffie I regret to inform you your services are no longer required) *HIGH FIVE!*
But the idiocy of this is that *households* don't use 100% of the energy in the US. If they did, great, we'd save energy.
Unfortunately, a great deal of the energy used in this country is at work. The hundreds of thousands of people who work in call centers or cube farms never touch the lights. They are on when they come in, and they are on when they leave. In fact, MANY businesses leave their lights on 24/7. If not all the time, they at least light their buildings 8am-5pm, regardless of how bright outside it is.
If it's lighter during the day, we won't use our computers any less. Our refrigerators won't run less. We'll still use AC. And our offices will still be lit by banks of fluorescent lights, heated and cooled by poorly balanced HVAC units which are further thrown off by morons with their windows open, and rooms filled by racks of inefficient computers wasting ton of energy in the form of heat.
If we really want to save energy, let's start by requiring government and military installations to have energy efficient buildings and policies, and enforce national building codes for households and businesses so they are well insulated and energy efficient. Throw in minimum fuel efficiency requirements for vehicles, and THAT would make a difference. This daylight savings extension won't do much to save energy, I'm afraid.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Scare tactics always work in US. Tell them, doom is near and people will do anything, even hire you ;)!
I'll have you know that telling people in the US that doom is near will spur them to do absolutely nothing. However, if you carefully word the statement and say "doom is nigh" you will evoke the intended effect.
Repeat after me: Daylight Saving Time, Daylight Saving Time, Daylight Saving Time; Not Daylight Savings Time.
Daylight saving time
The vague reference to a Department of Transportation study about the energy-saving benefits of DST can be thrown out at worst, or simply ignored at best.
I just finished reading Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving about a month before this latest change to the clock settings came around.
Read that, then come back. DST *is* madness, and really was only brought about by New York business magnates who wanted more entertainment hours in the evening. Bunko about saving energy.
Ask your parents (if they're old enough) what it was like to grow up in a century where most of the country couldn't agree on what time it was. This book certainly made me give thanks that at least most of the country found a way to agree (save for Indian and Arizona).
This will result in every operating system that handles daylight savings needing an update.
However some will be screwed (Sorry 95/98 users) becouse they are no longer supported.
I don't actually exist.
my point being that since the invention of light bulbs, there is no reason in the information age to worry about when the sun will come up. ever thought of how productive society could be if 1/3 of the work force worked 9am-5pm, the other third from 5am-1am, and the later worked 1am-9pm well trafic would be cut down considerably, as would car related deaths(not to mention increased productivity.) I know these things are off of you radar, because you are such a bad ass RS! but daylight savings time is ONLY repeat ONLY imortant to farmers!(and yes I know some Farmers). Since you are such a bad ass Rocket scientist why don't you work out time zones for the moon and mars instead of fucking w/ some kid who misspelled a couple(or eight) words[or even worse contributing to deaths of innocent kids. p.s. My granddad worked for the manhattan project, which is not something I'm proud of. So don't think I'm impressd by your job, and I wouldn't bet on your descendants being proud of you either. The whole war paradigm has changed and I wish i knew how you feel when you KNOW FOR A FACT that innocent Civis have died a a direct part of your work. mabbe you would feel better about yourself if you worked w/ R/E (if you don't know what that means you need help) INSTEAD of contributing to the Perpetualy Death Machine! work on & get back w/ me! *high Five*
This should give you some insight into this sort of nefarious conspiracy.
Fnord.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Why not scrap DST altogether? No more falling back or springing forward. It creates a hassle with everything.
But still allow States to decide which timezone they want. So if Washington state wants to go to Mountain Time instead of Pacific Time, so be it. Afterall, this new DST is going to be 9 months a year, so why not just have the next standard time zone year-round?
I think we should keep leap seconds. GMT needs to come at noon. The U.S. government doesn't need to be doing stupid stuff like this in the name of saving energy. People can stagger their work schedules. Schools can adjust their times. And people can invest in having solar panels on their roofs.
is that with universal time the date would change during the working day.
this would mean that you couldn't use dates to identify working days without having to seperately make it clear if you were talking about the date the workday started in or the one it ended in.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I know COBOL was popular and all, and it's not a bad language, but I doubt it's the code that runs my VCR.
+++
Cache In, Trash Out!
+++
My new Home
So we'll all have the same time on our watches, but we'll be doing whatever we want whenever we want and coordination would become even more confusing.
It wouldn't complicate much of anything, people on the US East coast would start work at 1:00 pm while people on the US West coast start work at 4:00. The specific time only matters to the people living/staying there. People in other areas will have to take the time difference into account but they have to do that now. Times in the TV Guide would be printed to reflect the local airing (just like they do now). (Inter)National media (radio/TV) can safely announce the time without confusing anyone.
It would greatly simplify a lot of things. When you travel you never have to change your watch. New Years would happen simultaneously all over the world. When you set up a teleconference between people in Frankfurt, London, New York, Los Angeles and Tokyo you just tell everyone it starts at 5:00 pm, you don't have to waste time calculating time zones (or worrying about who does or doesn't use daylight saving time). Sure that's in the evening for some people and early morning for others but you can't avoid that unless you do something about the world being round first.
The reason we won't do it is because the date would change at different times of the day in different places around the earth. It would happen in the middle of the night, in the morning, in the afternoon, or in the evening depending on where you live. I don't think it would actually be a problem (we handle the date changing everyday at night now, so what it it happened at lunch time?) but I'm sure there are too many morons out there who wouldn't scream and complain for it ever to get passed.
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
"How is this going to save energy?"
:-)
It saves energy if, and only if, you get up late enough so that it is already light when DST is in effect. If you get up so early it's dark either way, then it's irrelevant. If you get up when it's light on standard time, and in the dark on DST, then it costs energy, or at best shifts some of the load to the morning hours.
Now, I suspect that on both coasts they get up late, and go to bed late. There has to be a reason that prime time is from 8 to 11. I get up at 6 AM, so I am in bed by 10 PM, and I haven't seen the last hour of "prime time" since 1990. And here I am in the Peak Buying demographic too.
Actually, the 10 PM bed time is an improvement. From 1990 to 1995 I got up at 5 AM, and the TV was off by 9 PM.
When I grew up in the Central time zone, Bed time was 10 PM (once I was in my teens) but Prime time was 7 to 10, which meant I could watch more then than I can now, which is NOT at all what I was expecting at the time.
"Resource exhaustion is economically impossible."
History shows that the human race is perfectly capable of exhausting finite resources, despite common sense and economic pressures to the contrary. Species get killed off, local arable land gets over-farmed into wasteland, local food supply is insufficient and famine sets in, local population strains living space/facilities and crime/disease sets in, etc.
Sure, all these problems become self-correcting, given enough time. As long as we're limited on one planet, all problems are self-correcting. We either learn to live on this planet, or we die. So far, we haven't taken over ever square inch of the planet, so problems have always been local. I suppose we can wait until all problems become global.
The problem is I, for one, don't want to live in a dystopian nightmare vision of a world. I like clean air and forests and open spaces and clear water and natural habitats and all that stuff. I also like not killing each other over food and water and oil. I am of the opinion that we can, indeed, sustain something much like our current standard of living without turning the whole planet into a cesspool or open mine pit.
It's also worth pointing out that economic factors are not the only ones at play in the real world. For that matter, people don't always make rational decisions. Real-world economics also lag behind models because information and resources both take time to transit.
"When oil gets expensive, people will find substitutes."
Substitutes? Sure. Equivalents? Maybe so, but possibly not. It's foolhardy to think we can invent our way out of every possible problem. Sure, we can go back to stone knives and bear skins if have to, but again, do we want to?
To paraphrase C.S. Lewis: There are things that have survival value, and then there are things that give value to survival.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Keep in mind that the US uses about 20,000,000 barrels of oil each day. 300,000 is rather insignificant (only about 20 minutes worth of oil).
Divide the day into 100 hours (each about 14 minutes long), each of those divide into 100 minutes (each about 8.5 seconds long) and those divide into 100 seconds.
the time can then be read as ##:##:## going from 00:00:00 to 99:99:99 (though people will probaly use 10 seconds as a base for counting)
For daylight savings time/ leap seconds / leap hours have an option after the clock is set back that shows how many times that time has been reached(87:69:54::0 87:69:54::1) showing that the clock was set back, making it easier for computer equipment to deal with the concept of leap seconds/hours and adjust to time zone changes (this would probably only be of interest to electronics that keep time, not people)
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
I work for a Daytime-only AM station. This is going to take away a whole hour of broadcast time in the morning, which is where peak listenership occurs. Since our broadcast schedule is based on actual sunrise/set times, this change really hurts us.
Sure, the FCC can make an adjustment to the rules to allow us to still sign-on earlier with reduced power, but when you have a 50,000 watt station blasting into your coverage area due to reflection from the ionosphere at night. (See WIKI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_wave ) As a result, that low-power operation might cover the handful of listeners within a mile of your transmitter.
Many AM radio stations either change their antenna patterns or their transmitter power based on sunrise and set times. There are still a number of us that have no nighttime operation at all. In winter, for example, we sign-on at 7:15 am, and off at 5pm.
Right now, the schedule permits us to sign-on at 6am in March. With this change, that would change to 7am. In November, we currently sign-on at 6:45. That would become 7:45!
I wish they'd just leave well enough alone. Can this portion of the bill be repealed before it takes effect???
Willie...
Jesus fucking Christ, it's not the end of the world. The whole concept of Daylight Saving Time is irritating in the first place, but it's not that much work to remember to set your various devices manually. Or in the case of devices like (most) cell phones that pull time info from a central server, it's not that hard to adjust the difference centrally.
Ever been billed for an extra hour of online time 'cause you were on on spring forward night?
I also recall the story of a fellow with a timer in his car that went off an hour early, due to a time zone differance.
Fortunetly, the clock was hooked to a car bomb, and so he got blown up miles away from the target in the middle of nowhere.
Clearly, this change is intended to protect us from terrorists.
Here in Queensland, Australia, we don't have daylight savings time like the other states on the east coast because it would fade the curtains. Or the cows wouldn't know what time to give milk, or the farmers would have to get up an hour earlier or something like that. Keep in mind the Queensland Government has given our state the new slogan, 'The Smart State'.
The here is Queensland we would benefit from daylight savings because we don't really have a twilight, it is just light, then dark pretty quickly. Whereas further south in the states that do have daylight savings such as Melbourne, Victoria, they have a longer twilight and have daylight savings so it is not totally dark until 9pm or so.
Most of the techie widgets I have make use of NTP anyway. Those that don't can be OS or firmware updated on the fly to account for the the DST changes long before the spring of 2007. By this I mean my TiVo, computer OSes, and my Symbian-based cellphone.
So what if my eight-year-old Hitachi VCR can't adapt to the change in regulations? Big deal! All I use it for now is to provide my kids with additional ports for the PS2. It doesn't care what time it is.
Let's play Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I'll be Pestilence.
that I'm really creeped out and pissed off about the social engineering aspects of DST. The government decided to save energy by making you go to bed earlier. Fuck you bastards. I'm still going to stay up until midnight and get up at 7:30AM. Regardless of what fucking time of year it is. Bastards.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
Uhm, has any energy be saved yet? It seems to me that all the costs assosiated with it greatly overweight the hypothetical savings.
:)
I personally expect this to be the far greater problem that Y2K.
Just imagine the power grid, when 2 devices get a command they should execute at 08:00 and one of those devices accepts daylight-saving, the other one doesn't. The nice thing about it is that that error is likely to be not detected that quickly.
I personally think it's foolish to make any changes on the daylight saving, other than to get rid of it completely. It's a clear sign that there seem to be at least some people in power, who must have lost their minds.
Not only that, when I'm there I want my watch to let me know how long it is until lunch time. I don't want to have to remember that lunch is now at 20:00 instead of the usual 17:00 I'm used to, or that I should set my alarm clock to 16:00 instead of 14:00 when I want to make a morning meeting.
... (AFAIR, in 1918), they just did it: they set the clock one hour ahead (for daylight saving for the whole year).
But now we (in non-Soviet Russia) have DST in addition to that hour.
Studies done by the U.S. Department of Transportation show that we trim the entire country's electricity usage by about one percent EACH DAY with Daylight Saving Time.
Wow, so after three months, we'll have saved nearly 100%! Cool!!
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
... is feeling of "ruling Time/Sun": "I can tell Sun when to rise or set". (It is only almost a joke. A couple of years ago, my city was moved from GMT(or UTC?)+7 to GMT+6 without any rational reason (The "reason" from local authorities was that it was 2p.m. at the time of "real" noon). )
Another funny thing (but not a joke) about my city and the Time is that some time ago, the city was in two time zones simultaneously (different time zones for different banks of the river).
so how many states dropping DST alltogether would eliminate the proposed savings?
and why does our congress have the authority to change the worlds time zones? after all, all of these timezones they plan to change extend into Canada, and the time zone they live in extends into South America.
S.America doesn't observes daylight savings time now, but Canada does, correct? (since much of SAmerica is in the southern Hemisphere, I am guessing many would have to set ahead when US sets backward anyway)
writing this from AZ, I hope this bill would cause most states to opt out of Daylight savings all-together (I guarantee many states would take this time to consider opting out altogether anyway.)
My post (the GP of this one) was supposed to say "<1%" (not just "1%"), but the HTML ate the <. Shoulda used preview!
I pity the foo that isn't metasyntactic
Congratulations on actually being funny. 90% of the funny mods here are given to posts that are played out jokes, or just plain stupid. If only there was a way to filter out the stuff that is marked funny, but actually isn't... maybe some kind of peer rating system like credence
Computers don't make mistakes. What they do, they do on purpose.
Recycling of most things (glass, paper, plastic) is costly, dirty, wasteful work.
If it cost more to recycle than to use raw materials, companies wouldn't do it.
Ignoring the fact that recycled plastic costs much more than newly manufactured stuff, even after our government subsidies the recycling plants, the process of recycling plastic introduces many chemicals into the environment as or more dangerous than would be had by throwing it away and making a new one.
And this is based on...what exactly? I'm skeptical of this argument, the same one used against recycling paper. Are you basing your comparison on breaking down the materials and using them for cheaper products, or are you using the most expensive processing available?
Interesting... get sidetracked while typing a post, and get modded Funny :)
I work in the power generation industry, and I devide my time between new installations and maintenance/repair.
New unit installation is basically a construction job, and those almost always start at first light, usually to get the most work done possible during daylight. They rarely stick to 8-hour days, 10 or 12 hour days are more common, pretty much trying to get everything possible done in daylight (since outdoor lighting is expensive and not nearly as effective as sunlight)
In maintencance/repair situations, I deal with the permanant crews that cover the plant 24/7. Most either run three 8-hour shifts or two 12-hour ones. Either way 7:00am is the standard start of first shift.
Office jobs are the only ones I see or deal with that start at 9:00ish, unfortunately I discovered the hard way the cubicle/office work makes me practically suicidal within 6-months. The movie 'Office Space' isn't a comedy, it's a documentary!
I beg to disagree but a lot of demand is artificial too. A lot of people need to be told what to want, because they can't think for themselves, and they go around like a herd of lemmings, following the latest trends.
Not to categorize people, or belittle some as dumb, as opposed to you and me, who are wise, because everyone has a that trend following side to themselves, follow the flock, do as others do, including you and me. It's part of being human, otherwise there is no society, people that don't follow any trends ever don't get to cooperate. For instance, you could call scientific experiments, faith in the scientific method a trend, together with the written word from even thousands of years ago (e.g. Euclid), a human cooperation of a massive scale. It's nothing more than a belief system, a trend, because you put your belief in repeatablity of experiments, faith into - as Wittgenstein said it, "that the sun will rise tomorrow - is only a hypothesis." Nothing assures you, and some religion will come by and say science is an illusion, reality is an illusion, and tomorrow all science will end, and you shall be judged by your adherence to these religious rules this guy is preaching you. You may say, I won't adhere, I'd rather wait and see, and he'll say just watch, you'll be sorry. Or, you can adhere, saying, what do I got to lose if the the world truly ends tomorrow and I shall be judged because I didn't follow what this guy told me? What if he's right? A lot of belief systems prey on people with such techniques. At least doubt is at the core of science - It's the religion of doubt, the faith of doubting, the faith in not having faith, the faith of minimizing or optimizing faith, leaving as few pillars you stand on based on faith as possible. Faith is a very precious commodity you shouldn't throw around too easily. Still, as far as following trends goes, the scientific method has a lot of followers, because so far so good, look at the big picture, we got the steam engine, we got computers, eyeglasses, we get to look at Jupiter's moons, and keep our asses warm by running that nukular powerplant a couple miles down that way. For those opposing science and technology, I think it beats having to set a fire inside a cave, and eating meat you killed with your untechnological stone tools, because you didn't sow crops to harvest.
Still, when marching along, following trends, most often only when you've got a taste, when you walked down a path with a flock for a while - give everything a chance - do you come to a full hault and say: I gotta stop, something's not right, look at the big picture. It takes a while to wake up, until it's too late, and those who dare not sleepwalk and wake up early, get axed by the sheperds who are the religious high priests of the current trend, the current belief system.
There is of course the other side to even the scientific "vogue." Not the doubting part, because the following is a doubting of even the method of doubting. More exactly, the method of doubting gives you success and benefits, but the problem is failing to doubt the benefit of benefits, or, in other words, the drawback of too much, too sudden success without corresponding checks and balances. (My condolances go to all people who win the lottery, and are unable to behave like, say Bill Gates did, when he first became a billionare, and took the reporters to McDonalds over it, wearing jeans and tennis shoes.) As far as the sudden advances of technology and and science go, without corresponding spiritual advances, where we came to the point of being able to extinguish all life a the push of a button, there are some people that say halt, let's think here for a minute. Ted Kaczynski, for all the sickness he is, he's got another side to him, he's got a point. Look at the amish as a much better example of how to tame technology, how to tame science, how to say halt, let's think first before we dive head first down that cliff.
The "free market religion" is no different from a trend. Regarding the fallacy of the br
Forgot one thing, as far as artificial demand goes. They say the really good salesman is not someone who can sell you something you want to buy, but one who can sell you something you wouldn't want to buy in the first place. Yeah, how many salespeople have a "creed," a sort of "hippocratic oath," to seek out and get to know a person, and only sell them what they truly need, to become sort of people-knowers, psychologists, instead of abusing their position of power over their target, their power to influence them. Asking for such a creed is foolish, after all, happiness can be generated by telling you something will make you happy, and you believing in that. Placebos cure ilnesses, even though they have a lot of side effects. Any drug company will tell you that. Value and demand is something that's unfixed, fluctuates a lot, because perception fluctuates a lot. If your perception of the value of some goods is artificially increased, your happiness is increased too, even if artificially. Tell me lies, sweet little lies often beats getting the cold hard truth in your face all the time. Did you know that you're special? (Psst, so is everyone else.) Happiness, even artificial happiness, matters. Honey, do these clothes make me look fat? What is your answer? Artificial happiness? Artificial demand? Artificial piles of waste? Why can't we create artificial happiness without the artificial waste piles?