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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
(Yes, that's an opinion. Feel free to disagree.)
What is this "VCR" you speak of?
Mark A. McBride -- OmniNerd.com
You'll have another hour to fix it.
Hopefully this will cause more states to take the good example of Arizona and just do away with the daylight savings sillyness altogether.
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.
...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
Good for you. We all appreciate your proactive stance for mediocrity.
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 ;)!
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
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.
8:59, First time I've ever been early for work. --except for all those daylight savings times, lousy farmers!
For best results, tell them to do it to protect the children from terrorists.
...Daylight Saving Time, not Daylight Savings Time...
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.
[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.]
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
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
New Mexico has DST. Arizona is weird, though. The state doesn't have it, but the Navajo reservation which takes up the northeastern corner of the state does. Even more confusing, there is a Hopi reservation entirely inside the Navajo reservation that doesn't, and another tiny Navajo reservation entirely inside the Hopi reservation that does. You could very well have to change your clock seven times just travelling in a straight east-west line across the state.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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?.
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.
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 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.
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.
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).
No, they don't. They'll do whatever England does, since they're still the Queen's bitch.
/me puts on his hockey stick proof, anti maple leaf asbestos pants.
"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.
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.
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.
Coming into effect in 2007 ... but in under a year?
Is it 2006 where you are? Can you send me some stock quotes?
-- Alastair
It would improve my life to get from point A to point B. I can do so in an SUV, or I can do so in a car that uses half as much gasoline. Conservation is to use the least amount of resources to accomplish the same goal. Conservation is not the opposite of need, but the opposite of waste.
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).
My friends, common sense and traditional time-tested dexterity prove that left-handedness is simply wrong. Writing with your right hand is natural law--WRITE MEANS RIGHT! Righteous people know the difference between right and left!
According to the Encylopedia Britannica (1944), "The percentage of left-handedness . . . is much higher among inmates of institutions for the feeble minded and the psychopathic." Yet these "biological errors" are campaigning for special recognition as a legitimate minority to force you to accept their immoral behavior. Worse yet, the schools are encouraging deviant-handed diversity and facilitating the use of sinful southpaw scissors!
The Bible says, "A wise man's heart is at his right hand; but a fool's heart at his left" (Ecclesiastes 10:2), and "Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into the EVERLASTING FIRE" (Matthew 25:41).
"Theories relative to handedness vary in their treatment of it as an acquired or a native trait," says the Britannica. Many experts believe that left-handedness is learned and can be corrected. With repentance and reparative therapies, sinners caught in the lecherous leftist lifestyle can be converted and cured. Yes, right righteousness and healthy handedness is possible! Many ex-southpaws have become normal, happy right-writers. Some have even held hands, gotten married, and had children!
But the militant leftist lobby says they were "born that way." They cite evidence that it's genetic, morally neutral, and normal! Well, that doesn't mean we have to teach children that it's OK to respect people who are different! Any nonjudgmental mention of left-handedness is "promotion" of wrong behavior, encouraging vulnerable young children to experiment with alternative handedness!
Since right-thinking people believe that wrong-handedness is immoral, we will force the schools to teach only OUR beliefs to YOUR children!
AGREE WITH US OR BURN IN HELL!
-M. Dennis Moore
hinderfreude ('hin-dur-"froi-d&), n. The feeling of joy derived from being in the way.
[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?