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."

Comments

Time for a change...

[TripMaster Monkey]

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...

Re:Time for a change...

[Peyna]

Swatch started such an initiative a couple years ago.

Internet Time

Re:Time for a change...

[wazootyman]

But what happens when I'm in Michigan and need to call a client in California? It's still relevant that 9 am here is 6 am there. If you eliminate time zones, you'll still have to adjust your schedule based on the fact that their day is about 3 hours behind yours.

We already use a global time in a sense; time zones make GMT into a format that's easier to understand. Knowing that it's 05:00 GMT doesn't necessarily tell you whether you're going to be calling a person in the middle of the night or not.

Re:Time for a change...

[SlayerofGods]

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!

Re:Time for a change...

[brunson]

Anyone with a background in math will tell you base 12 or base 60 is much better to do math in. The more integer divisors your base has, the easier it is to do division without going into fractions. In a 12 hour day, what's half of that, or a third or a quarter? It's even better in a 60 minute hour where you have a factors of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30. What do you have for 10? 2 and 5. 100? 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25 and 50. Don't push for getting rid of base 60 time, push to change our number system to base 12.

Re:Time for a change...

[badasscat]

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.

I think you're missing the basic purpose of telling time. Which is to say that no matter what it says on the clock, it's the "same damned time everywhere", so your solution accomplishes nothing. Time is linear - you don't actually go back in time if you take a flight that lands in one place "earlier" than when it left (I know you know this, but your premise suggests otherwise). The purpose of having a time standard that we can all read is as a frame of reference. Your solution is to eliminate that frame of reference. I don't see how this makes things simpler.

If it's morning where I am in NYC, it's still going to be night in Hawaii regardless of what the clock says. I still need to remember that if I want to call somebody there, or otherwise communicate. Just because my watch says it's 4 AM (GMT) doesn't mean all those Hawaiians are going to be awake.

You're looking at things backwards. Time zones make it easier to deal with this issue, because we can easily say "oh, it's six hours earlier in Hawaii - that means people must still be asleep." Take away the time zones and you're stuck doing calculations about distance and solar cycles for every single place on the planet you've got to deal with. Is it really easier to say "well, Hawaii is 5,500 miles east, and the earth rotates at X miles an hour; therefore, Hawaii will have sunlight in 6 hours" than it is to just know that Hawaii's 6 hours behind us?

Re:Time for a change...

[Anonymous Coward]

Time is clearly not meant to be decimal-based. You can of course separate a day into arbitrarily many sections and call these sections anything you like. A 1000 wobbles per day perhaps. The bigger units of time are the real problem: The year can not be described by an integer number of days. If you don't want to do away with months, these are based on the moon and the only way to have an integer number of months per year is to not have them be precisely synced to the moon phase. Then you have the problem that a reasonable good approximation of the moon phase leads to a number of days by which the number of days per year isn't divisible, so you get months with more days and months with fewer days by dithering the error over the year. It's really hopeless, in terms of numerical elegance.

60 and 24 at least have some nice numerical properties:

60 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15 and 30.

24 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 6, 8 and 12.

Try that with 100: 2, 4, 5, 10, 20, 25 and 50. Much less flexible.

Re:Time for a change...

[justfred]

Actually, right-hand-drive originated for just that reason - because if you were approaching someone on a horse, you'd want to pass to the left so that your sword hand would be read.

Napoleon taught his troops to fight with their swords in their left hands, to surprise the British. Which is why the continentals would pass to the right.

Re:Time for a change...

[jZnat]

It's so that it's hidden from the normal users! We don't want anyone to mess with that timezone a la the US Government is doing right now, so we prefix with the dot and chmod it to 0700

Re:Time for a change...

[lgw]

A *real* math geek will tell you that balanced base 3 is the best way to go (i.e., the digits are -1, 0, and 1). The is the densest way to store and calculate numbers. After all, why choose a system that's easy for humans when it's not humans that do most of the calculating any more?

In any cas, the one true system of measure - the Furlong-Fortnight-Firkin system - is easy in both base 10 and base 12, you can't beat it!

Re:Time for a change...

[moonbender]

I once figured that we should just use Absolute Universe Time. Universe time starts at Zero (no unit)--the time when the universe started to exist--and the current moment AUT always is 100% (or just One). All other dates are given as a percentage relative to this. Dates in the past are between 0 and 1, moments in the future are larger than 1.
Of course, this introduces a number of minor inconveniences. First off, since the universe started to exist, as far as we can tell, some 16 billion years ago but our typical time needs are in the manner of hours and days, this leads to extremely minor fractions: "I'll meet you at 100.00000000009%" or "I was born at 99.99999999999983%." Second, the refence to a given moment in time changes, ie 50% AUT isn't the same in 5 minutes or 5 seconds, since the total time between 0% and 100% AUT always increases. So you'd have to take that into consideration when using AUT.

Re:Time for a change...

[Schnee]

I heard that the Babylonian king went to his most trusted advisors and asked what base should they keep time in. All six of the advisors simultaneously held up both hands, finger spread....

Re:Time for a change...

[leoxx]

My car gets forty rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!

Re:Time for a change...

[william_w_bush]

base 4. started using base 4 math in my head as an experiment a few years ago, so much easier, makes hex trivial. all addition has 4 possibilities, add quarter, add half, add 3/4 or shift up. the human brain is better at thinking in quarters than percents or 1/8'ths or 1/60's, whatever. seriously try it, takes like a day to figure out, and you can upconvert to hex by just grouping digits on top of each other
ex.
              0 3
2f = 2 3

just my 2c, but made math hella easier, and helps even more with higher dimensional math because you can visualize and manipulate halves and quarters much better than 2/5 and 7/10.

Re:Time for a change...

[Feanturi]

Silly mods. This shouldn't have been modded 'Funny' but 'Informative' See here:

http://users.pandora.be/worldstandards/driving%20o n%20the%20left.htm

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Moral travesty

[fruity_pebbles]

Daylight savings time is an idiotic solution to a non-existent problem.

(Yes, that's an opinion. Feel free to disagree.)

Re:Moral travesty

[js3]

It takes a big man to admit daylight savings time is idiotic but I am not a big man.

Re:Moral travesty

[legirons]

"Daylight savings time is an idiotic solution to a non-existent problem."

And while every other aspect of the gregorian calendar can be described in just a few lines of code, the daylight-savings time requires a 450KB database just to find out which timezone you're in, with entries like "during the second world war, London experimented with double daylight-savings time..." (admittedly most of that 450K is comments)

Re:Moral travesty

[Overzeetop]

Which seems to be the problem?

8:30 is a fine time for the sun to set. It sets by six in the winter (Virginia) and there doens't seem to be outcry.

7am and the sun is "high overhead"? I'm still trying to figure out why that would be a problem. I work a relatively normal 8-5 day, and I have a sunrise simulator that I use - even in the summer - to get up at 6 so I have time to have breakfast and get my kid out of bed / dressed / fed / off to school. If it were light out at 5am, that'd be great.

Of course, I have TiVo, so I don't have to worry about all that "but I can't watch Jay Leno and get up at 5am" shit. (No, I don't watch late night tv anyway). I don't play evening (insert sport here), where light is a problem. I can't get in 18 holes of golf after work regardless of the sunset time, so evening play is a moot point.

Now that I come to think about it, if it got cooler an hour earlier in the evening, it would probably be much nicer. Young kids could spend more evenings chasing fireflys insead of having to go to bed while its still light out. The fireworks on the 4th could start at a reasonable time.

Tell you what...I'm still looking for a down side. Even my wife would have one less day to be in a bitchy mood 'cause she lost an hour of sleep each spring. (Yes, she seems to treat the extra hour of sleep the fall change offers as a holiday akin to Christmas)

Re:Moral travesty

[ergo98]

The only other solution is to shift your work schedule to get back those lost hours of daylight in the summertime, like the company I worked for in Indiana did.

This is exactly how people should adapt to the increased sunlight hours during the summer - get up earlier and go to the gym, do gardening, whatever, during the copious hours before work if your work hours are static throughout the year. Alternately if you're an employer then adapt your hours (or even better adapt flexible hours for the majority of workplaces where it isn't detrimental to do so).

The idea of changing the clock to force it on everyone is ludicrous, and it's imperfect anyways as there remains tremendous sunlight "waste" during the height of summer (in my area the sun rises just before 8am in the height of winter, and at 5am in the summer). In the past, when life was much more synchronous and people needed direct and immediate contact with others to a vastly greater degree, it was necessary for this mass coordination, but today we live largely asynchronous, queued and disconnected lives, and everyone clogging the streets at 8am and 5pm is insanity.

Re:Moral travesty

[dave_mcmillen]

This is exactly how people should adapt to the increased sunlight hours during the summer - get up earlier and go to the gym, do gardening, whatever . . . The idea of changing the clock to force it on everyone is ludicrous . . .

Ah, but you've pointed out one of the problems: Go to the gym? But it's 5am, the gym isn't open yet. Neither is anything else, unless everyone gets together and agrees to start earlier. You can do this by asking every business to change schedules, or you can do it all at once by changing the clocks.

Not so ludicrous, I think. No, for ludicrousness, wait until someone reasons that if extending it by another month is supposed to save energy, just think how much we'd save by extending it to the whole year! Wait for it.

Look on the bright side

[drwiii]

You'll have another hour to fix it.

Please just drop it.

[Phs2501]

Hopefully this will cause more states to take the good example of Arizona and just do away with the daylight savings sillyness altogether.

Re:Please just drop it.

[the phantom]

May I also add that extending Daylight Saving Time even farther into the fall is a bad idea(tm). I work at an elementary school. The kids tend to show up between 8:30 and 9:00 am. Understandard time in November, the sun has been up for maybe 40 minutes by the time they get here. Extending Daylight Saving Time even further means that they will be walking to school in the dark, which just seems like bad policy to me. Furthermore, I bike to work at about 7:00. I really don't like being on the road when it is very dark, which it can be at 7:00. It will be even worse with more DST.

In short, I think this is a bad idea. I think DST is a bad idea in general, and I wish that more states would do what Arizona has done (but not the Navajo Nation), and dispense with DST altogether.

Re:Please just drop it.

[telecsan]

You have apparently never seen the typical electric load in the evenings for a large electric utility. Trust me, you can tell the difference between the day before daylight saving time (starts/ends) and the day after. There is a benefit. Personally, I don't think it's worth the hassle, but that's just me being selfish.

Of all the things in the Energy Bill

[bgfay]

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.

Alright, so I'm going off on this. I understand that /. is news for nerds and tech oriented. This story fits that. I'm not saying that this story doesn't belong on /. (Got 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.

Re:Of all the things in the Energy Bill

[Buran]

If you are going to claim that conservation does nothing good, back it up with sources. While not every conservation project is as successful as originally hoped, to say that all conservation is useless is ludicrous. If it were totally useless, no one would do it -- and instead there are many, many people -- paid and unpaid -- who work to ensure that conservation happens.

The same is true for recycling programs.

Also don't forget that many projects have long-term effects and take some time for the true effect to be realized. Your recycling example, for instance. While recycling processes are different from raw manufacturing, there's more to it than just that. Consider, for instance, the long-term effect of cutting down mature forests in terms of oxygen production, erosion, destruction of natural beauty, the effects on the biosphere as a whole, the destruction of habitat for animals that live in those forests, and so on.

We can specifically point to the short-sighted actions of a logging company that destroyed the then-last-known habitat of the ivory-billed woodpecker -- in full knowledge of what they were doing as a result of information given to them by scientists. And look at how long it has taken to find out that the damage may not have been permanent after all -- but undoing their mess may not be possible if it turns out the birds have been wiped out to the point where the ones that have been sighted can no longer reproduce.

You fall into the trap that so many others do of failing to think of the long term and thinking only in the short.

Again, let's see some sources to prove those ridiculous accusations.

Living in AZ

[DigiWood]

...I don't have to bother with daylight savings. The heat sucks but hey it's a tradeoff.

Why?

[Glendale2x]

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."

Re:Awful idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

"I use my mod points to rank down people who point out dupes."

Good for you. We all appreciate your proactive stance for mediocrity.

A great big DUH

[jandrese]

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.

Re:I offer you my consulting services.

[rovingeyes]

"Stop the apocalypse! Hire me"

Scare tactics always work in US. Tell them, doom is near and people will do anything, even hire you ;)!

Daylight Saving...No "S"

[chia_monkey]

Just to clarify, it's "daylight saving" time...No "s".

Daylight Saving Time...

[HEMI426]

...Daylight Saving Time, not Daylight Savings Time...

Why is it so easy?

[MikeDawg]

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.

Re:Purpose?

[lucabrasi999]

How is this going to save energy?
How about this?.

The only other solution...

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

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?

Freemasons, Illuminati, and the True Origin of DST

[Anonymous Coward]

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."

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 .. 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 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.

Re:Awful idea.

[AJWM]

Coming into effect in 2007 ... but in under a year?

Is it 2006 where you are? Can you send me some stock quotes?

Re:I also..

[dorsey]

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