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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."
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(Yes, that's an opinion. Feel free to disagree.)
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.
Good for you. We all appreciate your proactive stance for mediocrity.
Swatch started such an initiative a couple years ago.
Internet Time
What?
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 ;)!
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.
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
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!
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
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.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
Jesus loves you, I think you suck
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?
How is this going to save energy?
How about this?.
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.
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.
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.
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Coming into effect in 2007 ... but in under a year?
Is it 2006 where you are? Can you send me some stock quotes?
-- Alastair