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Daylight Saving Change Saved No Power
Brett writes "Results from energy companies are coming in, and the word is that moving Daylight Saving Time forward three weeks had no measurable impact on power consumption. The attempt by the US Congress to make it look like they were doing something about the energy crisis has been exposed as the waste it is. But the new DST is probably here to stay — letting the bill expire would mean re-patching a lot of systems again next year. So much for saving energy."
But, the DST change was one of the ONLY things they could agree on!!!!
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Look, I understand people that want to take a stab at the administration - Bush's administration has done far more harm than good, but come on - bashing like this summary is just not necessary. This was a widely supported idea beyond just the US - a number of countries followed suit in the idea. At the very least, it didn't HURT anything - so why bitch about it so much? Oh well, you had to patch your systems. It's over and done with. No need to try and make this into a "prime opportunity" to bash the administration for at least trying. There's plenty of other things to gripe about when it comes to this administration - learn to pick your fights, otherwise you just end up looking like a giant douche.... or a turd sandwich.
A community-oriented lyrics site
I thought feel-good legislation always worked. :-/
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Reuters spoke with Jason Cuevas, spokesman for Southern Co. power, who said it plainly: "We haven't seen any measurable impact."
While I had no doubts in my mind that this wouldn't save a dime, I'm still pleased with the fact that because I work 9:30 to 6pm I see daylight on my drive home three weeks earlier than usual. For me, I'd prefer it's this way all year long but I don't have kids that ride a school bus (isn't that the main reason they claim we do this in the first place?)
... we can just get rid of DST altogether, since it has been shown to not do dick except annoy people and cost companies money in IT time.
Keep it summer time year round if you ask me.
IANAL, but I play one on
Just two quick examples of the COST of the change, due to lost productivity - I live in the Eastern US, and someone in Ireland missed a conference call with us because everyone on both sides of the Atlantic thought that Ireland was always 5 hours ahead (for some reason, people found it impossible to fathom that this wasnt the case if we changes our clock and they didn't, but whatever). Example number two - a contractor in brazil was going to take down our servers at 5:00 EDST but actually took them down at 4:00 since they didnt know about the time change.
$200/hr * 20 * 8 clients = enough cha ching to enjoy this crap.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
First of all, this is a move by congress, no one is bashing "The Administration"
No harm, no foul, huh? How about the time it took to patch my file transfer program. I'm sure my employers don't appreciate the extra money spent. Not to mention tying up our IT staff trying to get time clocks/etc. fixed when the Windows patch f#$%ed up the time then fixed it again two days later. There's two days of pay for the IT staff, not to mention lost time where other things didn't get fixed.
And it's us who look like giant douches for complaining?!!
I remember a local news story the week of the 11th stating that there was actually an increase in gas use after the DST change because people were driving more now that it stay light out later.
ÕÕ
Water utilities claim there was no measureable impact to water consumption after their "hold your pee in for an hour before going to the bathroom" campaign wrapped up last weekend, in an effort to minimize water consumption and save the planet of resources. =P
When I had to switch my clock back on Ubuntu (the timezone fix did not make it in the apt-get updates somehow), my makefile on my hour-long build project refused to build (citing misalignment of the timestamps of the files). So I had to delete all my files and fetch them all again after I put the clock back to the way it was before.
After that, I turned on my amp and surround sound system and watched a movie during lunch while blasting away the AC because I got so hot from all the work.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
...and I'm all for it!
This DST2007 thing has been a real pain in my ass. I know that the US government hates to admit failure, so we won't leave Iraq and we won't back off on DST2007... wish we would though. It has caused a lot of problems.
On the flip side though, all the exta sunshine makes crops grow better so it should make farmers happier!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
You can with a change in DST that is supposed to save energy on both ends, and only affects one month on each end.
For other things, maybe not.
or, alternatively: three more weeks with LESS sunlight BEFORE work actually do something (run, bike, ...) is all that matters. And I've been robbed.
Who cares if it's sunny after work? Daylight when I wake up is a lot more important.
If I had mod points, I'd mod Informative!!
Seriously, this "useful" change was nothing but a waste of time, AND clocks. All those clocks/devices that automatically change according to the standardized time? Useless. Software patches? Quite impossible for most.
Looks like the waste management facilities will see a rise in borked electronics because of this - and that does precisely 0 for the environment, too.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
In fact, I fucking hate it. The sun is trying to kill me, and giving it any more opportunities to do that doesn't make me any happier.
I used my saved energy as a carbon offset to burn additional energy.
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
"exercise outside"
Wrong web site...
We're struggling with sun glare on the screen while firing up Counter Strike...
Sleep is for the Weak
Not for those of us who have visual overstimulation induced migraines. This just means that they've stolen several hours of my precious DARKNESS in return for no monetary advantage.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
This is why Arizona doesn't participate in this stupidity.
Extra daylight in the FRIGGING DESERT is NOT helpful. People don't come out until after 7pm even in normal time. Want the cafes and outdoor busineses to stay closed until 1030pm, or do you want them to waste more water with those evaporative coolers (garden misters) trying to keep the locals from passing out outdoors? Until nightfall they're all sucking every last watt out of their homes barricaded inside on air-conditioned life-support! Cool evenings save energy. The sooner it arrives the better, and less energy and water is used as a result. And don't get me started on heat islands!
It's not 59-90f degrees everywhere in the USA ya know.
3) Congress wasted time on this bill that could have been spent getting something important done, such as finally hammering out a definate government policy on Stem Cell research, abortions, or actually making a true impact on the energy issue we face.
See, that's the glass-half-empty talking. Just look on the bright side: When they were wasting their time turning out this ridiculous waste of time and paper, it meant that they weren't really screwing anything else up!
Please, Congress, do us all a favor: spend your time on things like creating new "National $FOO Week"s. What -- there aren't any free weeks left? Okay, I've got one: why don't you guys try to fix the date of Easter? I'm sure that won't take you too long.
The more idiotic, banal stuff that I know the Congresscritters are doing, the better it makes me feel, because at least I know they're staying out of trouble. It's when they go quiet for a while that I start to worry. The further away they stay from the "real issues," the happier I am. As absolutely fucked as the system we have is, don't you even think for a moment that with hard work and diligence, they couldn't make it at least ten times worse.
Congratulations, Congress, on your brilliant plan. By all means, keep up the great work.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
some schoolkids have to wait for the bus in the dark
I never understood school schedules. It has been shown that teenagers naturally wake up later in the day, and that elementary school students wake up earlier. Yet it is the elementary schools that start at 8:30 and the high schools that start at 7:30. Why not make school like work, where it runs 9-5, on a schedule more matching that of the parents? Some will counter that high school students have jobs in the evening, so let them start earlier. Why should jobs drive school schedules?
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Fine. You like more light. GET UP EARLIER. And leave my clock alone.
I _really_ dislike getting up before dawn. I mean deep viceral psychological bio-cycle "why am I getting up at night" kind of dislike. Just when dawn was arriving at a decent time, you "I want more light so I'll force everyone else to change their schedules" people make me get up at 5:00AM EST instead of 6AM (and now you're talking about pushing it back to 4:00AM?!?).
The clock reflects astronomical realities of earth/sun positioning. Noon is supposed to mean the sun is overhead, mid-day. Cocky people then decide they don't like that arrangement, and declare what _is_ shall be different from what they _want_ reality to be. A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, and calling dung a "rose" doesn't make it smell any better. Calling 5:00AM "6:00AM Daylight Saving Time" doesn't change the fact that it's really 5:00AM, and the combination of light and circadian rhythms means it's still time to sleep.
It's almost enough to make me move to Arizona where they ignore this nonsense.
Seriously, man - it really messes up my internal clock. Midnight to six is my time to _sleep_; mess with that, and you're messing with my ability to function.
You want more light? YOU get up earlier. Leave my clock alone; I'll be a lot more productive that way.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
What amazes me about the whole thing is that nobody bothered to look back to 1973 when Nixon did essentially the same thing. No energy was saved then, either.
Warning: This signature may offend some viewers.
I'm a lobbyist with the North American Automatically Time Changing Clock, Watch and Timepiece Manufacturers Association and we paid good money to have this bill passed so that we can sell more automatically changing clocks, watches and timepieces.
Record profits this year, my friend, record profits. You should have invested in manufacturers of automatically changing clocks, watches and timepieces.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
"Do something!" (Col. Sanders on the intercom)
The time change did not affect the amount of daylight, or the number of hours over which that daylight was distributed.
Check out the brain on Brad. OMG I THOUGHT CHANGING MY CLOCK TIME ACTUALLY ALTERED THE TILT OF THE EARTH!!1!!!111! Thank you DragonWriter!
We have quite a few; first, its supposed to reduce it by reducing daily demand, and its supposed to do it generally across the nation. You don't need multiple years of data to get a decent idea of what is going on with that; you can look at the data from one month daily and by region, and see to what degree it appears to be true. Or you could look at the overall average over all regions and days, and see that the number is not different that what would have been expected without the change.
Of course, one might posit that there is some reason to expect that this month was systematically atypical in a way which would distort the results, but those making that claim ought to have something to point to to justify it.
First, "unseasonably warm spring" is somewhat irrelevant (and not established) as its not even 2 weeks into the 13 weeks of Spring, yet, and a significant portion of the new DST time is in winter.
Secondly, even considering the right time period, where is the evidence that an unseasonably warm March increases energy demand? Certainly, in the hottest areas it may increase cooling demand, but in much of the country a warm late-winter-to-early-spring is going to save energy by reducing cooling demand.
I think all of us can agree that in a perfect world, the rest of the goofballs out there would pay as much attention to this as we Slashdot readers have. I turn my lights on when I need to see in the dark. I go to my appointments on time, no matter what numbers the government or anyone else tells me that time is called. Also, what is the deal with time zones? I think this is the same issue. I feel the same when I wake up at 8am eastern time as when I wake up at 5am pacific time. Seriously, this is all stupid and old fashioned. I suggest that anyone who cares about this start using GMT exclusively in their dealings, especially if those dealings are as meaningless as mine.
For me this meant that the "part-peak" tariff ran from 6pm to 9pm, instead of from 5pm to 8pm for the past three weeks. This cost me two ways:
1) Electricity generated by my solar PV system between 5pm and 6pm spun the meter backwards counting off-peak kWh instead of part-peak kWh.
2) I use very little power from 5pm to 6pm (I'm generally not home from work), I definitely use more from 8pm to 9pm (I'm home, and it is dark so I have lights on). So moving the part-peak time an hour later meant that I bought more of the higher priced power than the cheaper off-peak power.
-Tony
Back in the day, when people's interactions were mostly local, time zones might have been harmless. But now, a large part of our population interacts across time zones every day. They're just a PITA -- time is an arbitrary number anyway, so who cares if the clock says 6pm or 6am when you wake up?
It would take a little getting used to, but I bet everyone would adjust quickly and never go back. Imagine having every computer (and every log, timestamp, calendar, etc.) in the world on GMT. Imagine scheduling conference calls and not having someone confuse which time zone it was scheduled for.
What if we just gave up standard time? Everyone likes the light. Few like the clock change hassle. Let's just stay in DST.
If you life depends on the sun, get up earlier.
The government's laws should be about encouraging businesses to set working hours to match the sun, not changing fundamental measurement systems to trick people into getting up earlier.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Companies used to mostly work 9-5 (or 8-5).
Now, our company works from 7am to 7pm (9 hour shifts w/ hour lunches).
Basically, if you get up early, you take a 7am shift- if you get up late, you take a 10am shift.
I don't see why they can't leave the clocks alone and places will just shift their hours if it matters.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Wow, sounds like someone woke up on the wrong side of the day light saving time today.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
STANDARDTIME.COM SAYS: If we are saving energy let's go year round with Daylight Savings Time. If we are not saving energy let's drop Daylight Savings Time!
Enough of this daylight time, reset-the-clocks insanity. Just stop the madness.
Do you people have any clue what the concept of "noon" is supposed to be? In case you've forgotten, it's supposed to be the time of day when the sun is highest in the sky. It's supposed to be the time when there is as much daylight behind us as is in front of us.
For practical purposes, this isn't exact, but we've done a pretty good job with splitting the world up into 24 time zones so that it's somewhat close.
But not any more! No, now noon is just some arbitrary point during the day when we find it convenient to be. We want more time at the end of the day, so let's just move noon an hour ahead, right?
WRONG! I have a better idea. Instead of dinking around with clocks and redefining what something means that has been around since the beginning of recorded time, why don't we just have businesses shift their hours around?
Imagine how nice this would be. We never change our clocks. Twice a year, government changes its hours. The Post Office, for example, doesn't open at 8:00am during the summer, it opens at 7:00am, and it closes an hour earlier, too. Businesses that choose to do so follow suit and make sure its employees know when to show up. I suspect that almost all of them would, and probably most companies would have a policy that says something like, "When the government shifts its hours, we're shifting ours also."
Everyone's happy. People get their extra hour at the end of the day. No one has to write stupid software patches to account for when DST is. Atlanta, Georgia is always GMT-5, never GMT-4 like it is now. People don't think Arizonans are weird because half the year they're on Mountain time and half the year they're on Pacific. If government wants to change its hours a few weeks earlier next year, there's no issue at all, they can just announce it a few months in advance, and when the time comes, do it.
I'm sorry, but people who think that DST is a good thing are idiots. If you want to change your schedule, change your schedule. But leave my freakin' clock alone.
Everybody knows that this was an unusually bright winter. I wonder why you never hear about the problem with Global Brightening?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
That's right. The Sun burned up just as much fuel after daylight savings was introduced as it did before. Lawmakers are baffled.
It would be better to switch back. Why? Because there are unfixed errors in a lot of software that are still causing problems. For the fixed bugs, well, those can be "unfixed" if they were fixed in the first place. It isn't too late to switch back.
Yeah, the widening of the DST period at its other endpoint, in October, was only done to make daylight trick-or-treating possible. Search the congressional record for it. They changed it by one week just to get Halloween in there. American candy makers had been lobbying for the change for decades.
So stupid. I was never molested when trick-or-treating as a child because the predators couldn't see me in the dark.
That's six more weeks in the year when it will be light out when I (and a lot of the rest of you) go home from work.
On the flip side, however, it means that there's six more weeks in the year when it is still dark when we go to work... the other side of the coin.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
You have to measure the savings by looking at the sales of candles, the same way Ben Franklin did.
After all, if it was good enough for the Founding Fathers it's good enough for patriotic Americans, eh? Anybody that says otherwise is clearly a liberal who is soft on terrorism and hates America.
"Fine. You like more light. GET UP EARLIER. And leave my clock alone."
No, you should get up later instead.
"The clock reflects astronomical realities of earth/sun positioning."
Nope, it reflects oscillations of a cesium atom. Far more regular and periodic than, say, the time between two consecutive noons.
"Noon is supposed to mean the sun is overhead, mid-day."
If I recall, there are only four days a year when local solar noon and local mean noon are the same thing, and neither have anything to do with standard time, unless you're standing on a meridian that's a multiple of 15.
"Cocky people then decide they don't like that arrangement, and declare what _is_ shall be different from what they _want_ reality to be."
If we're getting paid by the hour, we want our hours to be of a consistent length.
"doesn't change the fact that it's really 5:00AM,"
Is that standard time, local solar time or local mean time?
"Seriously, man - it really messes up my internal clock. Midnight to six is my time to _sleep_; mess with that, and you're messing with my ability to function."
Then maybe it's time for you to find a job that lets you sleep later.
"You want more light? YOU get up earlier. Leave my clock alone; I'll be a lot more productive that way."
No thanks, I prefer coming home before sunset.
I don't see how this is saying Bush sucks. It blamed congress for the change in Daylight savings time, and last I checked, congress is run by the Democrats.
BZZZZT! You lose. Maybe you should wind back the clock and note who was in control of Congress when this bill was signed. Can you guess which party had control of both the House and the Senate at the time?
Those who laugh at you for you having a Mac.. are the people who constantly call you to fix their PC.
Yes, but it will remain that way for largely practical reasons. Having high schools let out earlier than elementary schools means that the older kids will be home to look after their younger siblings. The busing costs for school districts would skyrocket if all school levels ran simultaneously. The bus drivers first take the high school kids, then the middle school kids, then the elementary school kids. A school district would need a whole lot more buses running simultaneously to get everyone aged 5-18 to school at the same time. My high school and elementary/middle schools were actually two different districts, because I went to a regional high school. They had a bus-sharing scheme like this one worked out among all the districts.
As many have said, I like the extra daylight. It would be nice if it saves energy, but the extra daylight is more important to me.
Now if they would only legislate it so the sun didn't set at all.
I do not get this. My wife makes the same sort of comments. I tell her to put the baby to bed at 9pm if it's still too light at 8pm and she says the baby will be cranky because she is staying up too late.
I used to try to explain. Now I just nod.
This DST2007 thing has been a real pain in my ass.
There is a lot of firmware that has not been patched or acknowledged due to low priority.
I have a Linksys wireless router. Due to the difficulty getting kids offline to get ready for bed, I use the scheduler in the router to drop the connection. No nagging, begging for 5 minutes more 30 minutes later, etc.
A week before the time change, I downloaded the latest firmware update and installed it.
The changelog made no mention of the DST change so I checked the router Monday morning. It did not update. I have turned off DST in the router and changed the time zone one zone to the East to put it manualy into Daylight Savings. In the fall, I will have to remember to manualy move it back to the correct time zone.
Un-patching this router is simply a matter of setting the time zone back and turning DST on.
How much un-patched firmware is there?
The truth shall set you free!
"I never understood school schedules."
Then you haven't thought about it much.
Early to bed, early to rise. School schedules reflected our agricultural heritage, which is often why summers are off, still.
"It has been shown that teenagers naturally wake up later in the day, and that elementary school students wake up earlier."
These are more recent studies, like in the last 10 years or so. Once schedules are set, things are hard to change, as there is a certain expectation.
"Yet it is the elementary schools that start at 8:30 and the high schools that start at 7:30. Why not make school like work, where it runs 9-5, on a schedule more matching that of the parents?"
Obviously you haven't worked a hard day in your life. 9-5 is more white collar. Blue collar traditionally was 7-3 for 1st shift. 2nd shift was 3-11pm. For example, where I am, the white collar rush time in the morning is heaviest at about 8:30am. However, most of my neighbors are out the door before 7, and the dump trucks start their banging 10 minutes after 7.
"Some will counter that high school students have jobs in the evening, so let them start earlier. Why should jobs drive school schedules?"
Your older student can take care of themselves if they arrive home around 2.5-3pm. The 2nd grader can be met at 3:15-3:30 by the parent that got off work. Or if the elementary school student has an older sibling, watched by them since the latter got home first. Or, without an older sibling, something that used to be done was that you hired a short watch babysitter, usually a high schooler. Most parents are concerned with what happens after school.
A high schooler can drop off his elementary school sibling, or the white collar see the same off on the way to work. The blue collar with the elementary aged child usually had a stay at home wife, or she worked a more service or white collar job and could see the child off later.
As well, most elementary school students usually don't have after school activities, like theater, marching band, or sports. This gives high school students who want to do those activities time to do them, and still make it home for the family dinner. If they started later, you wouldn't have a nice family meal, since they, as you were earlier quoting studies, are a good thing according to most studies.
And yes, jobs do matter. A lot. High school usually lets out by 2:45. This allows high schoolers to hit the 2nd shift if blue collar (3-11), or the 2nd shift if they work in the service industry like fast food (depends, but usually 2.5-3.5pm to closing which is typically 9-10). Doesn't sound like a big deal to you, if mommy and daddy paid for your toys and food, but for a lot of on the edge students, if you can't have an afternoon job, they would drop out. At least this allows those interested in sports to partake, as well as those who need the jobs or the training to also get it while still in high school.
btw, those sleep studies I don't think accurately accounted for natural light variances, in which case daylight savings actually works against how the teen mind would prefer.
...or "TIMEBLA"...
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
No joke -- all of the clean-air legislation has started to clear out decades worth of accumulated crud (aerosols) in the atmosphere. That results in more sunlight hitting the surface and intensifies the greenhouse effect. In fact, air pollution caused by the industrial processes that release greenhouse gases may have been limiting the warming impact of those greenhouse gases for a long time. Now that the air is getting clearer, the impact of those greenhouse gases may be exacerbated. This effect is also regional since different parts of the world have differing clean air standards.
n nEmanuelEos06.pdf
Here's the original article on this subject, from June 2006:
http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/shared/articles/Ma
--- JurassicPizza
You got exactly the same amount of light that you would have gotten anyway. You just think there was more because you didn't sleep in as late as you usually would have.
Personally, I think anybody who needs the government to trick them into getting up early is a moron, but morons' opinions may differ...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
If you have a local magnetic anomility, setting a C-band dish can be difficult as a magnetic compass may get your polar mount off enough to cause tracking problems. A sunny day and knowledge of local noon makes finding true North/South very simple. It's the direction of the shadow of the plumb bob line at local noon.
The truth shall set you free!
alternatively...we can just get rid of DST altogether, since it has been shown to not do dick except annoy people and cost companies money in IT time.
Getting rid of it altogether requires far less IT effort than moving it. Most systems can just be configured to run on standard rather than auto-daylight time. The rest you can just strip it out - much easier than putting it in or tweaking it every time the legislature gets another hive of bees in their bonnets.
Staying with DST means a major ongoing hassle for any new scheduling application. Do you have any IDEA what a pain it is to program those with DST changes? *I* do: I had to do it for a client. What do you do with the 25 hour day - especially the hour that happens twice? What do you do with the 23 hour day?
I hear the railroads handle it like this:
- In the spring all the trains are suddenly an hour late, and try to make up the time over the next day.
- In the fall they actually STOP them and let them SIT for an hour.
I hear the worst day for commuter traffic deaths is the first Monday of DST. (It's rush hour with ALL the drivers jet-lagged simultaneously.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
People who oppose DST don't realize that it's just an attempt to recapture what people used to do automatically: Get up when the sun rises. The greater your latitude, the more variation there is in sunrise times between the solstices. We've settled on an hour as a good compromise that works for most people.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
How many bullshit animated cursor exploits have I patched my Solaris machines for this year?
It is an incredibly biased piece. ,at the very least, a year before they can glean an real facts about the change.
It will be
2 years would be more worth while.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
... completely ignoring the "functioning in society" bit.
People who complain about the gubmint are often just complaining about having to deal with other people.
Sure, if I never had to talk to anyone or do anything, I'd get up at dawn and go to bed at sunset too.
But I'd also be living in a cave, and be dead by now.
Yeah, the democrates have been in office for 4 months and just look at Iraq! republuicans never would have let that happen.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I couldn't handle reading 300 posts, but I did search the whole topic for the word "peak" and nobody at 2+ used it. So here it is: we had a local news article in Calgary about the lack of change in TOTAL consumption,( just as many lights on in the AM as off in PM) but that it was good because it shaved the PEAK CONSUMPTION.
People use the most energy right after they get home from work, basically; TV, computers (like me right now), cooking and other household operations.
Removing added lighting needs AT THAT TIME reduces the maximum generating capacity you need available to meet the peak demand. Which means they build a new power plant for your area in 2014 instead of 2012, or whatever. The time-cost of money means real savings on your power bill - even at constant total kWh consumed.
If Daylight savings time is a good thing, then why not have it year-round?
Ah, but I need the government to trick my boss into thinking the time for me to come in to work has changed. That's how I get my extra daylight. :)
I don't know about you, but my servers run on the power of cotton candy and happy thoughts. -Anonymous Coward
The rest of the world should follow Arizona's example. Don't touch your clocks. I grew up here in AZ, and for the life of me I can't understand why people want to mess with their clocks. If you want more daylight, get up earlier, or stay up later, whatever floats your boat. I'm usually a fan of the Founding Fathers, but Ben Franklin was off his rocker when he dreamed this one up.
Rather than bother with the patch, we simply took this opportunity as a sign that we ought to change our system clocks to GMT. Many benefits:
:P But Congress works in mysteerious ways... (we have to try to assume, because admitting they're dumb just sucks for everyone :P )
* Systems that dual-boot windows and linux no longer make oopses with DST transitions
* our company does more and more projects across different timezones across the country and internationally, and it gets real confusing real fast to have everything in Eastern, Pacific, Arizona (they don't observe DST), Melbourne, and the UK.
* we're an aviation company, so most of us are already used to it
* most of our computers are on closed networks anyway
So Congress is really doing us a favor by driving us towards a global economy with a common accessible timebase already established for maritime and aviation uses. Even if that's not what they intended
Something that may be of interest: In Sydney last weekend we all turned our lights out for an hour... check out http://earthhour.smh.com.au/index.php?option=com_c ontent&task=view&id=59 for the stats.
According to Energy Australia, for the hour between 7.30pm and 8.30pm on 31 March 2007, there was a 10.2% reduction in electricity consumption across the Sydney CBD. This is calculated as follows: Sydney CBD temperature during Earth Hour was 19.8c. Typical energy consumption at this temperature between 7.30 and 8.30 is 228,180 KWh. Actual electricity consumption in the Sydney CBD at this time was 204,900 KWh. Energy Australia analysed data over 4 years to get the typical consumption on a Saturday night in the CBD during March and April. This takes into account daylight savings and weather.
http://earthhour.smh.com.au/ for more info.
We'd be missing an hour of time for the rest of human existence.
So why didnt you disable the "Windows Time" service? MS put a NTP client with a ntp.microsoft.com address. I'd rather have a NTP server of my own and it only pulling time off of a level 2 NTP server.
That would make my server a NTP level 3 and my clients level 4. 4 Deviations of time off of nasa... Not too shabby.
Err.. telnet? In 2007? I think you need to go back to your cave.
I think that you vastly underestimate the power of institutional memory. Why do kids go to school September-May? Why, so they can go out and help with the crops in the summer, of course. Look at the amount of headway year-round schooling (go to school 2 months, off 3 weeks) has made - little to none! Even though many things point to it being superior in various ways. But damn it, kids get the summer off, that's how the world works. The original reasoning behind it has long been abandoned and forgotten.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
It is estimated that it cost US businesses about a Billion dollars to implement this DST change. If congress would have instead mandated a billion dollars worth of conservation efforts (such as more energy efficient lighting, better building insulation, etc.,) it would have saved 10 times the energy that the bill was supposed to save as conservation helps ALL the time, not just for an hour a day, 3 weeks of the year. It really doesn't take a whole lot of intelligence to figure this one out...
Someone did think of children - their own. Daylight savings time does not save energy, quite the contrary. One of the largest INCREASES is in gasoline consumption. The reason for the DST extension is simple - increase in shopping - hence those who own businesses & oil make more - and so do their children benefit.
Add to the fray the changing from winter to summer mix (and back at the end of DST) and you have a recipe for charging more for oil. Anyone have gasoline over $3 a gallon where they are right now? And all this BEFORE the Iran conflict with England. The oil companies switch mixtures and "clean" their tanks in the process, every March and every fall. March prices rise through April due to "less supply" but the same demand. The reality is the gasoline goes through at the same rate. It's all supply/demand *on paper.*
September brings Labor Day and "increased travel" for that holiday in the US, but prices CONTINUE to rise after that, due to switching the mix again. Add to that more shopping (more daylight DOES mean more shopping) and lo and behold it's all about the money. What else can we expect from a government that lets the President veto bills from the House and Senate because he wants to keep the Iraq war going, when less than 19% of the US supports the war? Definfitely fed up - but this move is STRICTLY over money.
"Ah, but I need the government to trick my boss into thinking the time for me to come in to work has changed. That's how I get my extra daylight. :)"
One man's 'funny' is another man's 'insightful'. Every business I've worked at had its start/end times set to work with the start/end times of the businesses it worked with. You'd think reality would prevent somebody with mod points from +1'ing somebody for loudly proclaiming that DST doesn't actually cause more sunlight to hit this side of the planet.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)