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Ask Slashdot: Could We Deal With the End of Time Zones?
First time accepted submitter hairyfish writes "Do we still need time zones? Time zones are a relic of the past, when different parts of the world were isolated, and 12 p.m. was whenever the sun was directly above your specific location. Now, in the Internet age, time is just an arbitrary number, and time zones are just unnecessary complexity. Why can't we scrap time zones altogether, and all just use UTC across the board? So here on the eastern seaboard of Australia, lunchtime will now be at 2 a.m., In New York it will be 4 p.m., and in Moscow it will be 8 a.m. There'll be some pain with the initial changeover, but from then on it's all good. Got a meeting with colleagues on the other side of the world? 4 a.m. means 4 a.m. for everyone. Got a flight landing at 3 p.m.? 3 p.m. now means 3 p.m. for everyone. For DST, you simply change your schedule rather than the clock (i.e. work and school starts an hour earlier during DST months). No confusion ever again. For someone whose work involves travel or communication across time zones, this is the best idea I've ever heard. So why aren't we doing it?"
In the U.S. it is because the Federal Government oversteps its bounds on everything, including telling us what the clock shall say.
Is this the type of crap we can come to expect now that CmdrTaco is gone?
Why do we need to fix something that isn't broken?
...that it would outweigh the inconvenience locally.
DST is a beast. Worse, the rules change over time!
Do we really want the date to change in the middle of the day? No, that is not practical. Most of the world still runs based on sleeping when the sun is down, so the time zone system still works.
Alright then, who gets the prime hours? Where 12pm means noon and 12am means midnight?
My UID is prime... is yours?
Scrap AM & PM - most people can figure out a 24 hour clock. Time zones, on the other hand, make perfect sense.
So why aren't we doing it? Because it's a stupid idea. We still want noon to be when the sun is overhead, and midnight to be the middle of the night. Internet be damned, it's arbitrarily more convenient for most people, because most people don't travel all that often, and spend most of their time in their local time zone.
Morphing Software
It worked so well with the Metric system conversion.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
this is the dumbest idea I've ever heard of. Time zones are very useful and easy to use. Having people use UTC for local time is utterly stupid.
If I disagree with you it's because you are wrong.
We couldn't get the country to adopt metric measurements fer chrissakes. No way we could convince bubba that 2 AM is lunch break.
-- Don't call me "Sir," I increase entropy for a living!
I.e. farms, and people.
I fully agree - and have been saying this for some time.
The reality is though, it's very hard to get people to give up an old thing and move onto the new - look at the metric system in the UK, it's been mandated as the official thing for some time, and it's still not completely overtaken the imperial (even if only for road signs - another thing I argue, why are we not using both metric and imperial units on signs we are putting up now? It's insane to expect it to happen all at once, so why not start using dual system signs, then when most signs have both on, replace the last few and swap over, then start using metric only).
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
99.9% of the people never have a meeting with people on the other side of the world. Changing time zones would bring them only confusion.
This story doesn't refer to an article? So Timothy just pulled this out of his ass because he's too dumb to figure out time zones? What an idiot.
If I disagree with you it's because you are wrong.
Only if we switch to DST completely. My summers would be completely ruined on the east coast if the Sun started setting at 6:30 in the afternoon in August.
People don't realize just how much they use DST's. especially in the northern latitudes.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
No. That is all. Now go back to playing with yourself.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
Our computer clocks are all using UTC already
The displayed time is adjusted to local time for the benefit of us humans
We can say "the best time to feed the animals is at 4 PM" and that applies to everyone on the planet. With your scheme we would have to give a much longer-winded explanation.
+1 for common sense. I'm all for shifting clocks 30 minutes to split the difference and calling it done. Time Zones are still useful because we are driven by the sun......and you need to know whether your colleague in India will be up or not if you schedule a meeting a 5pm local time (hint, probably not).
Sounds good but we (the US) couldn't even successfully switch over to the metric system. Yes it will be easier in the future but most people don't seem to care about long term goals when it means in the short term they'll have to remember that work is from 2-10 not 9-5. Also while we're at it we might as well switch to the 24 hour clock.
Everyone is free to express time in terms of GMT: You, your business contacts, your boss, etc. If you find it useful, do it! Many people already do. The vast majority of people have never been inside an airplane and have no need for such silliness.
Because time is arbitrary, anyway. And not everyone uses DST, for that matter. There are some countries that dont use it, and there are states within the US that dont use it.
(without digging up the info) I think there is even a county or two that is inconsistent wrt DST/timezone of the state they are in.
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Remember that?
http://www.swatch.com/zz_en/internettime/itime_howitworks.html
telling us what the clock shall say
I, too, find it completely ridiculous that they actually TOLD people what their clock shall say. I heard about this one guy who didn't listen, they killed him, last I heard. Fucking fascist with their standards. I am interested to here what great insights the good roman_mir has to say on the subject.
Also,Qba'g guvax V qvqa'g frr jung lbh qvq gurer.
Why set it to UTC? Still trying to keep the British Empire alive? If they were to do this, set the zero point at the International Date Line, something a little more neutral, and just makes more sense. But I'm for keeping time zones. The sun still makes the best, most logical clock, and it's solar powered
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
The function of time zones is that humans generally operate on Diurnal schedule. So wherever we are, we are going to wake in the morning and sleep at night. As such it makes sense to calibrate time to that. 08:00 is "morning", 20:00 is "evening". Change that, and it gets confusing any time someone travels. Even just across the US and you'd find everything gets thrown off.
What we have right now works well. Local time is always similar in terms of what is day and night. In the event you are communicating across time boundaries there's a simple answer: Specify the time zone. UTC is a good choice, or depending on what you are doing something else might be convenient. In online games it is usually "server time". The game server maintains time in the timezone it is physically located and will tell the player what it is. So you just reference to that.
Eliminating time zones wouldn't work mostly because people just wouldn't listen. They'd still use their time zone. If you desire universal time, just use it, use UTC. I do when I'm posting something to people from multiple time zones. However if you walk around and try to use it in daily life, people will just ignore you.
"4 a.m. means 4 a.m. for everyone. Got a flight landing at 3 p.m.? 3 p.m. now means 3 p.m. for everyone"
Unfortunatly now at the top of my head I don't know whether 3pm means I'm going to land in broad daylight or in the middle of the night.
Maybe we should have an ADDITIONAL time (call it Standard Internet Time) or whatever, but for day to day use its silly.
Shops here open at 8 and close at 7. I can assume in most countries its the same. So if I go on a holiday with the new system I need to either convert EVERYTHING in my head or remember that in country A shops open at 2am and close at 5pm.
No thanks. Its rather silly. I'd go for an ADDITIONAL clock, but not a reaplacement.
With time zones you can simply look up the time at a given location to know which part of the day it is, time corresponding to a part of the day is extremely useful, especially when you're moving through different countries or working with foreign people. It's much easier to change the time zone of your clock than to adjust to a day that starts at 16 o'clock. The different time zones give you more information, and given that most electronic devices can convert between them easily and display multiple at the same time, it's not really harmful.
DST is the beast that needs to die, because it makes it hard to represent the exact time me with the local time plus a simple offset. After DST dies, we should try to deal with unusual time zones that do not match the local solar mean time that you have in countries like Russia or offsets that have half an hour in them like you have in Iran.
If time zones make it difficult for you, work on the better integration of the tools dealing with them.
see http://ebeats.org
I think having everyone use UTC would be impractical. If the sun is out and its 2am UTC, someones gonna be confused, somewhere. And its gonna just be a giant pain in the rear end for everyone that isn't already using UTC to begin with. And even if you eliminate time zone boundaries, you still kind of need date boundaries. At one point do we say that monday is done with and tuesday begins? Is that a local thing? Do we keep time zones and just have them define the start and end points of the local day now?
And then theres all the technology that we use. Sure, disabling DST and just setting everything to UTC would be easy, but then every scheduled process has to be converted over to UTC. And then new rules for DST have to be implemented and its all a big pain in the you no what. Why don't we just go ahead and implement metric time while were at it just to make sure everyone's sense of time is sufficiently scrambled? Ugh...
I think something that would be much more practical would be to simply eliminate DST worldwide, and for countries that span multiple timezones to simplify. As far as the US goes, it would be easy to get the lower 48 on the same schedule. EST just falls back 90 minutes, CST falls back 30, MST jumps ahead 30, and PST jumps ahead 90. Bam, one unified timezone and no ones off by more than 90 minutes.
Zero longitude gets noon at noon, date line gets new day at noon. He said UTC which would make it thus.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Uh, the clock is just a number, if you believe the day should start earlier, talk to your management. Your colleagues would most likely disagree, but if they don't, you might convince them. It makes most sense if 12:00 is exactly at noon and the time matches the sun, not your work preferences.
... and midday at 2am ?
So when the hell is noon ?
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
Wasn't time based on the rotation of the earth and the relative position of the sun in the sky? The hours of the day were tracked long before people started setting up multiple time zones...look at a sundial and there are numbers and those numbers were pretty much same. Time zones only date to the mid-1800's so they certainly aren't a "relic of the past".
Don't get me wrong, there certainly are advantages to using a standard time (and plenty of scientific, military, and technical applications use either UTC or GMT), but the average person will want to track time in relationship to their day as they experience it. And face it, the average person does very little traveling, very little interaction with people outside their time zone, and probably never interacts with someone in a significantly different time zone (i.e. on the other side of the world).
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
You're obviously a time traveler from some long past century. Time zones are modern, man. Get with the program if you want to fit in.
First thing that came to mind on reading this article was "1998 called, they want their suggestion back".
Back in 1998 when the Web was new and cool, Swatch were attempting to market a metric alternative to the 24 hour clock, which they excitingly referred to as 'Internet Time'. It divided the day into 1,000 'beats', and was based around the Central European timezone (GMT + 1) on the basis that Swatch's headquarters are in Biel. Unsurprisingly, the concept went down like a lead balloon.
FWIW, you'd have to think about different timezones anyway. No amount of universally-shared timezones are going to change the physical reality, so they may as well reflect it.
The inconvenience is completely self-imposed. Its very similar to the problem of English measure here; metric is a totally superior system in every way but people don't want to recognize it because they are simply too lazy to change. If i could put a proposal before the American people I'd say "Please lets all start using the metric system, and by the way, let's just not all times in GMT, and also do away with AM/PM and use the 24 hour clock." So much simpler, but people are people and by and large, they are stupid.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
If it will take us a century to switch, it a reason to switch sooner not later. Best get the pain out of the way. It will make things easier and less arbitrary, what scientist/engineer could be against that? Hmm...
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
First they . Now they want to take my away local time ! Things haven't been this bad since they invented the meter.
...as soon as the US switches to using the metric system that the rest of the civilized world uses.
and all the other things...the best way for people to fall back to timezones :p...everyt timezone luchtime would be different ....lol!!
Famous last words:"but...."
I can look at my clock, see it's 9:20am in New York, and feel safe calling them or setting up a transatlantic meeting at that time..... Now, roll everyone onto the same clock, and I'll have no idea! I'd have to remember lots of stupid times or do some mental gymnastics to understand that calling at 22pm is a bad idea as that's lunch time in Singapore.
Want to fix something, make it a global standard when the clocks move for daylight savings... that really confuses things so meetings which don't normally collide between the USA and Europe, suddenly hit but only for one or two weeks until the other side moves into daylight savings.
A little thought shows why this isn't a good idea.
Say this idea is implemented worldwide. You've lived in a particular place most of your life. You're accustomed to waking up at what is now called 3 pm. You eat breakfast at 3:30 pm, get to work by 4:30 pm, have lunch at 9 pm, and dinner by 4 am. All is well.
Now say you move to another city. Now your entire concept of when things are scheduled to happen, has to change. Furthermore, the magnitude of the change depends on the change in longitude--so whereas you were eating at 3:30 pm, 9 pm, and 4 am, now suddenly you find yourself eating at completely different hours of the day. Same goes for sleeping and waking. Each time you travel, it changes.
The point is that the hour of the day is strongly associated with specific activities. "Noon" in any part of the world tells us when most people are having lunch. It gives us a mental marker to synchronize our activities. To have to change that every time you move to a different time zone, rather than simply adjusting your watch, is backwards, and doesn't lessen the burden of having to keep track of something. It is easier to adjust our clocks than our internal concepts of when we do very basic and regular things--especially in this day and age, when we have phones capable of using GPS to automatically adjust the time zone.
How about we first try and get america on the 24h clock. I noticed that even this crazy posting still listed things in am/pm.
----
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Whatever it is you're smoking, I want some.
they had a very interesting concept called "internet time", they even came out with watches that displayed internet time... no time zone, only a number between 1 and 1000... each unit would be about a minute, each 10 units , would be 1/4 of an hour, each 100 units, about 2 hours... could have worked... never caught on though.
as one person posted already, do you really want your day to change in the middle of the day? :)... though it would be fun to say let's meet tomorrow, later today :)
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
How about getting the US folks to use the metric system first?
How long is it now? 25+ years or so...
You can measure success rate on that one.
So here on the eastern seaboard of Australia, lunchtime will now be at 2 a.m., In New York it will be 4 p.m., and in Moscow it will be 8 a.m.
Why in the world would you go through all that trouble, and still keep a.m. and p.m.?
I have never even seen anybody express UTC in anything other than 24 hour format.
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
But why keep the antiquated 24-hour day at all? Why not decimalize all of our time units? 10 hours per day, I say, 1000 days per year. Who cares if none of it lines up what we observe in our daily lives? That's what we all have smartphones for!
BTW, the premise of the question is wrong: time zones were not introduced for when different parts of the world were isolated. When locations are isolated, they don't need to agree on a time. Time zones were introduced for when different parts of the world were getting connected... specifically by railroads.
Considering that at least 99% of the world population doesn't ever leave their own time zone, particularly on a regular basis, no, I think we'll avoid INconveniencing 5.95 billion people in order to make life a teensy bit easier for the 50 million who are probably educated enough for it not to really be an inconvenience, or wealthy enough to just buy another damn watch (if it is).
-Styopa
Is this like GNOME assuming one desktop manager "fits all"? I like noon to be when the sun is overhead, and I do not live in the UK.
I go out of my way to complicate the simple things, so that I can simplify the complicated things.
Are you kidding? Wake the fark up earlier. I remember a time we woke up in the twilight of the morning and didn't need to rely on clocks to tell us when to do things like wake up or go to sleep. This is the worst kind of nonsense ever.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I agree, if the best time to feed the animals is four hours after noon, then its wrong to say 4pm, as 4pm is more or less than 4h after noon depending on where in the time zone you are. Absolute time is absolutely better. I think I may switch, if I only provide times in UTC everyone is sure to jump on board, or kill me.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
Which is easier?
"Hey, it looks like it's 2 AM in London.... I'd better not call, he's probably asleep." -- this is our current system, and finding out "If it's X here, it's Y there" is about as easy as it can get.
OR
"OK, it's 3 PM here, which means it's mid-afternoon.... but what's 3 PM in London? Oh, in London, 3 PM is the middle of the night."
It's a lot easier when you can say "It's X time in Y location, and humans usually do Z at X time", then it is to remember that people on the East Coast eat lunch at 3:OO PM Universal Time, and people on the West Coast eat lunch at 11:00 AM universal time. My scheduling, etc, programs already automatically adjust events such as meetings to my local time -- if I see a phone meeting scheduled for 5:30 PM, then it's 5:30 PM *my time*, even though the person who entered it, in California, entered it as "2:30 PM".
The more I think on this, the more likely it is this is some kind of social experiment to see how people react when presented with a self-evidently bollocks idea on a site which is otherwise generally reputable and filtered.
99.9% of the people never have a meeting with people on the other side of the world.
Let me guess: you've never called a major PC maker's tech support number. In a lot of cases, that ends up becoming a phone meeting between someone in North America and someone in India.
2. Some stupid idea counts as news now?
Lots of stupid ideas count as news. If /. only posted good ideas, we wouldn't have much to read....
Maybe the idea is that we can discuss stupid ideas to see how stupid they really are, or whether they might just have some merit? A lot of good ideas come from a lot more stupid ideas. If you're lucky, you'll have 1 good idea out of every 100 stupid ideas.
In this case, I agree with #1 and #3 of your post :)
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If you want to get up an hour early in the summer, get your ass out of bed!
Why should the rest of us screw up our sleep rhythms because you don't want to reset your alarm clock?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
this annoys me even with local time
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
I can call my neighbor in the next town and say "let's meet at 4" and we do not need to get into a long winded discussion about what that means
Unless there's a state or province border between your town and the next town.
For example the USA could reduce the number of time zones to 1 or 2 for the main land. Just look at this map of time zones. China has only one time zone, half of Europe is in the same time zone and Russia just removed 2 of its time zones. Merging a time zone with the 2 neighbouring timezones is just a shift by one hour for the people, but already makes things much easier.
Why should time ;)
Actually, while we're at it, we would do well to change to ten hour days. Each hour would be 144 of our present minutes. Each of the ten hours would have 100 minutes, and each of the minutes would have 100 seconds.
Each hour would be 144 of our present minutes.
Each minute would be 1.44x the length of a present minute.
Each second would be slightly shorter (0.86 of our present seconds).
The timepiece industry would have a hay-day.
And while we're at it, let's change the timing system to NCE(New Common Era) 0, following J.R.R. Tolkien's system for adopting new eras. That would put us more in the now, instead of the "good ol' days" circa 0 A.D. people are so strangely fond of. (We can still remember Jesus without having to continue this overdue count-up to 3000 or higher.)
All this would shake up people's reality enough that maybe our civilization could grow into something different/better and make us feel less removed from people in distant countries, with whom we're as close communication-wise as a person two miles away.
And yes, eliminating the present location-relativistic time-system now that a significant portion of the world population is globally connected is a Good Thing(tm). Someday, people will look back and say, "Really, you had to communicate with each other in that hackey and limited way???" Imagine if every time you wanted to physically meet with a friend, and instead of just giving them an absolute time and place to meet, you had to know their location in order to tell them the place. "Let's see, you're at 21st and Broadway? Is that my 21st and Broadway, or yours? Oh, we'll need to translate your location by 4 blocks..."
*** once i really listened, the noise just went away. -liz phair
Let's do away with leap seconds first.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
If this mentioned post Columbine and 9/11 I would have thought Katz had returned. This is simple gibberish by someone who thinks they are smarter and more clever than they really are.
Apparently Hairyfish's mom's basement has no windows. Maybe he should come up from it from time to time.
Having a time that agrees with the appearance of the world consistently as you travel is a lot less confusing for most people. A given time now agrees with what activities people are doing across the world. At 8 am, you can bet that most people are doing morning related things even if in Bengal, or Botswana.
With this proposal, I hear 0800 Z, I have to think what would someone in Auckland be doing, and would it be different than what someone in Angola would be doing.
Unless, of course, you really want to synchronize activities and make some mow the lawn with night vision goggles, be my guest. Good luck with that.
In communications in the military, I had to deal with using GMT (Z) to coordinate things across separated areas. It sucked. It sucked pond water.
Yes, it would make dealing with the machines and networks easier, but the world is still more about people than the machines. At least for now.
Ugh, this is one of those silly ideas that lead to all those jokes about computer people having no social skills, living in the basement, etc.
The only people that think about this are a small minority of computer geeks - a teeny, tiny fragment of the population. For the vast, VAST majority of humans... this will never even be something they'll spend more than a few seconds thinking about; and those few seconds will be when they're talking to a computer geek. There's no real benefit to the average human in switching to UTC - instead, it would probably be more trouble for them.
Those supposed "benefits" to frequent travellers... right now, lunchtime is around noon most places. So you fly some random distance, and someone wants to have a lunch meeting or a working dinner - unless they tell you what time that is, you're not going to have a clue. You say "of course they'd tell you what time the meeting is"... well, that's the same thing that happens right now, so there's no real UTC advantage there. If you need to schedule things in advance (say you're arranging a conference that's significantly far away from you), you'll need to figure out what the time-zone-equivalent time shift is to that location so you can schedule meals, select reasonable conference room reservation times, and the like.
Bottom line is - time zones aren't an arbitrary creation. They exist because they match how we tend to function. For most people they're actually advantageous.
#DeleteChrome
Why aren't we doing it? Because it's a lot more complicated than the author makes it out to be.
First of all... many people are not that bright, and the DST proposition doesn't work at all.. the workday is something like a de-facto standard. If you don't change the clock, the complexity of people having to remember every day for 6 months, that they now need to get at work at a different time creates all sorts of chaos. It's a lot easier for _everyone_ to have to know to change their clocks, and the change to the start/end of their work day is IMPLIED by the time rather than decided by each individual company.
A decision to eliminate time zones and DST, is essentially a decision to eliminate changes of school work start/end times at various times of the year (not that I am saying that I oppose the elimination of DST, on the contrary, DST is kind of silly IMO)
Time zones provide us with consistency, especially for travellers. Wherever you go you just change your clock, and the timing of daily customs such as lunch or work will be at similar predictable times displayed on the clock. The time change alone lets you know what times correspond to morning, afternoon, evening, and night.
Speaking of "afternoon"; the term becomes a little bit meaningless if time zones are eliminated.
The vast majority of people have never been inside an airplane
Which incidentally is also why a global web of trust hasn't been proven practical. Local key signing parties lead to local webs of trust, with bottlenecks in the trust flow through those people who do travel internationally.
and have no need for such silliness.
Not necessarily. With foreign call centers becoming common, telephone calls between India and Indiana need some sort of common time reference.
" let's just not all times in GMT .
the only part of your comment related to time zones is completely incomprehensible
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It's more important that what a day is be the same across the globe not what the hour is. Like you said, our time is relative to the where the sun is in the sky. It makes perfect sense.
You know a changeover to metric isn't that simple.
I personally would love it. I hate arranging conference calls only to have one person miss, no matter how I phrase the invites. "That's 9 am Mountain time, which is 11 am for you, Steve." Means Steve will call me at 7:10 Mountain time and say, "Where is everyone?"
But why not: Inertia. TV producers will bandy about some straw man like, "Shows are used to delaying by an hour for Central, two for Mountain, and the odd hour out for the West. The common announcement that "x will be shown at y:00, z:00 West Coast" will have to be changed to "x will be shown at y:00, y-1:00 Central, y-2:00 Western, and some other time West Coast." The additional seconds it takes to say that will result in less advertising which will destroy our economy." That cable, satellite, DVR, and streaming have already made that argument pointless will not be understood by said producers or the politicians who listen to them.
Besides, enough voters don't understand. Remember, we're smart and in the minority.
"Got a meeting with colleagues on the other side of the world? 4 a.m. means 4 a.m. for everyone." Yeah, and I have no idea if anyone will be awake at 4 a.m. in that part of the world when I'm scheduling the meeting unless I consult my handy "sleeping hours around the world" chart. Or we can keep things the way they are now, where I know that 4 a.m. in India is a bad time to schedule a meeting.
Yeah yeah, mistype. I guess it takes a genius to figure it out.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Submitter gets it wrong anyway. From TFS: "Time zones are a relic of the past, when different parts of the world were isolated, and 12 p.m. was whenever the sun was directly above your specific location."
Um, no. Time zones were *created* to deal with the problem of local noon being whenever the sun was directly above your specific location. That's what the world used for thousands of years, until rapid transit and communications made that impractical. With the coming of railroads, for the first time, people were frequently outrunning the sun. Time zones became a necessity. You can't have a rail time table if everybody's clock is different.
Also, I think the proposal is just moving the problem around. Currently we have to think, "Okay, they're 3 hours ahead of me, so 9 AM here is 12 PM there." With this proposal, we'd have to think, "Okay, they're 3 hours ahead of me, so when I'm starting work they're going to lunch".
And nobody's stopping anyone from doing everything on UTC. I know at least one person who sets his schedule that way.
DST -- as others have said -- that we can do without.
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I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
And only a complete moron would get confused by them.
In that case, a gradual change (rather than no change at all) would probably be the solution.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
I argued with all of my friends about it and they all thought I was an idiot. :) Since then we've had a major change to when DST (at least in the US) takes affect which makes the problem just worse.
That said, I doubt we could convince the world to change, but for those of us that routinely communicate with friends/colleagues around the world... timezones only complicate the matter.
It is ALREADY being done in many spheres of commerce.
Aviation and Poker, for example.
Those who categorize the idea as "stupid" appear as luddites.
Or perhaps they have a hard time adding or subtracting numbers < 25 in their heads.
Who is calling who stupid?
We all got used to the metric system -- it took barely a year -- and the benefits will last forever.
Like all things human, time measurement and display will evolve, and there will always be luddites who will rant against whatever it evolves to.
All of the poker rooms I deal with use GMT -4 (Eastern Time, I think), so everyone ELSE is already using a world wide time standard
With aviation, they use UTC (symbol Z), which is roughly equal to GMT
Stop catering to the lowest common denominator.
If people are too stupid to understand time zones, then don't change time zones, change the stupid people (via education).
Wasn't time based on the rotation of the earth and the relative position of the sun in the sky?
It was. Now it's based most closely on cesium, with occasional corrections called leap seconds to meet the rotation of the earth.
The hours of the day were tracked long before people started setting up multiple time zones
In fact, I seem to remember reading that time zones (as opposed to high noon being at a different minute for each quarter degree of longitude) were invented to set railroad schedules.
the average person [...] probably never interacts with someone in a significantly different time zone (i.e. on the other side of the world).
That's because the median person (by average, did you mean mean or median?) by wealth lives in a developing country and thus has little need for customer service in an offshore call center. Unless, of course, you choose a measure of wealth that puts the median person in India.
Indiana has it's own issues with how things are now and they where messed up even more in the past and now to try some like this will just mess them even more for some time. At least now all of the state uses daylight saving time.
The metric system is still slowly and painfully gaining foothold in the US. Sure, what you're saying makes sense for cosmopolitans, but most of the world isn't even remotely there yet.
Because you still have to figure out during what hours your colleagues on the other side of the world are asleep and at work. You'd probably have to look up the conversion to local solar time anyway to figure this out.
Sure, I'm going to easily remember that lunch time here is 4pm and somewhere else it is at 6am. Get a grip. At least I can guess at the right time zones to convert here to there.
What kind of weird-ass chickens do you have? This time of year, it's too hot to be feeding them at 4pm. They eat in the morning and again around 7pm.
The author is clearly a JACKASS. See what is going to become of the web site ROB!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The metric system is NOT metric is a totally superior system in every way. Its not even as good as the Babylonian base 60.
"The metric system, being decimal, is not well-suited to working
with fractions. Officially, you aren't even supposed to say
"1/3 meter," but rather "333 milliliters." For everyday uses, such
as cooking, it is much more natural to use fractions.
Metric units are not always appropriate amounts for convenient
use. The 2-liter bottle seems to have become "natural," but if you
want to buy a single drink, it's easier to say "a pint" or even "a
12-ounce cup" rather than "400 milliliters." The metric system's
rigidity prevents designing units for convenience.
These practical issues lead to the use of "folk units" alongside
the official metric units, which can lead to conflict when laws
are too rigid."
---- GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
I think this is a great idea!
I live in the UK, so GMT is fine for me. You can all use my timezone.
I wonder how many people that support this live *outside* of Europe...
SteveB
Lead by example.
The concept of local time is too ingrained in language and culture to be replaced in every-day usage. It's hard enough to convince many Americans to join the twentieth century and adopt the metric system; and you want people to cope with the idea of "midday" meaning 0700 in New York, 0400 in Los Angeles and 2200 in Sydney? This would at most work in military or international business contexts.
Either way, you have to know where you are to determine when stuff happens.
For example, I'm on the east coast. I travel to California, set my clock back 3 hours (or for a cell phone it adjusts its self possibly.. some phones do some don't). I still know stores open at 8 or 10 am.. lunch is at 12, done working at 5.. stores close at 9.. etc.
Now with the op's idea.. I have to constantly remember the stores open at 5am or 7am, lunch is at 9am, done working at 2pm, stores close at 6pm.. how is that *any easier*? Instead of changing one factor and the rest fall in place, you're now keep that one the "the same" and having to remember to adjust *all* of the rest that are typically a given constant.
And if you can't figure out UTC +/- then you have other issues.
Stupid rant.
There are many many reason why it would be at least as confusing if you did the change over.
Sure it would be easy to tell people continents apart what time to have a meeting, but far harder to figure out if you are asking one of your peers to get up in the middle of the night or stay through lunch.
now you know what it happening in other countries based on the time, dawn is around 6-9am (based on the time of year), lunch at noon-ish, a normal working day is around 9-5, the day ends at midnight.
This obvious would be a benefit to someone who lives in their basement and has simply stopped living by the sun, but that does not mean that it would not make everything more confusing for the vast majority.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Swatch did this for us already back in 1998. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
--magusnet
I didn't say it would be simple, tons of arguments against, I'm sure. But anyone with a modicum of intelligence would have to agree that metric is the superior system. If we'd started the change over in the 60's like we were supposed to it wouldn't have been a mess that it is today.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Asperger logic at work here. Highly logical but completely unrealistic. Simply set how many people would benefit of a UTC only scheme against the people for which it would be really annoying and you'll understand. Essentially life is mainly is about being off-line. About having lunch at noon. Waking up some time between 6 and 9 am. Dining between 8 and 10 pm. Etc... You really want to sacrifice that in order to meet the whims of a hand full of geeks and business men?
As for Asperger, I've come up with enough crappy ideas where I realised that some of my perceived logic simply doesn't fit humanity.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Waking up earlier won't give me more free time in the evening, nor would it open restaurants and other places earlier.
If the majority of people are okay with it, then maybe you should just get up later.
And if each establishment could open and close as it pleases, then how would you like it if shops, banks and post offices only opened when you are sleeping? It's not a big deal to me, but I know that they'll get a lot of complaints.
testing out my trending skills
What's wrong with saying 4 deciliters?
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Enough said.
How about fixing time around the more experiential notion of sunrise and sunset. On every day of the year the sun would rise at 6am, and set at 6pm. Noon and midnight would be the other midpoints.
In this model, the discreet unit of time is not 'fixed', rather it is determined by geographic and 'solar' location. No need for DST or TimeZones per se, rather a continuous function over the globe.
It would have been 'hard' with mechanical gears for tracking time, but we have better mechanisms available.
No big deal. Just choose some time zone where nobody lives as the standard world time. That way, 2200 hours isn't sunset for very many people. Problem solved. GMT-9 and GMT-10 are pretty good candidates.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The field I'm in requires I pretty much live on UTC time. It's 20:25UTC at the moment. My workday runs from 13:00UTC to 21:00UTC. Lunch is at 16:00UTC. Much easier.
It's universally accepted (by computers) and easy to calculate with. If everybody used unixtime there wouldn't be any date conversion bugs (as Outlook is so famous for).
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
What's wrong with saying 4 deciliters?
or using what's done in most metric countries, namely use 250ml or 500ml ?
Allow me to quote the only person to understand the issue:
If I recall, there's some as-yet-unclaimed reward for disproving this. www.timecube.com.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
Why is 11pm followed by 12am, and then 1 through 11am, and then 12pm? Shouldn't 12pm follow 11pm? The only sensible way surely is to have 0am..11am and then 0pm..11pm. Can anyone explain why 12 comes before 1?
It was 23:00 in the morning when the post man woke me up. Wooooot!
We could also skip time zones completely!
Time should be determined by your exact longitude.
This post shall also serve as the patent pending for the GPS enabled smart phone app. "every time".
This might be a problem to the airforce though. Fighter pilot flight logs might be a litle bit difficult to enterpretate.
CmdrTaco maaaaan?
From the stand point of lazy central planners or jet setters this is simplifier but its more complicated for everyone else. As we're talking about 10 percent of the population versus 90 percent it's very hard to understand why anyone would think this is a good idea.
World travelers and centrally managed organizations have long ago adapted to managing multiple time zones. Local organizations do not need to generally because they assume everything is referenced to their time zone. Flipping that around helps nothing. How often do time zones really screw things up? Unless people are incompetent they're going to use an agreed upon reference.
There's no reason to force everyone to do anything. If the government wants to use EST as their standard reference they're welcome to do it. People in PST or MST are well aware of that sort of thing and make accommodations for it.
Here's a better question, because we have computers who cares since the computers can automatically compensate for time zone differences. Do people have electronic calenders? These things adjust for time zone already. So there's no need.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
So why aren't we doing it?
Because it would be a major inconvenience for the majority of people which only benefitted a tiny minority.
I interact a lot with people over time zones, but it's either like Slashdot or mail (I post now, you reply later) or I need to know if you're at work, not what your wall clock says. So I still need to know what timezone you're in.
The first situation doesn't need to be solved; the second one cannot be solved until you force half the planet to work night shifts.
... 12:07 in Springfield, 12:08 in Arlington, 12:09 in Marystown, 12:10 in Winchester, 12:11 in Martinsburg, 12:12 Union City, 12:13 in St. Lawrence, ...
The suggestion as it's been put in the main article is pointless.
The fact is we already have UTC (or GMT for those of us who still insist the British invented it so we ought to get to keep it), and it's perfectly easy for anyone in any country to use it. If you want to communicate with someone in another time zone, you are perfectly free to use UTC as a common reference point when deciding what time to meet.
But while it does indeed work very well as a common reference point, it doesn't solve any of the practical issues of communicating between time zones. If I want to talk to someone in another country, we have to arrange it at a time when we're both going to be at the office -- or at the very least, when we're both going to be awake.
The simple fact is that physics dictates that different parts of the world have different daylight hours, and biology dictates that people prefer to be awake during the daylight hours. There is nothing you can do that will change this; no amount of meddling with the time system will make it any easier to talk to someone on the other side of the world.
Regarding the suggested adjustment for DST simply meaning that everyone adjusts their schedule by an hour while the clocks stay the same.... I can't even begin to describe how wonderfully naive this is. If it were really that simple, we wouldn't have invented DST in the first place.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
Time is a complex subject and nothing can make it simple. Sure, if you deal with local time things can be simple, but step into international times or high-precision measurements and you get complex. While the proposal to end time zones keeps popping up across the decades I've been tracking time keeping, I suspect that those who really work with time can have nightmares over it.
Ignoring the inertia of an international timekeeping rule that has been in effect for over a century that was based on conventions going back millennium, any proposal involves revolts of both the masses and many techies who do the actual work. But ignoring all of that,
Moon colonization and space habitats can be different due to the local day being non-existent or way different from earths.
GP has a point, when you live in the north that extra hour in summer time actually gives us an additional hour in the evening - while it doesn't change the total hours of sun, it does give us the sun when we need it; that is, when we aren't sitting rotting in a cubicle.
metric is a totally superior system in every way but people don't want to recognize it because they are simply too lazy to change.
Not every way - most ways. Fahrenheit is more accurate than Celsius and one degree Fahrenheit is the amount of temperature change humans can sense. Celsius just takes two arbitrary points for water and divides by 100.
Advice: on VPS providers
For everyday uses, such as cooking, values are normally given in grams rather than fractions of a kilogram. For drinks, people buy a third of a litre or a half litre. People can adapt to almost any change: the problem isn't that the system doesn't work (or the rest of the world would have abandoned it) but that people don't like change.
Leap seconds really suck. Just give me a nice atomic clock that increments 1 second every 9.19 trillion radiations of a cesium atom (give or take a few hundred million) and I'll be happy. I really don't care if a day's .2 seconds shorter this year than last year. The Earth isn't the center of the universe, our time system should stop coddling it like it is!
Relativity also sucks. It kind of sucks that the atomic clock on the mountain observatory doesn't agree with the one down on the beach anymore. I think we should dig Einstein up and sue him. Or make him fix it.
POSIX time sucks goat balls. For a variety of reasons. Which I don't know you well enough to get into.
Time zones kind of suck if you have to deal with people spread out across all of them. For the purposes of your interactions with them, you should agree that all official business should be conducted in a specific time zone, which everyone can then synchronize a clock to. GPS time is a good one. UTC is only a good one if you can agree on whether or not to use leap seconds. Otherwise people will be 34 (currently) seconds early or late depending on which way they go. Of course if you don't use leap seconds it's not really UTC, it's TAI, isn't it?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The thing is that time of day is not the same everywhere.
What I mean is: any measurement system can be used anywhere, my metric tape measure would work just as well in the US as it does in my country. A day is 24 hours long everywhere, so a 24 hour clock would work anywhere without any problem at all. Now, no measurement system is going to change the fact that when it's mid-day in one country it is midnight in another. You can deal with this two ways:
1. (current) Assign midnight as 00:00, mid-day as 12:00 and split the world in time zones, so that 12:00 in each time zone means mid-day. Make one time zone the primary, tell all the others by their difference from the primary. To find out what time it is in another country, you need to add or subtract some time based on the difference between time zones.
2. (proposed). Synchronize all clocks to the primary time zone. Now all the clocks show the same time, so mid-day in one country is at 12:00, in some other at 9:00 and in another at 00:00. Create a table of countries and the time of mid-day (or midnight) in each of them. You know what time it is in another country, but you still do not know if it's, say, business hours or not, so you now have to calculate the difference between your time-of-midnight and their time-of-midnight, then add or subtract it from the time on your clock to know what actual time, compared to you, is there.
So, you have a system that is just as (if not more) complex, local time no longer corresponds to the position of the sun (without the calculations, anyway) and you gained absolutely nothing.
We didn't get rid of the a.m.-p.m. shit.
We didn't squat the DST.
We have Extra-Timezones (with fractional hour offsets) due to national pride.
How do you expect something to go through that is farther reaching then abandoning all three above together.
Yours, Martin
This idea would solve one set of problems (synchronizing events across time zones or figuring out the local time while traveling), but would create a whole new set of problems for long-distance travelers.
Currently people everywhere have a common set of expectations about what time the sun rises, when to eat meals, when to sleep, etc. If you travel to a new region, you change your clock once, and you're instantly slotted in to the local expectations. On the other hand, if we followed the proposal above, travelers would have to do timezone-type math for all these events every day.
Say you travel from California to Japan. What time will the sun come up? Well, at home in California it comes up at 14:00 UTC. California is around 120 degrees W and Japan is around 138 degrees E, so Japan is about 360-258=102 degrees east of California. The sun travels 15 degrees per hour, so events will happen about 7 hours "later" in Japan than in California. Add 7 hours to 14:00 and you can expect the sun to come up around 21:00 UTC. Great. Now what time should you make a lunch appointment with a colleague? Usually in California you have lunch at 20:00 UTC, so add 7 hours, modulus 24 to get 03:00 UTC.
It's a lot of work, but at least you'll know when to catch your flight home without adjusting your clock. You just won't know (without some math) whether that will be the middle of the night, first thing in the morning, etc.
This does not strike me as easier than the current system.
If I need to send an email to someone before they leave the office at 5pm I need to know what time it is by them. Isn't that the whole point of time zones? They were formed because of commerce and communication with the telegraph. Shipping was disasterous when trying to give ETAs.
It maybe only a number, but it is a number people all use at work and base it off of.
http://saveie6.com/
That's part of the point. How necessary is it for you to know the exact position of the sun, if you know what time it is anyway? The position of the sun was wonderful for farmers and navigators who relied on the sun to do some technical things for their time. nowadays if I say I have an important meeting at 13:45, you need to be there, the position of the sun has nothing to do with it, and adds nothing to the accuracy of the time dimension.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
DST is designed to create more jobs in the computer science fields... because we have to keep re-coding legacy systems to deal with it.
God spoke to me
1. What a stupid idea
2. Some stupid idea counts as news now?
3. What a stupid idea
4. PROFIT!!!
There, completed that for you. It's what page impressions are all about.
"The metric system, being decimal, is not well-suited to working with fractions.
Half-metre, quarter-metre, third of a millimetre. It's easy. What you meant - I hope - was that some fractions don't represent an integer number of some smaller measurement. This can happen with imperial measures too; try telling me what one tenth of a foot is.
Officially, you aren't even supposed to say "1/3 meter," but rather "333 millilitres."
Officially? Pah. The only official proscription that would apply here is against a millilitre being a subdivision of a metre. Apart from that there's no reason you can't ask for a half-litre of something, like beer.
For everyday uses, such as cooking, it is much more natural to use fractions.
What's natural depends on your upbringing: I have no problems whatsoever in measuring out 100g of flour or a kilo of mince or anything like that.
Metric units are not always appropriate amounts for convenient use. The 2-liter bottle seems to have become "natural," but if you want to buy a single drink, it's easier to say "a pint" or even "a 12-ounce cup" rather than "400 milliliters." The metric system's rigidity prevents designing units for convenience.
Bull crap. A half-litre of milk is close enough to a traditional* pint as to make no real difference and a standard measure of spirits here has been 25ml since before I was born. No-one asks for 25ml, one just asks for "a measure of X". It's not systemic rigidity that makes things hard, it's your own: if you just accepted a slightly smaller/larger drink as being sufficient then there'd be no trouble at all. For example, our corner shop recently stopped selling pint cartons of milk and started offering 500ml ones instead at a reduced price: no-one really cared. Granted, I get perhaps one cup of coffee-worth less out of them but so what?
These practical issues lead to the use of "folk units" alongside the official metric units, which can lead to conflict when laws are too rigid."
You'll have to forgive me but I've yet to see any practical issues using metric alone or with imperial. The only conflict we've had is when a grocer refused to give prices for metric quantities of produce and started claiming The Man was persecuting him as part of some EU conspiracy when in fact the government had no objection to giving prices per pound so long as there was a price per kilo there as well. It didn't take long for people to see him for the attention-seeking fool he was.
*Refer to what I said about upbringing; simply being traditional adds no objective value to anything.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Officially, you aren't even supposed to say "1/3 meter," but rather "333 milliliters." For everyday uses, such as cooking, it is much more natural to use fractions.
Well, 333mm or 330mm, depending on what precision you need. As for the "more natural", I guess it depends on tradition, decimal is more natural to me - 0.25L or 250ml, but not 1/4 L.
The 2-liter bottle seems to have become "natural," but if you want to buy a single drink, it's easier to say "a pint" or even "a 12-ounce cup" rather than "400 milliliters."
Is the "pint" some absolute unit or is it an arbitrary one (~473.2mL). Could you drink 0.5L of beer? That's how you can get beer where I live (completely metric country) - 0.3L, 0.5L, 1L (if we are talking about a bar). I have no trouble asking for "one beer, zero five" (literally translated) or a "one big beer" if the bar offers only two options (very common, 0.3 and 0.5). The bottles are 0.5L, and cans are 0.3 or 0.5.
Stronger drinks are often measured in "grams", or at least when someone says 100g of vodka they mean 100mL (because 100mL of water would weigh 100g), gram is shorter than mililiter.
Currently I cannot think of any "folk" units in use (in my country) that do not correspond directly to some of the metric units.
sorry but I don't get it. Why dump time zones for the sake of business? which is the only major reason for doing so. The majority of the population would get ZERO benefit from changing the current system.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
I hate to use the word idea for something that lacks any actual backing thought. This idea crops up every now and then among technologists who only experience nature between car and building, and is especially popular in Britain and western Europe, where no one would have to change their habits or language if this nonsense were put into place. A few things technologists do might improve, but all other parts of life would be thrown into unnecessary, lasting chaos. This idea is ultimately nothing more than selfishness among Asperger's types who never consider other people.
There are thousands of reasons why a single worldwide time zone is a massively bad idea. I'll restrict myself to one: in such a world, where would you put the international date line? With the current, well-working system, the line between today and tomorrow is drawn though the Pacific Ocean in such a way that no country or economic zone is itself divided into today portions and tomorrow portions. With a single time zone world, that line becomes the GMT line, which would place one part of England and indeed of London into today while the other half is in tomorrow. Not to mention dividing France, Spain and portions of Africa into two days. Try planning your meetings around that.
You don't seem to understand that the time zone system was made possible by technological changes. It's not some baggage that we carry from the caves, it was invented in the 1870's when transcontinental railroads in Canada and the US had to come up with reliable timetables. The technology that allowed near-simultaneous setting of clocks hundreds of miles apart was the telegraph. Before the railroads needed time zones, and before the telegraph made them possible, all time was local and was generally based on the position of the sun locally.
The imposition of a single worldwide time zone would require a complete break with parts of language and literature, in every human language. Words like dawn, noon, and midnight describe the position of the sun, and today, in every language, also describe roughly the same time of day. Dawn is about 0430 to 0730, depending on season, in the populated temperate zones, and that is true in all latitudes of those temperate zones. In your world, dawn would be 1230 to 1530 in one place and 2030 to 2330 in another, so the word dawn loses its current meaning to describe a time of day. Books written before the start of your brave new world would all use the old meaning of dawn and would assume the reader knows that dawn-colored sunlight is a rosy pink.
To schedule intercontinental meetings, I rely on timeanddate.com and its cross-time-zone scheduler. If that didn't exist, I'd have to do a little math. All airlines already compute their schedules internally in terms of GMT, then publish departure and arrival times in local time. It really isn't hard to live in a world that we have very wisely divided into naturally-occurring time zones.
Plus, the joke about someone having an IQ just below room temperature makes a lot more sense in F.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Around here it's a small or a large beer. (small is usually 333ml, large is around half a liter depending on the bar and drink").
Even if we use metrics, that doesn't mean we have to use silly phrases in our everyday life.
And with this we would have big problems to know when it was morning/day/evening/night at the place you wanna call... much better to have timezones and know that "that country is 6 hours before us" so it's ok to call them... much easier to add X hours to the current time when contacting someone in another country than to adjust to a different time-schedule that is different for each country you visit...
Sure it would be easier for the ones that never travel, but it would cause lots of confusion for the rest of us...
Last time I checked some guy named Edison invented a nifty thing that makes light in the night, even without fire. Great thing, really, you should try it some time.
In other words, it's the 21st century and your night life is still dependent on the sun?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Most people live in one place or state. They meet locally, the work locally, they eat locally. For them 12:00 means noon. and 24:00 means midnight. If you have a cross country meeting on the phone, you just accept the event invitation and it is displayed in your time zone adopted to your sense of time, while your colleague in another country sees the same appointment recoded to his time zone.
Removing time zones is an idea such as using something like a "star date". The easiest time format is an 64 bit integer counting since one reference day. However, it is totally unhandy. Therefor we use years, month, days, hours etc. and need to add extra days and seconds occasionally. Time zones fall in the same category. They help to adjust time to the locality of people. Even though the world appears global now, people are not. They live in their context and need time for their contexts.
BTW: Some tried to "fix" time and introduce a metric form for hours, minutes and seconds. He failed.
What's wrong with saying 4 deciliters?
Because people, as a whole, gravitate to simplicity. They want "a cup", "A pint" or some other simple group label when they do something repeatedly (like order a beer).. and if the simple thing doesn't exist, one will, inevitably evolve. and thus, the reference to "Folk" volumes appearing alongside the rigid measurements.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
No sooner has he left before we get this!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Then blame Canada.
"Canadian Sir Sandford Fleming proposed a worldwide system of time zones in 1879. He advocated his system at several international conferences, thus is widely credited with their invention. In 1876, his first proposal was for a global 24-hour clock, conceptually located at the center of the Earth and not linked to any surface meridian."
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Forty or so years ago there was this grand plan to change the USA over to the metric system. They put up new highway signs and everything. But, it turns out that the general public was too dull to see what a great idea this was, so they protested. The government backed down. End of metric for USA. The problem was the metric system was different, and people don't like that, even when it makes total sense to change. I don't think people have changed much since then. Time zones are here to stay. You can change your watch to UTM if you want, but you will soon learn to say "I don't know" if anyone asks the time, because 90% of the time the person won't even know what UTM is.
As somebody who has daily communications with the other side of the globe I can not imagine any need for this. The only moment when the time difference is a bitch is when suffering from jet lag, but that is based on our biological clock.
Ha. We humans should go to a non-intuitive time reckoning simply to make it easier for computers to work? You obviously never worked for Apple.
Keep Doing Good.
Last time I checked some guy named Edison invented a nifty thing that makes light in the night, even without fire. Great thing, really, you should try it some time.
In other words, it's the 21st century and your night life is still dependent on the sun?
As if nobody spends any time outdoors?
R.Mo
You miss the fact that it is easier to convert 1/2 ounce to 1 1/2 ounces than it is to convert 14 grams to 42 grams when you want to triple the recipe. Which is the point the poster you replied to was making. English Units are better for things like cooking because they were created for that sort of use. The area where they start to lose out is when you need to convert from one to another, say teaspoons to tablespoons to ounces to cups to quarts to gallons. However, if all you need to do is work within the scale of that particular unit (which is generally the case when cooking), they are more natural to use.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Hmm... someone should invent something like a portable version of that light thingamajig. Like, say, with a portable power source.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Been there, tried that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
Sold the watch at a car boot sale. Waste of time. Pun intended.
The reality is that people's body rhythms aren't tied to the clock, they're tied to the sun and the day/night cycle. We sleep when it's dark, we're active when it's daylight. And that cycle likes to run at a roughly 24-hour frequency. Eliminating timezones won't change the fact that when it's noon in New York it's 2 hours after midnight in Sydney, Australia. Eliminating time zones won't change the fact that when you get off that flight from New York your body's clock will be 10 hours out of sync with Sydney's local day/night cycle. And it won't magically make the people in Sydney want to have meetings in the dead of their nighttime just because the sun's high in the sky in New York.
Besides which, you don't need to eliminate timezones if all you want is a consistent clock. The military already uses Zulu time (roughly GMT) for most purposes. You can do the same.
I've seen many mistakes and even one alarm go off due only to DST.
The biggest problem with it, IMO, is that not every point in time is represented by a unique DST measurement. Typically, there's two "2 AM"s or similar on the day when the extra hour is squeezed back in.
This could be fixed by using a 25 hour day, although I'm sure that would annoy some other code.
You agree with me.
"No confusion ever again"? Haha, right. There is no possibility of confusion when while traveling instead of changing your clock you have to shift the time of everything in your day.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
tripling 14g (instead of ½) will make your math skills less rusty so you won't make as many mistakes in your tax form...
Because most people DO STUFF. Getting up arbitrarily an hour earlier, will just mean you're sitting around doing nothing for an hour, until stores open, you start work, etc.
If you're so concerned about your sleep, why don't you START getting up a few minutes earlier each day, leading up to DST? Are you so dense and helpless that you can't plan a week or two ahead?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Last time I checked some guy named Edison invented a nifty thing that makes light in the night, even without fire. Great thing, really, you should try it some time.
In other words, it's the 21st century and your night life is still dependent on the sun?
Your comment implies that you don't see the point in ever leaving the house. Some people like to go outside in the summer. You know, hiking, cycling, canoeing, whatever. In summer, thanks to DST, I have another 5 or 6 hours of daylight for that after I get home. It's great while it lasts, without this, I wouldn't be able to cope with those 4 or 5 months of the year when the only daylight I see at all during the week is what comes through my office window.
Just get up an hour earlier you say? I could if I was single and without responsibilities like you. For the rest of us, getting up earlier will only work if everyone else does the same. Schools and daycare open and close at a certain time, stores open and close at a certain time
Now your talking pure science-fiction!
For some reason, most people sleep at night and are active (work etc) during the day. So, for you to say "meet me at 13:45", you still would have to know whether it will be day where I live. So, as you see, you do need to know the position of the sun, even if only to know whether other people are active or not.
Now you have to look up what your 13:45 is in my time zone. Under the new system you would have to look up whether it will be business hours at 13:45 in my timezone (maybe it's midnight here).
You think DST is bad? Read about leap seconds! They are added twice a year and are announced only with few months of warning.
And we should all speak Esperanto.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
Hey /. editors, how can you let this shit through? With all the interesting stuff going on in the world, drivel like this counts for news?
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
>> What's wrong with saying 4 deciliters?
Because, some of us learn to drink before we learn to count or even talk. We want to express our concern for that beer as efficiently as possible.
You need to know the approximate position of the sun for all of these meeting participants when you're scheduling the meeting, unless you're a complete self-centered asshole, of course.
But the rest of us, who care about other people, would still need to know what time the work day starts and ends in other places. It's easier to do time zones, and assume that it starts at roughly 9 and ends at roughly 5.
Time zones aren't that hard, and most people don't ever deal with them. I would bet my mom never thinks about time zone except when she calls her aunt, who lives in Pennsylvania, to decide if it's too early or too late to call from Illinois. A lot of people don't even have that need for them - basically everyone they know is within 50 miles of their home.
Personally, it would take me quite a long time to learn that I have to be at work at 13:00 and can leave at 22:00.
There's no reason to bother most of the world's population just to make international business slightly easier for assholes.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
Now. Under GMT knowing where the sun is isn't necessary.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Not 9 in the evening or whatever.. Taco.. Please unresign!
The reason time is listed as it is is due to the use of sundials. It's based on the angles of the shadows cast by the sun, which varies based on where you are on the earth and the use of a bizarre 1-12 system to measure it twice over. Not to mention humans having 10 fingers to measure with intuitively and a poor approximation of a 360 degrees being the percentage of a circle for the Sun orbiting the Earth (purposefully mis-stated).
Perhaps one could go to metric times or stardates, but even now you could use modern SI conventions far better .In practical use these days, who cares if you use UTC and have to be at work at 0200 hours instead of 8:00AM? The usability of being able to sort dates on an orderly basis under the YYYY-MM-DD convention (e.g. 2011-08-27 instead of 8/27/11) is also another important issue.
Of course, considering that the US still to this day considers adoption of the metric system to be far-out is a huge barrier. Even though no scientist or engineer would measure the precision of their work by the lengths of half their thumbs, size of their feet, the length of their step, or how much an ox can plow in a day. Even though the burden of such conversions caused Mars landers to crash.
I live in North Germany, 54 20 North, 10 8 East which is more to the north than Winnipeg and a little south of Calgary. So we have long days in summer and short days in winter. And DST has never helped by anything. It just costs a lot and people need weeks to adjust. If you have kids, you will observe that one day before the switch, they are awake before the "time" in the morning and the next day they are almost an hour late.
In short DST sucks. Why should anyone have jet lag every 6 month? It is just ridiculous.
Quite simply, circadian rhythms are a biological reality. I know the business world has this imperative of being always available at any hour, but until cybergenetics catches up to fictional imagination, many of us will remain bound to solar light-- vitamin D and serotonin produced by the body when it shines on the skin, and secretions of melatonin in its absence, the two regulating our waking and sleeping states, respectively. Humankind has attempted to ignore this imperative and science has shown we do so at our peril, at the risk of our health. The tragedy of Chernobyl is but one example.
Why not ditch the 24 hour day as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
Why? Because it doesn't work.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
Two teaspoons = one dessert spoon. One and a half dessert spoons = one tablespoon. Four gills in a pint. Two pints in a quart. Four quarts (hence the name) in a gallon. I don't see how that is difficult ;-)
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
The position of the sun is still important to nearly everyone. Or do you not operate on a 24 hour schedule? Believe me, normal people care if a meeting is scheduled 4 hours before sunrise.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
"Does anybody really care?" - Robert Lamm of the group Chicago.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
You need to know the approximate position of the sun for all of these meeting participants when you're scheduling the meeting...
Why?
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Because people, as a whole, gravitate to simplicity. They want "a cup", "A pint" or some other simple group label when they do something repeatedly (like order a beer).. and if the simple thing doesn't exist, one will, inevitably evolve. and thus, the reference to "Folk" volumes appearing alongside the rigid measurements.
Thanks for playing, but...
Having lived in both countries, I'd like to inform you that 45 cl beers are the norm in Swedish pubs, and asking for 500 g of mince is the norm in Australia. No references to "folk volumes" in either case.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Depends. Try going out on a lake in the evening. or maybe play a round of golf in the evening,
The problem is that businesses are open for such and such hours, rarely are they opened at 5 am for such things. however they will stay open later.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
The problem you describe doesn't exist, unless you are thinking non metric.
Recipes and measurement cups are both in easy units.
5ml (teaspoon),15 ml (tablespoon), 300g, 325ml, 700ml
For example:
http://www.ah.nl/recepten/voor-elke-dag?lp_sortProperty=shoppingListPopular
and pick any recipe and look under Ingredienten. All units are combinations of fractions of 10 and 4. For most ingredients it doesn't matter is you are off by 5 or 10 ml/gram.
The same for buying lengths of stuff, you either buy something in 1/2, 1, 3, 5 or 10m and cut it down to required length if it not possible to order custom lengths/sizes.
The "folk units" have been converted to metric a long time ago. A dutch ounce is 100gram (pre metric: 1/16 pound), a pound is 500gram (pre metric: 430-460gram). A pint (beer) is 250ml where a standard glass is 150ml. This conversion happend atleast twice (unfied futch measurements in 1820, and in 1875 the switch to S.I.).
How did you get from tablespoons to gills? The difficulty comes in when you have to convert teaspoons to gallons. This of course points out why most people don't see a reason to convert. How often does to the average person need to convert teaspoons to gallons? It, also, explains why "progressives" want to convert, the metric system makes it easier for government functionaries to figure out how much material different companies of different sizes are using, thus (theoretically) making it easier for them to allocate resources.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
People don't realize how annoying it is to have the sun go down at 10 in the night.
Yet, where I live, we manage to live with it every June and July...!
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Take a recipe that uses 2 teaspoons, and serves 4 and scale it up to feed 32 (1/3 cup*). Then simplify the units to make it easy to actually make, and let me know the outcome... This is even worse for things like 1-1/2 teaspoons oil scaled up 8x (1/4 cup*).
I would much rather use metric there. It's simple to do unit conversions. 300mL * 8 = 2400mL or "2L + 400mL". Now this is much easier to use in your head while in a kitchen with something on the stove already.
As for your apparent hatred of "mililiters", you could try using the widely recognized short form, "mils". so "could i have a 400mil beer please?" or "I'd like 2.3Kilos of butter", or "53 liters of petrol". "how large is your large beer? ... 450Mils sir".
*unit conversions per wolfram alpha, which did make this much easier but isn't seemly around when I am in the kitchen with hot things on the stove, and have fish juice all over my hands.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
Because if it's 4am everywhere I *still* won't know if the phone call I'm about to make in Los Angeles, USA to my brother in Brisbane, Australia is going to wake him up three hours before local sunrise. Not without checking some handy table, perhaps divided into convenient longitudinal 'zones' based on local sunrise/sunset times for each 'zone'. What's that you say? We already have such a system and the current proposal does nothing to improve on it?
Ah, there's a very good reason for keeping timezones. I'm amazed I even thought of it! :)
You see, If I live in India, which happens to be GMT+5.5 If I wanted to call someone up in the UK, I'd suddenly have a problem on my hands. On the one hand, I have no interest in calculating backward from the position of the sun in my sky. On the other, I'd be hard pressed to do the same based on the star patterns in my night sky if I wanted to call during my night. I might end up calling up while he's asleep, or while he's warming up his wife.
It all becomes much easier for me if I were to deduct 5.5 hours from my clock and figure out the current status of my clients sleep cycle based on my calculations and overlaying the result over my own sleep cycle.
Of course, having a standardized clock for the whole planet would have its conveniences, but the inconveniences far outweigh those. Once we've encapsulated the entire planet under a nice thick blanket of steel and start living in artificial days and nights to match our clocks, the tables will turn. But until then, we're going to be eating out of the hands of God, or something very much like him/her.
Geekism is your _only_ God!
Putting Everyone on UTC is not really possible. An example. Insurance policies expire at 12:00 noon, for very good reasons. If everyone is is on UTC, That won't work anymore. Furthermore, in the mid-pacific time may not be very different between east and west, but places will have to change dates in the middle of the day. That is really inconvenient and confusing. In Hawaii, you would go to work on Monday, and go home on Tuesday.
My suggestion is to reduce the number of time zones to about 8 across the world. The entire continental US would be on UTC-6 (i.e. Central Standard). No part of the contiguous states would be more than 2 hours out of sync with the sun. You would get some 4 a.m. sun rises in Maine and some 11:00 p.m. sunsets in Washington state, but it would be tolerable. South America would need a zone for the eastern part of the continent, -3 would work well. On the other side of the Andes, they already use -6.
Around the World, Europe and Africa would be on +1,
South Asia on +5, East Asia on +9
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Because that's not how it works. Getting up an hour earlier doesn't let you start an activity that may then take longer then expected (such as doing some house renovations) because accidentally working in the dark is a little different then you boss shouting at you that you're at work an hour late.
I don't have DST where I live, but I still live by it. I am lucky because I have flexible work hours. I get to work an hour early or late no one cares. But there are plenty of other people in the office who don't, and regardless of when they wake up they still end up driving home in the dark.
and both of those are officially defined as parts of the kelvin scale, afaik. You could also claim that Rankin would be better than Fahrenheit as well. I'm betting some can sense smaller changes than "normal" so lets use something sensible please. At least Celsius make sense, and I can reasonable check a Celsius thermometer in my home. Freeze some water, and measure the temp, should be near 0C. now boil some filtered tap water, should be near 100C.
Yes yes, I know that it will be very hard to tap water that boils at 100C, and freezes at 0C but i'd bet it close enough for you oven, and measuring the temp outside.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
the time will always be correct in London.
One thing I really enjoy about Wikipedia is all timestamps being local time.
Except in summer. But then, BST can just fuck off too.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
lets, please, make time base 10. (Or even better, base 2 Pi).
In Czech republic, you'll mostly hear people putting orders like this (translated from Czech):
All I can say is that if they DO get rid of time zones (I'm personally for it), and leave that am/pm crap in there, heads will ROLL!
"And if each establishment could open and close as it pleases, "
You mean they can't?
The reason we subjugate ourselves to law is to better procure justice. If law does not accomplish this purpose then it m
Celsius just takes two arbitrary points for water and divides by 100.
Fahrenheit did pretty much the same thing. But you can measure everything in Kelvins if you want to.
Because, when someone in a certain timezone goes to another, they will have a lot of mishaps and long adaptation issues due to the numbers on their mind being different. while some new yorker will know the lunch time as 19.00 and conditioned to get up and even set his/her alarm clock for 11.00, japanese will e having lunch at 12.00 and getting up at 04.00.
unfortunately it cant be done, in a global society.
Read radical news here
This is a great proposal. I would no longer make mistakes about a meeting in another time zone changing to local time for an in-person versus a phone meeting. However, it can be improved. Decimal time would make calculating percentages of time spent on various activities much easier. Combine the two for Flawless Victory.
I wrote parts of this stuff
It always gets to me that people want something to be more convenient for computers, when computers are so much better at recalculating everything. Now, I'm all for the abolition of the 12 hour clock and of the DST, since I think they are an inconvenience for both computers *and* humans. But only UTC? Hell no, that only makes it easier for some people and computers. It does not make sense for most of us.
And although it is easier to make mistakes in a program when calculating UTC into local time, I think that still beats people having to guess what the time of day actually means. I mean, imagine listening to the radio and the presenter said: "you know, we had lunch at 9!!! Imagine having lunch that late!!!". Then he could add "in Wisconsin" or something so people could go and start calculating (probably coming to the conclusion that what I just used as a random example does not make sense).
For the same reason I absolutely abhor the one K = 1024 people. I don't think it makes our calculations easier, and I honestly thing that the computer does not care a bit (nor 128 bits) if it is 1000 or 1024. It was a close enough number that fortunately was 2^10 (why 10, why not 8?) but it's time to let the computer do the calculations, not us.
In case you think I'm biased: UTC is really easy for me, since I'm into cryptography and thus into certificate and CRL validity periods. Cryptography is normally also calculated in 128 bit, 256 bit and 1024 bit calculations nowadays. I do of course use KiB and UTC date representations all the time.
So that you can schedule it during their work day. Since you often don't know people's exact work day (even in the same office) you just assume that 9 to 4 is fine with almost everyone.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
This is right up there with TimeCube, except TimeCube had a lot more thought put in to it.
Paraphrasing, "An impertinent question often leads to a pertinent answer."
Corollary: "Sometimes an impertinent question is so mind-bendingly fucking stupid that to waste time discussing the many ways in which it is stupid is an affront to all human endeavour."
Next time on "Ask Slashdot": "Why doesn't everyone just belong to the same religion? We could consolidate all the churches, temples, synagogues and mosques and use the space to build affordable housing!"
Use UTC for everything.
Got a meeting with colleagues on the other side of the world? 4 a.m. means 4 a.m. for everyone.
YES but 4 a.m. in NYC means lunchtime. I say we move a step further and agree that all the world must have lunchtime at 13:00. UTC.
Consistent time of day is vastly more important than the 'complexity' of converting time based on time zones. If you're not converting one then you're converting the other. To everyone in the world, lunch is at noon. If you change that then you're changing more than we do already.
More importantly! Why do we use a time system with such a bizarre base numbering system!?
1 year
12 months per year
28 - 31 days per month
52 weeks per year
4 - 4.5 weeks per month
7 days per week
24 hours per day
60 minutes per hour
60 seconds per minute
Metric time fixes all that by converting everything to base ten, with the exception of days per year, which is defined by the pace of our favorite rock hurling through space - something we really don't have control over.
365 days per year
drop months
drop weeks
10 hours per day
100 minutes per hour
100 seconds per minute
What is currently
2011/08/27-18:23:35
becomes
2011/239-7:66:37
The cool thing is, seconds are very nearly the same length of time given the small difference between 86,400 seconds in a day versus 100,000 seconds in a day.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Fahrenheit is "more accurate" in the sense that less temperature change corresponds with the translation of more integral units.
Which I guess is important if you hate decimal points?
".... 400 milliliters ... The metric system's rigidity prevents designing units for convenience."
Right. That's why you can't simply say .4 liters, or just round up to a convenient "half-liter". Or, heaven forbid, simply say, "I'd like your regular cup, please...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
erm, i'm pretty sure you can say 1.5 miles or 1/4 kilometres with exactly the same degree of difficulty
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
So here on the eastern seaboard of Australia, lunchtime will now be at 2 a.m.,
That's why we need timezones. If I want to know what time is appropriate to call someone in London, I do the math, see that it's 6am there, and surmise that they're probably not up yet. If you want to know what hours someone is working in another place, that would always be tantamount to a time zone calculation.
Having spent considerable time developing calendar software I can tell you that time zone handling is the ugliest part of the picture. It certainly would be best if everything, everywhere, was on UTC.
For a while, we simply converted everything to UTC on the way in to the system, and all was good. We simply converted back to local time when interacting with the user. But then we had to add support for recurring events. This was a bitch and a half because of DST being observed in some parts of the world, and not being observed in other parts of the world. If you converted a recurring event to UTC, the recurrences would be an hour off the next time you entered or exited DST. Really a pain in the neck, and it required storing all recurring events in local time.
Sadly, most people don't write and maintain calendar software, and are quite attached to their local time. So much so, in fact, that they can't even comprehend doing it any other way.
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I'm all for the 24-hour clock, although I doubt we'll be saying "X at sixteen hundred hours" like the military any time soon.
What bothers me, though, is event calendaring.
If a movie theater runs a sneak preview of a movie at 00.30 on Friday, what does that mean? Are they saying it's in the night of Thursday on Friday at half past midnight? Or is it the night of Friday on Saturday at half past midnight?
am and pm don't help there. 12.30am listed for the Friday is still just as confusing, as would be 0.30am.
It all falls apart even further with naive calendaring systems that do accept 0.30 as being the next day, and so list the event for Saturday. So if you're looking at Friday's late night shows, there will appear to be none past midnight. But if you clicked through to Saturday, you'd see them listed there as the very first show of the day.. followed by closing hours, and then firing up again at 10am or something.
Thus the 25th hour; make the notation 24:30 and the problem is solved. There's 24 hours in the Friday, and it's 30 minutes past that Friday's 24 hours. I.e. it'll technically be on Saturday - but they can still list it for Friday's opening hours. Automated systems will no longer have to worry about ambiguity either.
Then again.. that would pose a problem for the PCB I'm designing at the moment.. it doesn't have space for a 25th hour. Damn. Back to the drawing board :|
Officially, you aren't even supposed to say 1/3 meter," but rather "333 milliliters."
Well, yes, if you say "1/3 of a meter" where you meant "333 milliliters", I'm sure there would be some confusion.
Nothing wrong about "1/3 of a litre", though. I don't know who that "Officially" guy is, and I don't think anyone in my home (metric) country does, either.
if you to buy a single drink, it's easier to say "a pint" or even "a 12-ounce cup" rather than "400 milliliters."
If I want to buy a single drink, I say "a drink, please".
If I want to be more specific than that, I say "half a liter" (400ml? that's for wussies).
These practical issues lead to the use of "folk units" alongside official metric units, which can lead to conflict when laws too rigid."
Can you give some examples of said 1) folk units, and 2) laws regulating them? I'm not aware of any "folk units" from 20 years of using metric, unless you count "half a kilo" or "quarter of a litre" - which would be profoundly stupid. Even less so the laws - sure, the packaging should use plain numbers like 250g or 1.5L - but verbally people use whatever is most convenient.
Fahrenheit is more accurate than Celsius and one degree Fahrenheit is the amount of temperature change humans can sense.
Says who? I definitely can't sense a change in the amount of 1 F. Heck, even 1 C is so subtle that it takes a while to register (e.g. when setting up air conditioner).
As for accuracy, the only case I'm aware of where you need to divide one degree centigrade into fractions is when measuring body temperature. On the other hand, I'm not sure what you guys do with Fahrenheit there, since 1 F sounds like it would be too rough of a measurement for that as well (but then I'm no medic).
Celsius just takes two arbitrary points for water and divides by 100.
Water freezing point has a profound effect on weather, so having it on an easily located point of the scale is very convenient specifically when talking about weather (which is probably half of all contexts in which temperature is used in day to day life). Boiling point is somewhat more arbitrary even for cooking, but at least it's consistent. Compared to points that Fahrenheit took for his scale, those two are the pinnacle of rational thought - I mean, freezing point of brine? what the hell is that useful for?
At this point we might as well make it year-round, as the DST has been extended to the point where there are only a few months in the winter when we are actually on standard time. I'd prefer to make standard time year round and have everybody just move their schedules up by an hour which would be effectively the same thing, but I realize that it would be a lot easier to sell the former to the public than the latter.
No, its not arbitrary. High noon is still high noon. Calling it something else is just appeasing the idiots who dont actually go outside.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
A serious proposition to do this would also move to 24 hour time. It is used in a majority of places. And our military here in the US. I already set my devices to GMT/UTC when possible. Oh, and to the metric promoters and detractors of the standard system of measurement, (US or British Imperial) for almost all sizes and quantities that we routinely measure in day to day life, there is a one syllable unit of measure that keeps the total number of units easy to conceptualize. But if you must change something, change the jewelry industry over to metric.
The biggest benefit to me would be that when I travel, if everyone used UTC, my calendars would not get messed up moving from one to the other. Sometimes birthdays move a day in one direction and not in others, so after several trips the "all day events" moved to a new week. Now it just makes multiple copies sometimes. A great way to ease into this would be have all OS'es offer the ability to set the clock to UTC, and only change the display.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
This sounds like a solution looking for a problem.
Everyone should work during the same 9 to 5 times, so that everyone would work at the same time and sleep at the same time. It might be a bit dark for some, but it would synchronize everyone's day (or night (or whatever))
That was the joke. Please calibrate your sarcasmometer.
I come back from lunch when people in London are either in bed or out partying, either way, they're not in the office. The approximate position of the sun and therefore whether or not people will be in the office is a fairly important consideration when scheduling a meeting, no?
Spoken like a true basement-dweller!
But it was because their destinations were far enough away to routinely cross what are now time zones (such that the departing and arriving local-noons were appreciably different), not that they outran the sun. The day/night terminator sweeps across earth's surface at 1000mph.
"outran the Sun" was perhaps a bit of poetic license -- but only a bit. Before rapid transportation, differences in local times didn't matter because by the time you traveled far enough for the difference to matter, enough time had passed that the difference didn't matter anyway. By the time you got to the next time zone, hours or even days had passed. At that scale, nobody cares about differences in local noon. Rail roads changed that; suddenly you could get there before the issue because moot. Would "outran time" be more accurate? :)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
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The Russian rail system (spanning about UTC+2 through UTC+11) ditched time zones in favour of using Moscow time on all its time tables.
Ah, but they're still using time zones. The fact that they've decided to use just one time zone still counts. The first "time zone" was British railway time, and there was only one. That's still a critical difference vs every city and town have its own local noon.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
In practical terms, it wouldn't help that, either, because you'd still have to qualify it with, "Do you mean 1 PM UTC, or 1 PM your time (because most people align their schedule to the sun and so haven't adopted UTC)".
And before anyone drags out the metric system as an example of global standardization that worked, the metric unit of time is the second. We should all be using kiloseconds; this "hour" thing has no basis in la Systeme International d'unites.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
. . . if they could no longer use the old "Well, it's 5:00 somewhere!" excuse!
1) Your using GMT anyway, so your all set. 2) When was the last time you called a meeting for "the hour at which the sun is 60 degrees on the horizon."? The position of the sun is immaterial. You call meetings using a position on a clock face, not where exactly where the sun is. Do you call off a meeting because its raining? Perhaps, maybe if its off site, but not because you don't know where the sun is and your scared.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Good point, whether or not you intended it.
What I meant, is that if it were as easy as the person implies, then obviously there would still be problems. So, yes, a store could open an hour early and close an hour early, but a lot of people would have a tough time coordinating their schedules. That's why the having the government enforce Day Light Savings Time, or not, is a good thing.
My point is that getting up an hour earlier in summer isn't going to bring about the same outcome of Day Light Savings.
testing out my trending skills
It starts with 1am, 2am, 3am... 10am, 11am... what would you expect next? Well, considering it's a base 12 system, you'd expect 12am, followed by 1pm. Nooooo, what you get is 12pm, 1pm, 2pm... WTF? Did we do a #define 12 0 and found a compiler that allowed that?
AM = ante meridiem = before midday
PM = post meridiem = after midday
The Romans numbered the hours from noon in each direction. What we call "10:00 AM" today was "2 a.m." for them -- two hours before midday.
At some point, people decided it was easier to always count forward. I'd guess the invention of mechanical clocks might have had something to do with that. But they kept the a.m./p.m. convention for writing down times. It refers to which half of the day you're in; it's *not* another decimal place in the time itself. The confusion around turnover prolly wasn't such a big deal back then: Digital clocks hadn't been invented yet, and precise timekeeping was rare. It usually wasn't needed when the fasting thing around was a horse.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
If you want to know how it would turn out, look to Saskatchewan. We manage just fine.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Actually, you do. Take an old-style clock -- one that has hands, not a digital clock. Point the hour hand at the sun. If you're north of the equator, halfway between the hour hand and 12 is due south (if you're south of the equator, it's due north). So by specifying the time of a meeting, you're also specifying where the sun will be.
In the parent post: s/fasting/fastest/
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
1 pint = half a liter
Sure, it's wrong. A two-by-four ain't really 2 inches by 4 inches, either. Chances are your 12 ounce cup isn't really 12 ounces, too.
You might point out that a two-by-four *used* to measure 2x4, but the principle still applies: What we call something doesn't have to be its measurement, even if what we call it sounds like a measurement.
Base 10 isn't as convenient as some other bases would be, but we've been using base 10 for so long it's never going to change. You're complaining about how people measure liquids. Try getting people to change how they *count*.
Base 12, in particular, would have worked a lot better. You can divide it cleanly in five ways (halves, thirds, quarters, sixths, twelfths). Base ten only divides cleanly three ways (halves, fifths, tenths). You can even count in base 12 on your fingers; just bring your thumb in again at the end. But it was not to be. Sigh.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
snarkiness about the Feds and the rickroll aside, for once the Feds may be clearly Constitutional here ... fix the standard of weights and measures" (including standards for measuring time?)
"The Congress shall have power to
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
No room to reproduce my paper on the subject, but here's the executive summary:
Real time is the actual time where you are right now. If the sun is directly overhead it is noon. A mile west it is still morning, and to the east it is afternoon.
There is no reason that we cannot use real time with the technology we have today.
If you drive 30 miles east or west to work, you will have to make some adjustments to get there on time by their clock. Can you handle that?
Your biological clock can work as intended by nature and you will live longer, healthier and happier.
...omphaloskepsis often...
I've been making this same argument for the last few months. I suppose it's good to know I'm not alone in this.
derp derp derp
I am sort of acting as the database manager for the Global Ozone Project, an organization that sends ozone monitors to schools around the world and has them upload their data to our database. We are currently in the process of working with AIRNow, the EPA's air quality organization, to see if our data can be included in their database. So far, we have spent about a month trying to get things set up and working. The vast majority of our problems have been related to timestamps on each ozone measurement. Because there was no way to guarantee that people had set the time on the ozone monitors right at all, we had to use the time that each point was uploaded to the server. This would be almost fine except for the fact that it was a Windows server and no one had bothered to change the default timezone, so it was using the local time and daylight savings was turned on. We ended up converting all of the times to GMT, but it still meant that when daylight savings goes away there is one hour where we have twice as much data as we should and the next hour has no data. In other words, I am fed up with dealing with timezones and daylight savings. Yes, it would be very hard for things to get adjusted, especially when it comes to things like the firmware in our ozone monitors, but I believe it would be worth it. And people? People can get used to things. I would find it better anyways.
It wouldn't solve anything. In fact, it would probably make it harder to grasp when you shouldn't be calling. This is one place where having to convert to a standard that makes more tangible hours of the day like local breakfast, lunch, tea, dinner and hour of sleep, requires you to localize to someone else's schedule. With no more than double digit integer math, no less. That's a bargain. I agree that the numbers themselves can be seen to be arbitrary (why not 48 half hours?), because they are abstract concepts, but the reason we have chosen them to signify time in specific "zones" is anything but arbitrary. That's necessary.
Now when our computer overlords finally take over, of which I heartily approve, then it will make sense for them to sync time to an agreed upon longitude at noon, as they have no such biological needs. My silicon master tells me that the prime meridian will be somewhere over New Zealand, though, for their own inscrutable reasons. It will not be "arbitrarily" chosen to be centered over a long defunct empire.
I've had an atomic watch for years as well as a home clock. Doesn't matter where you are, you always have the correct time, to within a 1/2 second.
It is well known in time synchronization circles that by default Windows stores the time in the BIOS/RTC in the local time zone but there is a registry hack for Vista and above to make Windows use UTC in BIOS/RTC. However Windows uses UTC internally.
sounds like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door_in_the_face_technique
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
http://www.swatch.com/zz_en/internettime/itime_converter.html
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
I'm genuinely shocked at the number of stupid people in this discussion who a) can't understand timezones, b)think this would be a good idea, c) can't understand 24hr time and d) can't easily flip between GMT/UTC and their local timezone in their head. Did I miss the memo about "Get a complete fucking idiot to post using your uid day"?
However, how does having a passport correlate to using it often? Also, how many Americans without passports travel a lot domestically (which is easier to do to a large extent in a bigger country)
might still be an issue, but from some other factor
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
All of the problems could be solved by simply switching to a metric time.
Remember this time people, 80 past 2 on April 47th, it's the dawn of a new enlightenment.
Because our working times are dictated by social norms?
Move out of the basement and see the real world...
See previous stories posted to Slashdot about doing away with leap seconds: 2010-08-24 and 2011-06-28.
What's your idea of a "pure" food? Food comes from animals, dirt, or fungus.
If you don't like the idea of drinking secretions from a cow's mammary glands, just come out and say it.
For some people (not all), the idea of drinking milk from a TB-free herd as it came from the cow is appealing. It's cooled to halt bacteria growth.
>potentially deadly
You've got to be kidding. I'd love to hear if you support armed raids on sushi bars. Sushi being raw fish, of course. Oh, and fugu, too.
As long as the product is properly marked, and people do know exactly what they're getting, what's the need for busybodies to bother themselves?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Great idea. And get back to driving on the left, to avoid all those 'foreign' confusions too.
Our whole human existence is built around time, specifically morning, noon, afternoon and evening and midnight. How would you fix the title of the movie 'High Noon'? All the languages I have studied have names for these times and more. No, just because an idea is good and practical does not mean that everyone will like it. Still, if the idea of universal application of UTC has merit, then natural social pressures will bring about the change. To facilitate this conditions for change, we should quote times in the local window and include UTC reference in all communications using local time in the media. Until you get people educated and using UTC, you will never bring about the change unless we lapse into a world dictatorship and the dictator likes UTC.
Pretty much every scientific and engineering application already uses metric. Having both standards in practice have led to stupid, wasteful, and avoidable accidents, plus it's just silly. Metric is obviously superior; it's not a matter of opinion. We would have to deal with less bullshit coding for multiple units for everything, (though I practically think in pixels and ems anyway) plus (once they got used to it) people would be able to benefit from the simpler conversions.
However, OC is wrong about the motivation. It's not that Americans are too lazy to make the switch. The real reason we don't change is because we are America and it's a way to be oppositional relative to the global community. We're the teenagers of global culture.
"We live as though the world were as it should be, to show it what it can be." - Joss Whedon via Angel
I thought the answer was obvious: It's not being implemented because no one has figured out a way to stop time or be able to determine when the event will naturally occur. Then I read the summary.
Yesterday's Weirdness is Tomorrow's Reason Why
I frequently host conference calls with people from other parts of the world. Every time I schedule them it takes something like two minutes for me to check the local time for everyone. It's a minor inconvenience, sure, but nothing I can't manage, it's just a matter looking it up. Same thing goes for traveling across time zones - I mean, you have to buy tickets, wait in line to check in the baggage, wait in line for the security check, wait for the gate to open, sit on a plane for several hours, and then to everything again in reverse order on your destination. Adjusting your clock, on the other hand, only takes a few seconds to do. Time zones are good. They were invented for a reason, and those reasons still stand. In fact, in China where the whole country runs on the same time for political reasons, the Western parts of the country has adopted an unofficial local time that better matches the sun's movement.
i say we switch to six 28-hour days.
...
If we ever try to pull off a bug stupid change, I say lets go to metric time. This base 60 and base 12/24 stuff is a lot of bother. http://zapatopi.net/metrictime/
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety"-B.Franklin
This is probably the dumbest thing I've ever witnessed on the slashdot feed. Where's quality control?
Of course it is, unless you expect people to start work at, say, 10am irrespective of whether it will be light or dark during their work. This won't work. People synchronize themselves to the sun, even if their job does not require them being outside.
So, you would still need to know if the person you are going to call is asleep or not.
It's far too late for the end of time zones. If that were to happen, it would ruin meetings and other incredibly important things all over the world lol
This would only work if there was no day/night cycle, or if the day/night cycle was completely meaningless to the entities keeping time. We're on a rotating planet near an active star, so we're stuck with a day/night cycle for now. Plus, we're still biological organisms that must sleep, which, for us, is best done at night (thanks to the way we evolved). Perhaps the elimination of time zones would work and make sense if we became digital entities (i.e., downloaded our minds into non-organic substrates), and/or if we inhabited a chunk of matter (planet or construct) that was tidally locked to a star, completely surrounded by nearby stars, or in deep space.
YOUR NOT GETTING IT!. After people get accustomed to what time it is when the sun comes up, IT WON"T MATTER! When, in your local area, the sun comes up at 23:30, you'll know!!! You don't need a 12 hour clock connected to a local time zone! If you would just think about it, it will make sense. WHY do you need to know that the sun is at zenith at 12:00 pm??? You can just as easily come to learn that the sun rises at 23:30... this is not hard people.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Sure, I'll know when the sun is over my head and what the clock says then. Now, the question is will you know whether it is day or night _for me_ when you want to call me. You will know what my clock says, but how do you know that 02:00 is the middle of the night for me and you should not call me.
When you want to call me now you go something like this: "my local time is 16:00, my time zone is GMT+9, his time zone is GMT+2, so his clock shows 09:00, he should be in the office, so it's OK to call". With the new system you would go something like this: "the time for both of us is 07:00, his work starts at 06:00, so he should be in the office, so it's OK to call".
get rid of time zones but keep the 100% useless DST? what complete moron thought this one up?
honestly, Daylight Savings time does NOTHING. we are not an agricultural country anymore so catering to a handfull of farmers is dumb.
Get rid of DST first THEN we can look at the retarded idea of getting rid of time zones.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'm not entirely sure (or convinced) I do that now. Most of these interactions occur with people in the same time zone. Its rare that I need to set a time or a date with some one in a different time zone, and on the occasions I do, they seem smart enough to know that a particular time won't work for them anyway and tell me so. Again, I don't recall the position of the sun being germain to the conversation.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
will be more likely to take off in the U.S. if we first have to convert it to metric.
If you only communicate with those in your time zone, then wouldn't the current system be better? I mean why go trough all that change and the result would be the same. So what if the clock shows the same time everywhere in the world (or not) if the clocks of your time zone are the only ones that matter to you?
"So why aren't we doing it?"
Because it's the worst idea I've heard suggested outside of a political campaign, at least since Michael Dell suggested shutting down Apple and giving the money back to the shareholders.
There is almost no benefit whatsoever to people who don't travel or participate in pointless teleconferences a lot. Why on earth would I care whether my clock is the same as someone's in Gdansk or Perth? Most of my communication with people these days is asynchronous, and almost none of it is based on it being scheduling by the clock, except for face-to-face meetings all in the same time zone.
Furthermore, without time zones, the date would have to change everywhere simultaneously. Fine if you live in Europe; it'll happen while you sleep. Too damn bad if you live in Hawaii; it's going to happen around noon-ish (or will they not be allowed to call it that anymore)?
A: "I'll see you on Tuesday."
B: "Do you mean Tuesday afternoon tomorrow, or Tuesday morning the day after that?"
Y: "What's the date today?"
Z: "Let me think... um, what time is it?
This would totally muck up most of our day-to-day usage of time and date as a reference point – undermining the whole concept of "today" – and solve a problem (it isn't "noon" everywhere at the same time) that's already been solved: with time zones.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
The handful of people defending this idiocy choose two tactics: "Well, this is a New Global Age" and "Hey, why are you all so close minded? Remember, they laughed at continental drift!" Let's look at those defenses.
The idea that this would help people who travel a lot, or people who do a lot of global business, is bollocks, because it removes all information content from time. Right now, "12:00 PM" conveys meaning -- it means, for most people, "around lunchtime". If it's 12:00 everywhere on Earth at once, that meaning is lost. This proposal MAKES THINGS WORSE. IT REDUCES INFORMATION CONTENT. Human biology will not change; we've evolved to a particular timescale and we're happier, healthier, and more productive when we stick to it -- though of course individuals vary. (And if it turns out that a slightly mutant internal clock leads to you producing more children, over time, the internal clocks of our whole species might change... but just because you make a fortune in currency trading because you're sharpest at 4 AM doesn't imply you'll have more kids, as wealth tends to negatively correlate with offspring in industrial nations, but I digress.)
So, the idea that "If it's 6:00 here, it's 6:00 everywhere!" is somehow useful or helpful for the New Global Era is absolute and utter drivel, because it forces you to remember what's happening at "6:00" in any part of the world. In London, do people eat lunch at 6:00, or leave work, or are they sound asleep? In Hong Kong, is 6:00 breakfast time, the start of the work day, or rush hour? It's very easy for a computer to add/subtract hours automatically, so you can schedule things to your time and other people see it at theirs; it's harder for a computer to deal with abstractions like "It's around lunchish", without having to be programmed with something that ties activity periods to GPS systems. We could have Clippy come up and say, "You're scheduling a meeting with the Hong Kong office for 3:00 PM, which is when they're going to be home with their families. Would you like to reschedule? Y/N"
Remember, folks: The reason we remember the wacky, far-out ideas that everyone laughed at but which turned out to be brilliant is because they're the extreme minority -- we report on planes that crash, not ones that land safely. Most of the wacky, far-out ideas that everyone laughed at.... deserved to be laughed at. Being "outside the box" is not the same as being RIGHT, and most of the time, the box is there because no one's found a USEFUL idea outside of it.
Over here, we say "0.4" for the drink of that size (many places sell beer in 0.4 L glasses) or the traditional 0.5L, the "half-liter" literally. Then there's the "0.6" for the thirstier people... none of this gets to be any more complicated than the "pint" or "cup". The latter is for coffee only, and comes in various sizes, so it isn't really quantified.
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
You're missing the fact that recipes aren't expressed in metric by taking recipes in Imperial, converting them as precisely as possible, and writing them down with more precision than the original Imperial values. It would be 15g, which isn't too hard to multiply by 3, leaving aside the fact that scarcely any recipes use non-integral numbers of ounces anyway. My cake book (metric with Imperial in brackets) uses 25g/ounce as a conversion factor, which given the errors inherent in using an analogue scale isn't going to have a noticeable effect on all but a vanishingly small number of recipes.
It's useful for the people as a whole if services are available at earlier hours during summer. So the federal government changes its clock, government offices change when they open, and most businesses go along with them for convenience. So right back at you; if you want to get up at the same "absolute time" in summer, why don't you? But don't bitch that the stores are shutting an hour earlier; that's what the majority prefers.
I am trolling
You should try to find a better class of golf course. Floodlight golfing has an air of decadence you simply can't beat.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Say what you want, one day, I will hold my very personal light making device in my hands, and it won't burn my fingers while lighting the area. In fact, I should probably go and invent it, I'll make billions! I'll call it ... umm... the personal light
Patents pending.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Totally agree. Get also rid of the "Daylight Saving Time". Noon would still be when sun at highest, but that would happen at different time depending of the location. Isn't that natural ?! Actually the sun is not at it's highest at 12.00 even in the current system, except when: 1) not using DST and 2) on correct latitude of the time zone. On the other side of your time zone the sun could be at highest just after 11.00 or before 13.00. And the stupid DST adds another hour mistake.
Ok, then it is easier to convert 1/2 oz to 4 oz when you multiply a recipe by 8 then it is to convert 15 g to 120 g.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Time zones are less work than ever. When I travel from San Francisco to New York City, my iPhone adjusts the Time Zone accordingly. Same with Daylight Savings Time. I don't have any clocks that are not both location-aware and network-connected and neither should you unless you are a masochist. Out of all the things computers can do for us, managing the clock is the most basic.
The thing that has to go is AM/PM. The defense of it is not everybody can count to 24, but that is fucking weak because at high noon, ask 100 people if it is 12 am or pm and half will be wrong, like flipping a coin. And if using a 24 hour clock, time zones are not that hard to deal with manually. That is, compare "15:00 GMT -8" which is 15-8 which is 7:00 GMT to "3:00 PM GMT -8" which is a much, much more complex equation to convert to GMT.
Brilliant.
A proud member of the Onion-in-Hand alliance
If Y2K was a hassle, think what this would be like. It would probably cost billions of dollars to change the software, reprint things, train people, etc. Not only would software require backend changes, but in many cases it would also require some substantial changes to the user interface.
If you didn't have Time Zones and everyone used UTC, you'd still be doing the same mental math you do today, just in the opposite direction.
If it's 4am everywhere, is that "awake time" or "sleep time" for the locations involved? If it's 4am here, what time is it there? Same effort.
Time Zones are convenient because you know the relative time (to daylight hours) easily. Otherwise, you'd need a chart that says India daylight is between X hr and Y hr while New York daylight is between A hr and B hr. Everyone knows that the typical workday is somewhere between 8am and 6pm for most office workers regardless of their location.
The hour carries with valuable meta information. Under our current system if it's 2 am, you have an idea that you probably won't get a hold of anyone if you called. With local times more or less being synchronous, 2 am is the same most everywhere and with it comes information about conditions in that time zone. Without this information using the pure UTC time, you'll still have to ask about the conditions on the ground in New Zealand. You'd have to ask follow up questions about whether 2am there is business hours or dinner time or sleeping time. It would be a nightmare. No, the current standardization is useful and communicates valuable information in a convenient format. I am convinced that OP is a troll.
Toddlers are the stormtroopers of the Lord of Entropy.
We split the day into 24 parts, and with microtunings we also split the octave into 24 parts so quite obviously, the replacement for our archaic time systems is to sing the time in microtunings. Midnight? 440 Hz. 8 PM? 784 Hz. It's so SIMPLE!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What exactly does p.m. and a.m. mean if 4 "O'Clock" is every where the same on the world?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
or using what's done in most metric countries, namely use 250ml or 500ml ?
Right, we * have what's called a "metric cup", which is defined as 250 mils. Simple.
Soft drink cans are 300 mils, a "pint" bottle is 600 mils, what used to be "a pound" of butter is 500 grams. But we tend to buy our milk in litre bottles at the supermarket anyway. It's more than a pint, but it's still a good human size, and oh my goodness how much easier it is to not have to do weird conversions in your head all day. You just get on with life and free up whole chunks of your brain for important stuff, like putting captions on cats.
Powers of ten for the win.
* New Zealand
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Well, yes, if you say "1/3 of a meter" where you meant "333 milliliters", I'm sure there would be some confusion.
Nonsense! You're looking at the guy who drank the Kessel Rum in twelve parsecs.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Just picking a nit, but you converted a measure of length to a measure of volume in your rant against fractions.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
...if each establishment could open and close as it pleases...
They already do... some of them choose to be open during "normal business hours", others use their customer flow as an indicator of when the best time to be open is.
As for your comment:
... how would you like it if shops, banks and post offices only opened when you are sleeping?
If you work graveyards, they already do.
Sorry, did you have a point?
Oh, and one more thing...
Waking up earlier won't give me more free time in the evening, nor would it open restaurants and other places earlier.
The restaurants that want your business will be open when you want to eat there, and will serve the type of food that you want to eat. Jack-in-the-box has always had both breakfast and lunch food available whenever the doors are open, and McDonald's just decided they're open 24 hours a day because people have such varied schedules that there's always someone upset that you didn't stay open "just one hour later" so they could grab a bite on the way home from work.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
First eliminate daylight saving time! This causes lots of mess and is a waste of money.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2401270&cid=37231920
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Yeah, you're right: it actually happens. My point was: "how would you like it", not whether or not it actually happens.
People, such you, complain that Daylight Savings is disruptive. Well, get up an hour later, then.
You remind me of somebody who might complain that he should be able to drive on the left side or the right side of the road, any time he wants. Perhaps you even tail gate ambulances, fire trucks, and police cars, too?
The way I see it:
* your argument against Daylight Savings is based solely on some right to not be disrupted, and the desire to be happy
* the support for Daylight Savings is based on a coordination issue and some desire to be happy.
I don't think that you have a right to not be disrupted in this way. It only disrupts you twice a year. You probably disrupt yourself more than that, so your body can obviously handle it, regardless of who is disrupting. It's not like the majority of people need this, but this is something that they seem to want or at least allow.
As I said, getting up an hour earlier doesn't bring about a desirable outcome. A few restaurants and banks and places stay open, but it isn't good enough.
Honestly, this isn't an issue that I really care about. I'm just practising defending a view.
One thing that I thought of while I edited is that a lot people probably are less disrupted with Daylight Savings, because there is more darkness in the morning. I could imagine being disrupted with the sun coming up at 2am - 3am. I suppose that they could have thicker curtains or wear a mask, though.
testing out my trending skills
But what happens in 20+ years when a younger generation comes along that doesn't remember the old time zone system?
The first generation of them, will probably be trained in school to now that a difference in 15 lat translates into a 1h sun difference. And will mentally compute "in my timezone, the sun currently sets up at 11.00. If i want to be sure that my friend is awake, I'll have to wait until 13.00, because he's 33 west from me". Most of the kids won't bother memorising this shit and will just do what the next will be doing anyway.
The next generation? They'll just use an App on their iDroids 13th generation.
I suppose this would be one solution, but it seems pretty ridiculous when we already have a system now that doesn't require a constant internet connection or a nearby computer to tell us such a simple bit of information.
I really think that internet is going to get more and more pervasive. Even before the in-brain wired connection, I really believe that soon everything including your wrist-watch will be 24/24 online. And you'll probably get free world-wide roaming, as long as you consent to your watch recording all your moves for marketing purpose.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I agree base-12 would have been much more practical for all purposes. I'm not sure why it was never universally adopted, except on the clock.
Perhaps if we ever "reboot" humanity, then we can establish base-12 as the standard.
--Randall
Um really, social norms? I know plenty of businesses that open at 8am. In fact, frankly most businesses at least here in Illinois open at 8am. I don't know where you live but it seems pretty normal here :)
--Randall
My proposed solution is to just advance all clocks a half-hour ahead. I advocate designating this as the standard time year round. Thus we would observe the average between daylight saving time and current standard time, and no further adjustment is necessary.
--Randall
Because for the enormous percentage of the worlds population who _don't_ regularly travel internationally, it would be an huge pain in the arse for no benefit whatsoever.
Any further questions?
I'm in total agreement. What really needs to be rectified is the 24 hour days, 30/31 day months, etc. which are impractical for anything other than perhaps astronomical observations or zodiac readings.
:)
When I was in high school I devising a comprehensive metric-based system of civic time measurement. I don't remember what the units were called, but the average length of the day was derived as a decimal and the annual calendar was based on degrees of revolution around the sun (with five extra days distributed evenly through the year). I'll have to go through my piles of notes to find that project again
--Randall
I've been advocating for a +30 minute switch for a long time. I thought I was the only one that recognized that solution :)
--Randall
It's Daylight Saving Time. Even Slashdot can't get it right. Go to "Options" and it clearly says Daylight Savings Time.
I laugh, and then I can't help but laugh some more. Even nerds can't get it right.
--Randall
You'd think the Slashdot nerds could at least be intelligent about this subject.
:P
Many of the posts here refer to "Daylight Savings Time". For that matter, go to Options at the top of this page, and even Slashdot calls it "Daylight Savings Time". Yet there is no such thing.
I can't help but laugh. People aren't as smart as they often pretend to be
--Randall
So you are arguing that it isn't dictated by social norms, with an example of almost an entire town opening at the same time?
Try going north, set your clock to winter time (in the summer) and see when the sun is up.
It might be a little more tricky to remove time zones from the entire planet than it was to convert the US to the metric system but we were able to pull that off relatively easily... err... never mind.
Uhhhh, last I checked Illinois is a state, and it is one of the northernmost states in the midwest. It is also one of the most populous states in the entire country. I don't remember Illinois being merely "a town".
This reminds me of Swatch's failed attempt at setting a standard for "Internet Time" back in 1998 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time . Remember, those @-preceded 3 digit numbers?
There aren't many floodlit public tennis courts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time Swatch Internet Time (or beat time) is a decimal time concept introduced in 1998 and marketed by the Swatch corporation as an alternative, decimal measure of time. One of the goals was to simplify the way people in different time zones communicate about time, mostly by eliminating time zones altogether. Instead of hours and minutes, the mean solar day is divided up into 1000 parts called ".beats". Each .beat lasts 1 minute and 26.4 seconds. Times are notated as a 3-digit number out of 1000 after midnight. So, @248 would indicate a time 248 .beats after midnight representing 248/1000 of a day, just over 5 hours and 57 minutes.
There are no time zones in Internet Time; instead, the new time scale of Biel Mean Time (BMT) is used, based on Swatch's headquarters in Biel, Switzerland and equivalent to Central European Time, West Africa Time, and UTC+1. And unlike Civil time in most European countries, Internet Time does not observe daylight saving time.
Why do something as smart as eliminating timezones and then do something as stupid as keep DST? Whatever we do with time zones, DST should already have been eliminated as an ancient, useless relic decades ago.
Might be useful is things like travel itineraries and meetings also displayed the UTC time in a font smaller then the local time. Might also be useful if some clocks displayed UTC time in smaller text. Overall, however, I really like keeping my time somewhat related to my locale.
No, I will not work for your startup
I think you have mistaken me for the user you were previously arguing with. My only point was that you were setting up straw men, and fantasizing about a world that matches our current one (for the parameters defined).
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Not a new idea.
Where does it say you cannot say 1/3 meter? And certainly, saying 333mm for 1/3 meter implies too much precision, even 33cm would be off. Unless you really meant 1.00 meters.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
Ask yourself this. If tomorrow we (meaning "humanity") were to go colonize another earth-like planet someplace, and set up a bunch of settlements dotted all around the planet according to the local resource availability etc, do you think we'd also have a universal time reference that we'd all use all over this new planet? We'd probably align it to some natural cycle - for instance, the day as defined by an axial revolution determining sunlight/night-time distribution. Would this just be an initial convenience or would it persist past the colonization period for the rest of the time the planet is occupied?
Interstitial spaces are filled with cream.
No, I realized that you weren't the same person.
I might be able understand why you think that I was setting up straw men.
That being said, I don't think that I was doing that at all. Politicians decided to do this. Some people insist that I adjust my own schedule, instead of troubling everybody else. The intent of Daylight Savings wasn't to trouble people. It's just a natural consequence of Daylight Savings. His and your simplistic solutions to getting what we want wouldn't really provide what we want.
Adjusting the clocks is the easiest way to get what we want. That doesn't justify it, but that is the easiest way.
testing out my trending skills
...metric is a totally superior system in every way ...
No, it is not.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I never suggested any solutions, so you're still barking up the wrong tree. All I did was correct a fallacious statement that banks and other businesses didn't operate at the hours of their own choosing. Better luck next time, thanks for playing.
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"All I did was correct a fallacious statement that banks and other businesses didn't operate at the hours of their own choosing."
Fair enough, and I did agree with your correction.
testing out my trending skills
Also, I don't think it was an issue of individuals having the freedom to do 1 thing or another. It was about how easy or how hard it would be to do it on a large scale.
testing out my trending skills
Programming languages (C#, Java, tsql, javascript, etc.) doesn't have good concepts for handling timezones and timezones are usually ignored during design and implementation. And then developers doesn't like timezones, and their software cannot support people to manage time easily. I don't think people have any problems with timezones. Better timezone support in languages, frameworks and applications are needed, not removal of timezones.