Slashdot Mirror
Russia Moves From Summer Time To Standard Time
jones_supa writes: Russia's legislature, often accused of metaphorically turning back the clock, has decided to do it literally – abandoning the policy of keeping the country on daylight-saving time all year. The 2011 move to impose permanent "summer time" in 2011 was one of the most memorable and least popular initiatives of Dmitry Medvedev's presidency. It forced tens of millions to travel to their jobs in pitch darkness during the winter. In the depths of December, the sun doesn't clear the horizon in Moscow until 10am. The State Duma, the lower house of parliament, voted 442-1 on Tuesday to return to standard time this autumn and stay there all year.
The article also discusses a ban on swearing in books, plays, and films that went into effect today in Russia.
Fuck that.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I donno, I guess they gambled on us finding this story appropriate. A throw of the Dice if you will...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I'm a software developer, and dealing with unpredictable timezone changes is not fun. This is definitely relevant to me.
So... How is this even tangentially related to being newsworthy for a tech site?
Like, seriously, WTF?!
It's newsworthy because we finally have proof that another countries legislature is at least, just as ridiculous as our own.
Consider the inherent illogical move of banning words. Everybody has to know the words if you want to ban them. They have to know the banned word in order to not use it, thus someone has to use it, to teach them not to use it !? One assumes Russian will simply use the English words khuy (cock), pizda (cunt), yebat (to fuck) and blyad (whore) instead.
Surely the craziness of teaching people words they are not allowed to use to make sure they can adhere to the law and not use them will dawn on them.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
So... How is this even tangentially related to being newsworthy for a tech site? Like, seriously, WTF?!
It's not, really. I mean, some people here have to deal with maintaining time zone changes on servers and such, so it will be relevant to a few.
But it's mostly to draw out two major types of people who love to debate time issues on Slashdot: (1) people who want to have the perpetual debate about whether Daylight Time EVER makes sense (or whether it ever "saves" anything), and (2) the people who love to propose their favorite "NEW" alternative time and calendar initiatives that are generally very similar to ones that have been debated by weirdos for hundreds of years and have absolutely no chance of being widely adopted.
Just wait... that's the sort of discussion to expect whenever anyone brings up time standards.
But we are also permanently on DST, as it's more like 11 when the clock reads noon.
No way you slice it, days are too short in winter, too long in the summer. shifting one way or the other makes no difference. In winter it's dark when you get up and dark when you go home.
Sent from my PDP-11
That's why you should never deal with dates/timezones yourself; use libraries and avoid lethal headaches. For instance, the good people taking care of tzdata are already working on it.
"It forced tens of millions to travel to their jobs in pitch darkness during the winter." This is called "living in northern latitudes", people have been doing it for millennia. It also forces millions to "suffer" through really long summer days. Those of us who live in NYC also call it the "running of the boobies' and you can pry it from our cold, dead hands.
What is more concerning is your switch from ranting about day light savings time to an aside about censoring, well, everything.
Shifting time an hour is the act of a mad-man but telling other people what they can say and how they can express themselves is an aside? You should get your priorities in order.
We also have tempurature ranges from -45ÂC to +45ÂC,and 9 months of winter, 3 months of potholes. :-)
Where I live the county government describes it to new residents this way: "The two weeks of summer are bracketed by one week each of spring and fall. The rest is winter."
In Australia, the clocks are upside-down.
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Even then its still a headache.
Just because someone else fixed the library, doesn't mean my servers and embedded devices have the update yet.
What are they doing reading an article about DST then?
Obligatory Onion link and XKCD link
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
In Putin's Russia, time fucks you.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
and this is why UTC was invented.
We use UTC internally, but that doesn't stop customers from reporting bugs with wrong timestamps in the UI since they don't have the latest timezone rule patches installed.
Also, I hear they turn counter-clockwise.
So... How is this even tangentially related to being newsworthy for a tech site? Like, seriously, WTF?!
Hi. As the submitter, my reasoning was that timezones are quite nerdy topic. There has also been lots of daylight saving articles in Slashdot over the years. As far as I know, Slashdot hasn't ever been purely tech site.
Aw, scrap that. I actually submitted this only because I can totally annoy you with it, and because of all the possibilities for Soviet Russia jokes.
I have heard that those radio-controlled (DCF-77 in Europe) mechanical clocks always do the time adjustment clockwise, so when moving from summer time to winter time, you might hear a "kkkrrrrrrrrrr..." in an unconvenient moment, when the clock patiently goes all 23 hours forward.
Lacy underwear is banned. http://edition.cnn.com/2014/02... You may laugh at a regulation like this, but it went into effect yesterday.
The mainstream media is distracting you from what's really going on is Russia.
Anyhow, before condemning their new laws, have a look that what the FCC says.
http://www.fcc.gov/guides/obsc...
ayottesoftware.com
In other news, the one holdout was also revealed to be the one dentist who didn't recommend sugarless gum (for patients who chew gum).
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
The problem is that tide tables in the UK are [as a rule] published with times explicitly in UTC. However, tides are occasionally published on the sailing instructions (regatta race information) without any mention of timezone, so do you assume that they're using local time (most likely), or UTC. It's easy to check, but it annoys me when it's done by a big event organiser such as Cowes Week - three letters are all you need to make everything completely unambiguous.