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.

Comments

A ban on swearing in books, plays, and films?

[nitehawk214]

Fuck that.

Re:News?

[GigaplexNZ]

I'm a software developer, and dealing with unpredictable timezone changes is not fun. This is definitely relevant to me.

Re:News?

[Charliemopps]

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.

Illogical

[rtb61]

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.

Re:Illogical

[CRCulver]

Russia does not have the luxury of wide open boarders or just accepting a vast culture of drink ... drugs, health issues...

The tragedy of Russia is that Russia is indeed deeply affected by these ills and much of the population is unwilling to face it, preferring instead to complain about other countries. I travel widely in Russia for linguistic/ethnographic fieldwork in Russia, and I am aghast at not just the widespread alcoholism (a perennial ill) but the widespread heroin abuse as well. You have poor village men stealing out of their wives' purses so they can get their next fix. Of course, they can't steal much because there just isn't so much money around, so the quality of the drug is crap, and needle sharing is common, which leads to the spread of HIV.

It is easy for people in Moscow and Saint-Petersburg to pretend that everything is fine and that Russia is somehow avoiding "foreign" problems, but in fact the rest of the country is going to hell and its a damn shame. There's so much potential in Russia and yet the population is doomed by this neglect.

Slashdot fails at reporting.

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Re:Slashdot fails at reporting.

[dargaud]

Well, when the days are short, one hour of difference can mean a lot of light and temperature difference. When I was working in Antarctica Dome C, in order to 'simplify' things, 'they' decided we would have the same timezone has the logistical base of operation on the coast which was actually located 5 time zones ahead. So we had to get up when the sun was actually at 3am solar time. In other words the coldest time of day and in summer it was ofter -50C at that time while it could be a balmy -25C at noon even though there was little difference in sun elevation. To make a long story short after a few days we all started to get up at 11am to compensate. The next year they gave us our own proper timezone.

Re:News?

[vux984]

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.

Re:News?

[GigaplexNZ]

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.

Re:News?

[jones_supa]

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.

It's a distraction!

[Flammon]

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.

Obscene Broadcasts Are Prohibited at All Times

Obscene material is not protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution and cannot be broadcast at any time. The Supreme Court has established that, to be obscene, material must meet a three-pronged test:

• An average person, applying contemporary community standards, must find that the material, as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest;
• The material must depict or describe, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by applicable law; and
• The material, taken as a whole, must lack serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.

http://www.fcc.gov/guides/obsc...