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Are we not advanced enough to use UTC Time? (Score:4, Interesting)
I think we should standardize on UTC time everywhere. Forget timezones and 'Savings Time'. One time for all - would it really bother us if we had to wake up at 03:00 and it was daylight?
Re:Are we not advanced enough to use UTC Time? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Are we not advanced enough to use UTC Time? (Score:2)
Re:Are we not advanced enough to use UTC Time? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Are we not advanced enough to use UTC Time? (Score:4, Insightful)
If only we could figure out a way to send a message to another person around the globe that didn't require them to be physically present at a particular location, nor to perform any action to recieve this message.
Alas, it eludes us yet.
Re:Are we not advanced enough to use UTC Time? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think we should standardize on UTC time everywhere. Forget timezones and 'Savings Time'. One time for all - would it really bother us if we had to wake up at 03:00 and it was daylight?
We have standardized on UTC. We are just following the principle of separating View from Logic.
Very confusing at first (Score:2)
Re:Very confusing at first (Score:3)
That's nothing to do with timezones, it's to do with avoiding the hottest part of the day. Southern Italy does a similar thing.
I worked in Madrid for a while, and we did normal 9 to 5 hours. Then again it was a German company and they were in very modern offices with air conditioning.
It's true that they eat late though - we'd turn up at restaurants at 10 p.m. and they'd be open - but just setting up.
Re:Are we not advanced enough to use UTC Time? (Score:5, Funny)
If you - and everyone on Slashdot that agrees with you - didn't select "bothers everyone around me as I rant and fume"...
You answered wrong.
Re:Are we not advanced enough to use UTC Time? (Score:5, Funny)
You advocate a
( ) lunisolar ( ) atomic ( ) metric ( ) Luddite (x) overly simplistic
approach to calendar reform. Your idea will not work. Here is why:
( ) solar years are real and the calendar year needs to sync with them
(x) solar days are real and the calendar day needs to sync with them
( ) the solar year cannot be evenly divided into solar days
( ) the solar day cannot be evenly divided into SI seconds
( ) the length of the solar day is not constant
( ) the lunar month cannot be evenly divided into solar days
( ) the solar year cannot be evenly divided into lunar months
( ) having months of different lengths is irritating
( ) having months which vary in length from year to year is maddening
( ) having one or two days per year which are part of no month is stupid
( ) your name for the thirteenth month is questionable
( ) the lunar month cannot be evenly divided into seven-day weeks
( ) the solar year cannot be evenly divided into seven-day weeks
( ) every civilisation in the world is settled on a seven-day week
( ) having one or two days per year with no day of the week is asinine
( ) requiring people to manually adjust their clocks is idiotic
( ) local time should not be discontinuous
( ) local time should not go backwards
( ) people like to go to work/school at the same time every day all year round
( ) "daylight saving" doesn't
( ) UTC already solves that problem
( ) zoneinfo already solves that problem
( ) rearranging time zones yet again would make the zoneinfo database larger,
not smaller
(x) the date shouldn't change in the middle of the solar day
(x) local "midnight" should be the middle of the local night
( ) I shouldn't need to adjust my wristwatch every few miles
( ) there needs to be a year 0 and negative year numbers
( ) no, we don't know what year the Big Bang happened
( ) years which count down instead of up are not very funny
( ) planetary-scale engineering is impractical
( ) not every part of the world has four recognisable seasons
( ) "sunrise" and "sunset" are meaningless terms at the poles
( ) the Earth is not, in fact, a cube
( ) high-tech applications need far more accuracy than your scheme allows
( ) leap seconds have been a fact of life for more than forty years
( ) leap seconds are more frequent than leap years
( ) TAI already solves that problem
( ) most of history can't be renumbered with atomic accuracy
( ) everybody in the world is already used to sexagesimal time divisions
( ) date formats need to be unambiguous
( ) abbreviated date formats should be possible and still unambiguous
( ) date arithmetic needs to be as easy as possible
( ) 13-digit numbers are difficult for humans to compare, even qualitatively
Specifically, your plan fails to account for:
(x) humans
( ) clocks
( ) computers
( ) the Moon
( ) the inconsistent rotational and orbital characteristics of Earth
( ) rational hatred for arbitrary change
( ) unpopularity of weird new month and day names
( ) total incompatibility with the SI second
( ) general relativity
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) technically, our calendar is already atomic
( ) they tried that in France once and it didn't take
( ) nobody is about to renumber every event in history
( ) good luck trying to move the Fourth of July
( ) nobody cares what year you were born
( ) the history of calendar reform is horrifically complicated and no amount of
further calendar reform can make it simpler
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) sorry, but I don't think it would work
( ) this is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it
(x) please just shut up and fix your broken date/time code
Re:Are we not advanced enough to use UTC Time? (Score:5, Insightful)
Timezones make it so that daytime is "almost" the same for people in relative proximity. "Today" is almost the same timeframe for most people who are awake at the same time, regardless of their location, give or take a couple of hours. While long distance communication tools have somewhat eroded this notion, it's still true for the vast majority of interactions. If you switched everybody to UTC, the international date line would result in massive confusion unless all times are augmented by the date for reference. Besides, switching to a singe timezone doesn't solve any significant problem.
Re:Are we not advanced enough to use UTC Time? (Score:5, Interesting)
Timezones make it so that daytime is "almost" the same for people in relative proximity. "Today" is almost the same timeframe for most people who are awake at the same time, regardless of their location, give or take a couple of hours. While long distance communication tools have somewhat eroded this notion, it's still true for the vast majority of interactions. If you switched everybody to UTC, the international date line would result in massive confusion unless all times are augmented by the date for reference. Besides, switching to a singe timezone doesn't solve any significant problem.
Um, if everyone were on UTC, there would be NO "international date line".
Which would remove TONS of confusion.
The biggest problem for people would be that the date would change in the middle of the day for a large number of people. Your work week might be from 2200 on Sunday to 0800 on Friday, with a date change 2 hours into each of your shifts.
It would also be inconvenient for anything which is normally advertised as a date range, because times would have to be included with the dates.
Re:Are we not advanced enough to use UTC Time? (Score:5, Insightful)
The biggest problem with that idea is that time would lose much of its meaning.
To give an example, let's say you're taking an international flight that get in at 4:30am. So, will public transportation be running or will you have to get a taxi? Can you call the friends you're visiting when you land or will the be asleep? The problem is that 4:30am has lost its meaning until you contextualize to the location where you'll be. In the current system, 4:30am is almost always pre-dawn and most everyone will be asleep. That's true no matter where in the world you are because every place has its own 4:30am.
There's value in a universal understanding of what a time means. If you removed time zones, you'd quickly see that you'd need to add place codes to every time. This would be because despite the fact that you know the precise point in time represented by an hour:minute value, you'd know almost nothing else.
Re:Are we not advanced enough to use UTC Time? (Score:3)
Swatch solved this problem a while ago...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... [wikipedia.org]
For some reason absolutely nobody uses it.
Re:Are we not advanced enough to use UTC Time? (Score:3)
Besides, switching to a singe timezone doesn't solve any significant problem.
You have clearly not tried to coordinate multiple interconnecting activities across those timezones.
Re:Are we not advanced enough to use UTC Time? (Score:5, Insightful)
Amen to the idiocy of time based (puritanical via the back door) restrictions on alcohol consumption. If you work the day shift when your work is done it is happy hour. If you work the night shift too bad if you want supper food from a restaurant or a pint with your bacon and eggs.
Dailylight savings wasn't a good idea when it was introduced and has become a pointless one since the majority of people are not agricultural workers anymore. If employers|government really cared why don't they just say 'our office hours are 8am-4pm from October to March and 9-5 the rest of the year' or whatever? Are people such sheep that as long as the number on the clock is the same as yesterday they'll blindly get up whenever you want but if you ask them to get up at a different time they'll revolt?
Re:Are we not advanced enough to use UTC Time? (Score:2)
No, it's my waking up at 15:00, going to work on Monday and coming home on Tuesday.
This is the conclusion I reached as well--working across a midnight would be a logistical nightmare.
Re:Are we not advanced enough to use UTC Time? (Score:4, Insightful)
We'd advance faster by removing them.
Corporate bureacracy (Score:3)
In theory it would be better if the clock didn't change and everyone just adjusted their schedules, but it is easier to change time itself than to deal with corporate bureacracy and feet draging.
And who doesn't like more daytime?
Re:Corporate bureacracy (Score:2)
So what you're saying is that daylight saving time was created by the Vogons?
Re:Corporate bureacracy (Score:4, Informative)
In the UK, it's Scottish farmers who want the early day light. There have been some experiments here with regards to either abolishing it or doing a "double day light savings" (essentially changing to CET).
http://www.rmg.co.uk/explore/a... [rmg.co.uk]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... [wikipedia.org]
http://www.theguardian.com/com... [theguardian.com]
Re:Corporate bureacracy (Score:2)
In the UK, it's Scottish farmers who want the early day light. There have been some experiments here with regards to either abolishing it or doing a "double day light savings" (essentially changing to CET).
http://www.rmg.co.uk/explore/a... [rmg.co.uk] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... [wikipedia.org] http://www.theguardian.com/com... [theguardian.com]
I didn't bother to read your links (this is /., after all), but farmers I know here in the states don't give a shit what the clock says - they work during daylight hours, whatever they may be.
Corporate bureaucracy is not the problem (Score:2)
I've never had an employer tell me what time to be at the office and what time to leave, as long as I make the hours they're paying me for, and my workday at least largely overlaps with that of my colleagues - otherwise, what's even the point of going to the office?
If anything, it's useful that not everyone starts at the same time. This way there are team members available at the office for about 12 hours a day, without anyone having to work insane hours. Some start around 7 am, others around 10.
The single thing that makes my hours so inflexible these days is school for the kids. They have to be dropped off and picked up at a specific time, so starting early is no longer an option. 9 to 6 it is. Before the kids started school, I was more of a 7.30 to 4.30 guy.
Re: Corporate bureaucracy is not the problem (Score:2)
I don't see how you could interpret my post that way. It is my counter argument to DST abolitionists who tell me just to adjust my own schedule.
I like DST, it's a practical solution to that automatically adjusts everyone's schedule at the same time.
I like DST but... (Score:5, Insightful)
... Can we keep it there forever? Stop changing it back and forth please.
Re:I like DST but... (Score:2)
So we get more daylight when we leave work. Regardless, two people at two opposite boundaries of the same time zone will get midday at different times anyway, so why should we care about it?
Re:I like DST but... (Score:2)
Re:I like DST but... (Score:2)
Re:I like DST but... (Score:2)
... paper sizes that don't follow the golden ratio...
Sorry, I meant the silver ratio - the one where the sides are in the proportion 1:sqrt(2), so that scaling an image from one page size to another doesn't require changing the aspect ratio of the image. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_216 [wikipedia.org]
Re:I like DST but... (Score:2)
Oh! There's so many things our ancestors got wrong: the charge of the electron, using pi instead of tau, two twelve hour half days instead of a single 24 hour day, paper sizes that don't follow the golden ratio, month-day-year instead of year-month-day, not switching over to the metric system, just to name a few. Why should we not change things for the better, especially when the reasons for keeping them around are purely sentimental.
I hate the whole electron charge thing. Why is the way we currently do things wrong? Why is it wrong to say that current flows from the negative electrode to the positive electrode?
Here in Arizona (Score:2)
...We don't use Commie time schemes. It's Mountain Standard all year long.
Re:Here in Arizona (Score:2)
For the humor-impaired: the actual reason we don't have Daylight Saving is that we are too far south for it to make much difference. If your state has winter sunset at 4 pm and summer evening that stretch to 10 or longer, it makes more sense to have DST.
HI does not observe DST for the same reason.
Ben Franklin was joking... (Score:2)
...when he proposed to tax shutters and wake people at sunrise by ringing bells and firing cannons. In his recounting, he had gone "home, and to bed, three or four hours after midnight, with my head full of the subject" (of artificial lighting), as well as probably a few bottles of French wine. The premise is that he is surprised that the sun comes up so early and doubtful that anyone gets up before noon ("it will be difficult to induce them to rise before noon").
Translation here: http://www.webexhibits.org/day... [webexhibits.org]
Thus, Franklin demonstrated the challenge of using satire to communicate your ideas; even a genius will be often misunderstood (QED).
Not as much trouble as it used to be.... (Score:3)
The change of time used to be a twice a year annoyance but since computers started to adjust themselves; cell phones sync time to whatever time server the carrier used and the wall and alarm clocks I have wirelessly sync to the radio time signal the only clocks I have to adjust manually are the microwave and the car. So not so annoying as it used to be.
Re:Not as much trouble as it used to be.... (Score:2)
Re:Not as much trouble as it used to be.... (Score:2)
By "computers" you mean "internet connected devices that receive updates". I develop firmware for data logging eqipment and our customers ask about implementing DST. We tell them it is impossible because the rules vary around the world and they keep changing them anyway, so even if we did it in five years time the rules might be wrong.
Re:Not as much trouble as it used to be.... (Score:2)
"Running around the house setting the clocks" is the LEAST annoying part of the change.
Re:Not as much trouble as it used to be.... (Score:2)
"Running around the house setting the clocks" is the LEAST annoying part of the change.
Unless you do it when the time actually changes, at 2 AM.
Re:Not as much trouble as it used to be.... (Score:3)
I'm just speaking for myself, but I've never had any problems adjusting even to losing an hour. I just set the alarm for 7.5 hours (my usual amount of sleep time) from whenever I end up going to sleep. No big deal for me, I don't know about small children by why not make them go to sleep an hour early on Saturday night or let them sleep an hour later on Sunday.
Stick to one time all year round. (Score:2, Insightful)
DST was a WW1 con-trick (at least in the UK) to "maximise" daylight working time for agricultural purposes. This sort of fiddling with the clock is pointless nowadays and we need to settle down to a standard time all year round. And there arises a problem - which standard do we use? In the UK, we could always stick to our local time, GMT. But there are othes who want to move to CET so that either mornings or evenings are "lighter" in winter (I can't remember which) and is a "Think of the Children" ploy as it tries to suggest that it'll avoid travelling to or from school in the dark. Other proponents of CET want it so we're in the same time zone as "the rest of Europe". They seem to think this would be a Good Idea...
All we need to do is get away from the idea that we're "wasting" daylight at one end of the day or the other.
day light savings can really pay off (Score:4, Interesting)
Light at 4am (Score:2)
I miss daylight savings, at my latitude (Brisbane, Australia) in summer it gets light at 4:30 am. Install all the block out blinds you want, the birds still go nuts and early risers will be out making noise. I don't know why our state doesn't have it, slightly further south they do.
Re:Light at 4am (Score:3)
I miss daylight savings, at my latitude (Brisbane, Australia) in summer it gets light at 4:30 am. Install all the block out blinds you want, the birds still go nuts and early risers will be out making noise. I don't know why our state doesn't have it, slightly further south they do.
Maybe your state realized that merely changing the wall clock isn't going to make the wretched birds shut up.
Re:Light at 4am (Score:2)
I miss daylight savings, at my latitude (Brisbane, Australia) in summer it gets light at 4:30 am. Install all the block out blinds you want, the birds still go nuts and early risers will be out making noise. I don't know why our state doesn't have it, slightly further south they do.
Maybe your state realized that merely changing the wall clock isn't going to make the wretched birds shut up.
Of course not - that's the general idea. You change the wall clock so that "normal" hours for people match the wildlife. He wouldn't be bitching if the birds started at 5:30 (which the clock would read if his state went on DST).
Watch your language please (Score:3)
A lot of my work involves processing time series data as well as administering dual-boot workstations.
Daylight savings time can eat flaming death.
Re:Watch your language please (Score:2)
Where I work, we call that "job security." :-)
We don't bother... that is AZ doesn't... (Score:2)
Except for the Navjo Nation up in the NE corner of the State... we don't play the clock game. Just leave it where it is all year long.
Re:We don't bother... that is AZ doesn't... (Score:2)
I loved telecommuting from AZ to St. Louis, I'm an early persona and started half the year at 6AM, and then the other half at 5AM. Finishing work at 1:30 was awesome. It was funny that I never actually got away from the time changes.
Bothers me only a bit (Score:2)
However, I'm usually relieved when it happens.
I work from 8am-7pm almost every day of the week. It's a relief in Spring to set the clock forward, because it increases the amount of daylight I experience on my own time. Makes a big difference to me.
And I like sleeping in, so falling back in Autumn is kewl. :P
In the UK I think we would be better (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:In the UK I think we would be better (Score:2)
Re:In the UK I think we would be better (Score:2)
Keeping summer time all year round, would lead to it getting dark at 3pm on the winter solistice, that's crazy, want to leave work in the light at much as possible.
Uhm no - you've got it the wrong way round. It would mean that its still light until 5 instead of 4 at the moment; you get an hour extra light in the evening and an hour less in the morning.
Re:In the UK I think we would be better (Score:2)
Re:In the UK I think we would be better (Score:4, Interesting)
Not so fast, I'm in the UK too and I vehemently disagree with this ridiculous idea. In fact it would make more sense to move the other way (lighter earlier) given our latitude. But really there's no need to monkey about with the clocks.
For most people that would mean the sun shining for even longer before they get up, and it being dark by the time they leave work for more of the year. It would also save 80 lives and 212 serious injuries a year [rospa.com] acording to ROSPA, The move also has popular support with 63% of Londoners and 56% of people in Scotland would support staying on BST year round. [ipsos-mori.com]
Re:In the UK I think we would be better (Score:2)
Re:In the UK I think we would be better (Score:2)
Take an opinion poll after months of sunrise after 9 am (BST all year), or even 10 am (the CET option)
Factually wrong. Time is the same in winder under both options where sunrise will only be after 9:00 from Dec 16 to January 16 reaching a latest time of 9:06. Don't forget there is a lot of twilight before sunrise and after sunset in winter too.
Re:In the UK I think we would be better (Score:2)
Absolutely! I'd love BST to stay all the time. We should just leave it after it changes and rename it GMT, as it would be a shame to lose the name of the world standard.
Somehow I don't think that "renaming GMT" will be an option. Though most technical people use UTC you often see timezones described as "GMT+6" etc, and they aren't all going to change. Also GMT stands for "Greenwich Mean Time", i.e. the time where the sun will reach the zenith over the Greenwich meridian (longitude 0) averaged over the year. If you change it then it wouldn't be "what it says on the tin".
Just toss DST to the bin already (Score:2)
Changing hours twice a year disrupts circadian rythms and causes unnecessary fatigue, which exacerbates inattention and causes accidents and deaths. The whole thing is preposterous and should be scraped ASAP.
quick fix (Score:2)
Twice a year, we keep switching by one whole hour...
Why not change once and for all by 30 minutes to average the daylight gain/loss and call it a day?
Missing Option (Score:2)
Idiocy (Score:2)
Depending where you are... (Score:2)
In a timezone, in a territory or state which observes DST changes, depending upon how far east (sooner the sun rises) or further west (later the sun sets) and what activities you engage in (out of doors - because inside, you could care less 'what bright thing in the sky? aaaahhhh it burns ussss!') you may view it differently.
I Geocache. The change means more daylight time after work for running amok. Before the change I get most of the amok running done before work ('How come you come in to the office covered with leafs, mud, brambles, shoes full of sand and so on?' - 'Rough commute. Really. Really tough today. Some real nuts on the road.')
I actually wish we had night time savings (Score:3)
I live in Arizona you insensitive clod.
Local Radio Station does a DST song (Score:2)
Re:Time to lose Daylight Savings Time (Score:2, Insightful)
Excactly!
There's no logical argument for the time change. None. The farming argument doesn't make any sense. Farmers don't give a rip what the wall-time is. They get up when it's time to get up and get the work done. They go to bed when the work day is done and they're sleepy. If you have to get up at 3:30 to milk the cows, you get up at 3:30. If the wall clock suddenly says it's 4:30, you still get up at the same time because the cows, corn, and sun don't give a flying FSCK what the wall clock says.
As far as providing more natural light in offices, that may have been true in 1930 when buildings were built without central HVAC with window access for everyone in mind. Though there's precious little evidence that DLS made a bit of difference in the then either. Now all but the "greenest" buildings (and some WalMarts) have their lights on during the work day weather the sun is shining or its pitch black outside.
And my rant continues with the horrible effects on your health. Suddenly changing humans sleep patterns is terrible for general healthfulness and sleep cycles [biomedcentral.com].
In short take your DLS and shove it where the sun will never shine
Re:Time to lose Daylight Savings Time (Score:4, Insightful)
There's no logical argument for the time change. None.
FALSE
There are many logical arguments for time change. Whether the benefits outweigh the costs is what is at issue. Welcome to alternate viewpoints, population you don't count, you just want to rant.
Re:Time to lose Daylight Savings Time (Score:5, Informative)
There are many logical arguments for time change. Whether the benefits outweigh the costs is what is at issue. Welcome to alternate viewpoints, population you don't count, you just want to rant.
What evidenced based arguments can you site? The rationale I have read for DLS involve saving electricity, but as this article suggests, [scientificamerican.com] not only does DLS not save electricity, it may actually use more. It also goes on to cite studies that suggest that DLS may actually cause heart attacks. Farmers tend to hate DLS because they get up when the need to get up with no relationship to the clock. When the time jumps around, they still get up when they need to get up, they're just suddenly one hour out of sync with the wall time.
Though to be fair, it may save some traffic accidents due to allowing more people to drive home in the daylight and it may provide more revenue for some retailers. Though there's plenty of evidence to suggest that sleep disruption (like moving someone's wake and sleep time) causes more accidents [mja.com.au]. The cited article studied shift workers, but it applies to anyone who's regular sleep cycle is suddenly disrupted.
All in all, it looks like DLS shifts on whole causes lots of hassle, probably costs money and lives and should its self die a quiet death in retirement.
Re:Time to lose Daylight Savings Time (Score:3)
Retailers claim that people are more likely to shop when it is still light when they get out of work
Re:Time to lose Daylight Savings Time (Score:2)
Is that supposed to be a logical argument for DST?
People will buy what they want/need whether it's light or dark outside - that's how 24 hour stores stay in business. If DST is good for retailer's receipts, it's equally bad for shopper's pocketbooks.
Re:Time to lose Daylight Savings Time (Score:2, Insightful)
That's what "more likely" means, and why the parent said that instead of "certain".
Re:Time to lose Daylight Savings Time (Score:3)
Though to be fair, it may save some traffic accidents due to allowing more people to drive home in the daylight
Not where I live. Here, It causes more accidents. I commute east in the morning to go to work, and west in the evening to go home. There is a period of about two weeks in the Spring and two weeks in the Autumn when the Sun is just above the horizon during rush hour, in just the right position to half blind drivers, causing accidents. Correction... without Daylight Saving Time, this would happen only twice each year. But because of DST, this happens 4 time a year. Twice on the spring, and twice in the Autumn.
Re:Time to lose Daylight Savings Time (Score:2)
You can't prove there are no arguments for (that was your original claim that AC rightly called you on) by showing that there are some arguments against.
And concerning the Australian article, "regularly disrupted" isn't quite a stretch from "twice a year".
Re:Time to lose Daylight Savings Time (Score:2)
Excactly!
There's no logical argument for the time change. None.
I live in Boston, which is on the eastern edge of the eastern time zone. Without daylight saving time, the sun would go down between 7:00pm and 7:30pm during the summer. And while most employers now recognize the benefits of flex time, most offices still operate within standard office hours for meetings etc. It would make it much more difficult to enjoy the summer. So, there is at least one good argument for daylight saving time.
Re:Time to lose Daylight Savings Time (Score:2)
You realize, of course, that the entire state of Maine lies East of Boston (by up to three degrees)?
Not that I disagree with you in spirit, though - Pretty much all of New England really should use Atlantic time rather than Eastern Standard (though VT and CT could go either way).
That said, I don't care what time the clock says at high noon, as long as it stops changing twice a year for no goddamned reason except "someone once upon a time thought it would save energy but it never actually worked even back then". X(
Re:Time to lose Daylight Savings Time (Score:2)
The idea got going good when the Brits needed to keep the pubs open longer during the blackouts in the World Wars.
It was picked up in the USA in the same time frame because it (theoretically) cut down on power usage during a period when electricity and coal were being diverted from civilian usage to war industries and military uses.
While none of the original problems it solved have existed for 70 years or so, there's nothing so permanent than a temporary government program....
Re:Time to lose Daylight Savings Time (Score:2)
And they never will again. Unless Iran gets the bomb, or Russia starts throwing its weight around, or China continues to use more and more fuel.
Nah. Never happen.
Re:Time to lose Daylight Savings Time (Score:2)
>There's no logical argument for the time change. None.
In rural areas where children walk down sidewalk-less roads to wait at unsheltered bus stops, parents well understand the usefulness of DST. I grew up in a farming community, and it was never about the farmers, it was always understood that DST was a way to keeps the kids safe.
I am against DST, but as a rural parent of 4 I understand full well that there is at least one very strong argument for keeping it.
Re:Time to lose Daylight Savings Time (Score:3)
Re:Time to lose Daylight Savings Time (Score:2)
I see what you did there. You probably don't.
Re:Time to lose Daylight Savings Time (Score:5, Insightful)
We live in a 24/7 world that ignore the natural cycle and since it saves nothing,why do we need it?
Because despite your fantasies of being disconnected from the natural world, you're part of it. Our bodies are attuned to the day/night cycle. We SHOULD be getting up earlier in the morning, it's just that clocks and regimented schedules have distorted our connection to the natural world. DST and Summer time adjust our regimented world back to the natural world.
Also, believe it or not some people actually LIKE to go outside and experience the world. (And if you think you can just do this yourself by getting up earlier and leaving earlier.... well, you're either extremely lucky to have such a job, or extremely naive that you'll be able to adjust your schedule to your whims).
Re:Time to lose Daylight Savings Time (Score:2)
"Our bodies are attuned to the day/night cycle."
I have a feeling that most Slashdotters are more attuned to the CPU cycle.
Re:Time to lose Daylight Savings Time (Score:2)
If that is the case, then there should be more argument to abolish DST. That shit creates so much extra logic when writing programs it is pathetic...
Re:Time to lose Daylight Savings Time (Score:2)
Ever had to implement a timezone aware software application?
Ever had to deal with DST support in said application?
Thought not.
The suffering involved is reason enough for DST to go the way of the Dodo...
Making timezone calculations in an application is ridiculously painful even with helpful TZ libraries. In my last program I just decided to ignore DST in my calculations and just fudge everything. This is particularly annoying because it needs to calculate the time in New York, but the computer it lives on is currently in Norway and North America and Europe switch their clocks at seemingly random times each year.
For this particular program it doesn't matter *too* much, but it does lead to weird failures occasionally. Fortunately it's not in a production environment, it's just something that runs around the house.
Re:Time to lose Daylight Savings Time (Score:3)
I feel your pain. Worse yet we deploy software in airports, these are all EXTREMELY high availability systems that if they are out for even 20 minutes during operations you are talking about millions in cost. I think everyone at my company loathes DST with a great passion...
Re:so much hate (Score:5, Funny)
I had already organized a rally for this morning, but almost everyone arrived one hour late.
Re:so much hate (Score:2)
Maybe they were all using European clocks?
The DST is done different in different parts of the world and just messes up the international coordination royally in large organizations.
Re:so much hate (Score:2)
Only if you have a shitty calendaring solution. My corporate calendar adjusts automatically both for new and existing recurring meetings.
With that being said, i no longer see the need to have DST. You're not "saving" any "daylight" anymore, anyway.
Re:so much hate (Score:2)
Well it would have to be, wouldn't it, given that one half is tilted towards the sun when the other half is tilted away.
FTFY.
Re:so much hate (Score:2)
Realize that not many in Europe knows that the DST has changed now and not many in the US have realized that Europe hasn't changed yet.
It's not about calendar options or which half of the globe you live on, it is creating a mess because instead of a 6 hour difference is it a 5 hour or 7 hour now? It would make a difference between getting called 5am or 7am for your conference call.
Re:so much hate (Score:2)
I just wish they'd pick one time -- Daylight Saving or Standard, I don't care which -- and keep that year round
That is equivalent to abolishing Daylight Saving Time. Day Saving Time only works (for rather feeble values of "works") if the time changes. If it stays the same, schedules will simply readjust over time to follow the sun. A good example of this is Easter Island: the official time is two hours ahead of solar time. Therefore businesses open and close two hours "later" than they do on the mainland.
Re:so much hate (Score:3, Insightful)
No. No it wouldn't. We artificially connect our schedules to the hourly time frame. DST just complicates things to an unnecessary level (in the US at least, in other countries I can't say much) for adjustment and specifically writing software that doesn't lose it's damn mind when the adjustments happen. I have applied so many fucking patches to systems (some of them neither I nor my company even wrote!) that I could scream and I've only been doing professional software development for 3 years. Twice a year I have to be extra fucking alert for a string of service calls that will undoubtedly come in and we only stay in standard time for a grand total of 4 months!
Not only that, there are already multiple states in the US that DO NOT observe DST and they get along just fine. I disagree whole-heartedly and wish to god they would abolish this constant shifting practice. If it saves so much money to be on DST then lets do it year round and save even more on not having to complicate tech systems.
Re:so much hate (Score:2)
Just Arizona now. Indiana was the other one, and they changed it about six or seven years ago. I used to live on the west side of Indiana, and it was sorta strange to have half the year being the same time as my grandpa, who lived just over the border into Illinois, and the other half of the year, we were an hour different.
Re:so much hate (Score:2)
Hawaii also doesn't participate.
Re:so much hate (Score:2)
> If it saves so much money to be on DST then lets do it year round and save even more on not having to complicate tech systems.
--I'll give you an amen to that. My phone has to be manually rebooted to get to DST; it was an issue for my friend's phone this morning as well and she ended up getting to work a little late. I wish we could have DST all year round.
Re:so much hate (Score:2)
Where I live they did! I had no idea what this Daylight Savings thing was until my age was measured with two digits... My parents moved to here before I was born, and where they came from there was no Daylight Savings Time either.
And yes, I do live in the United States of America.
Re:so much hate (Score:2)
I've long been a proponent of the "fall back 30 minutes and leave it alone". Split the difference.
The thing that bugs me most about the time change is the nagging from my wife to adjust all of the clocks. And of course she wants them to PRETTY instead of being the self adjusting kind (women and their aesthetics....)
Re:How do these anti DST people deal with life? (Score:3)
Explain that to the families and friends of all the people who die each year [sfgate.com] due to the switch to daylight savings time.
Some of us have a very hard time forcing ourselves to get up an hour early. When you put all of us who have that issue on the road at the same time and all suffering from lack of sleep, bad things happen. You can belittle the problem all you want but daylight savings time KILLS people.
Cheers,
Dave
Re:How do these anti DST people deal with life? (Score:3)
Ha! The study linked shows that switching to year-round DST is what would save lives. So it's a lack of DST that kills people. You should follow your own links before you post.
It's not the presence or the lack of DST that kills people. It's the pointless change between "standard" and "saving" time that kills people.
For my own lifestyle, I would prefer year-round DST. Yes, it's completely irrational, and we should collectively switch to an 8-4 work day instead of a 9-5 work day, but we have to work with what we have.
Re:How do these anti DST people deal with life? (Score:3)
Life is a different beast. It is unpredictable, but for life that is part of the fun. It can be irritating, true, but there is no alternative and I work to avoid or remove the irritating elements of life. Why shouldn't I lobby for removing an expensive irritation from life?
Re:How do these anti DST people deal with life? (Score:2)
A lot of people work "normal" 8-17 schedule or similar (9-18 etc), so they tend to go to sleep and get up at a certain wall clock time. Their bodies get so used to this schedule that they might even get up at the same time on weekends without an alarm clock.
Having to go to sleep one hour earlier (later) to wake up one hour earlier (later) throws them out of sync with their natural sleep cycle until the sleep cycle adjusts.
I have a weird sleep schedule (sleep during nights on work days and sleep during days when I do not have to go to work) so DST does not affect me, though I still hate adjusting all the clocks (my car, VCR, etc).