I don't think you realize also how much confusion it generates for ordinary people, including administrators and the general public who has to worry that their clocks are set right. If mistakes are made by admins, then the knock-on effects can be even worse.

Heck even taking a couple of minutes to change the clocks multiplied by a billion people equals a LOT of time lost. Not to mention that DST often affects sleep cycles in a bad way, or at least in a mildly bad way for perhaps most people.

I'm going to be a bit harsh now, and I may even be at least partially wrong, but you really don't seem to care about unification, consolidation, standards, or simplifying things as much as you should. Exaggerating to illustrate a point, I suppose you like to see hundreds of incompatible competing standards, just so you can go through the effort and 'fun' of trying to support them all. For example, you may not care about the elegant 'hack' of UTF-8. After all, who cares if we have hundreds of different text formats floating around - let's build ugly kludge after kludge in software to support them all!

I have no doubt your programming skills are capable of taking on such tasks, but the fact you're not even SLIGHTLY bitter about the mess that is time zones indicates that for better or for worse, elegant design and unification is not your first priority. And I think that's where you're mistaken.

Did you deal with all the arbitrary intricacies that the aforementioned video showed? And if you did (good for you), did you think it was a productive use of time? Do you think tens or hundreds of thousands of programmers multiplied by that waste of time is a net benefit to society generally?

It's not even for me, as C# handles most of the crap anyway, so things are (relatively) trivial, just time consuming and long-winded. It's how appalling the system is and how much time it wastes for everyone involved.

Actually you know what?

Just see this (very humourous) Youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

NOTHING will show you better how idiotic the whole system is, and how much time it has wasted (and will continue to waste due to the ongoing changes governments worldwide make on a whim).

Spoken like someone who has never really had to deal with the subtleties of time zones. Just read this message here: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskSci...

Just recently we had a story on a woman who gained weight after a fecal transplant: http://science.slashdot.org/st...

Swapping the bacteria in our mouth may also prevent bacteria by killing off the Streptococcus mutans, perhaps the main contributer of tooth decay.

I really think this relatively new area in science could help if we pursue it carefully.

Never mind just America, let's work to scrap DST worldwide. DST (or daylight saving time) is a great source of confusion. It complicates administration, as well as making life tough for programmers and every day people who need to make sure their clocks are reset twice a year.

However, if we scrapped DST (along with 15 or 30 minute offsets), we would only have 24 time zones - one for each hour! This is a reduction from the hundreds we currently have in use around the world. Each location would simply be assigned to an offset from UTC (0-24).

For many reasons, it'd be nice if everyone used UTC as their only time, but in the mean time, twenty four consistent, simple and clear zones should be enough for everybody.

I misspoke there. I meant to say, they don't need constant cooling to prevent a catastrophe as the reaction can be stopped immediately if need be. I didn't mean they don't need cooling for normal operation.

I'm not 100% sure of the above, but that's what I meant.

Just as well there'll be far fewer accidents in self-driving cars then. The tiny insurance costs will be an afterthought by comparison, no matter who pays them.

Well as an example, the new thorium reactors don't even need cooling as the reaction is cut off immediately when there's a failure. We do learn and adapt from past mistakes y'know, however long it may take.

My point is the current new tech will be a lot safer and therefore far less expensive as they won't need to factor in the cost of hypothetical catastrophes.

I thought it was already established that Fukishima used old tech reactors which are a lot more unsafe than the current generation. And they built them in an awful place to boot.

I'm more inclined to think it's red tape that costs the most.

Ah, so we might need THREE icons in total ;)

The new icons don't look great, but the far bigger crime is making the whole GUI look flat where the same washed out white background is used for the foreground and background.

Not in my opinion because I don't think AI will ever experience qualia or anything for that matter.