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.

Try sciencedaily.com. The research results I read about there show up on Slashdot a day or two later, and then another two days later on mainstream news sources, if at all.

This idea is exactly the sort of cynical, presumptive plot that the Right loves to dream up in their smoke-filled rooms. If you still believe in genuine democracy, then be willing to give it a chance to work.

This idea is based on the completely incorrect assumption that the majority of voters will come to their senses when faced with an Obama vs Palin choice. What evidence supports that? You really have no idea how venally and deliberately misinformed the majority of Americans are. One in four believes Obama was born in Kenya, for Christ's sake!

Palin is a horror and cannot be allowed anywhere near a nomination. Believe me, if she is nominated, a great many people will take it as a sign from God and will vote for her against their own logical selves, screaming NOOOO inside them.

Here's what I posted as a reply to this "expert's" article. It's now awaiting admin approval to appear as a comment. We'll see if it makes it.

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While reading, I was thinking this was a well-written detective story. Then I got to the end and found out it's a story about a massive waste of time because you didn't follow standard procedures.

Here's how to save a few days next time: go to the motherboard manufacturer's website, get the list of supported CPUs for the motherboard you're trying to install. Then download and install the BIOS that supports that CPU. It really is that simple.

Asus is particularly good at providing a CPU support list for their motherboards. It took me entire minutes to find the lists for the P5Q3 and P5E3 Deluxe (not P5E3 Pro, as you wrote). The QX9650 is listed for both motherboards -- and in both cases, it is supported only as of a recent BIOS revision.

So all you had to do was download and install BIOS version 0204 or later for the first motherboard, the P5Q3, and I bet Win 7 would have installed correctly the first time.

As for the motherboard automatically making BIOS changes to match the fast DIMMs you installed, Asus motherboards do NOT do this by default. You must have left the BIOS in some sort of overclocker's mode.

Next time, look up and download the BIOS that supports the CPU you're trying to use. After installing it, use the BIOS setting that restores all other BIOS settings to their defaults. Then install the OS. THEN and only then, can you start tweaking BIOS settings.

Once again, the article was well written. But it's also an inadvertent confession.
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