Everyone talks about how DST saves money. Fine then. Get rid of Standard Time instead. It is only for a few months every year anyway.

Imagine if we could actually have 24 hours in the day, all the days in the year, instead of one with 23 hours and one with 25. Imagine if every day had a 2:30AM, or if we never had one day with two 1:30 AMs. How I long for it.

Not only was Mosaic the foundation code for both Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer (as well as a variety of other, now forgotten browsers), but the NCSA project at the University of Illinois also produced the NCSA HTTPd web server. This eventually morphed into the Apache web server. See http://www.apache.org/history/timeline.html.

Here is a link to a post that provides the best explanation I've found so far about why this works.

http://callenish.blogspot.com/2010/11/directly-downwind-faster-than-wind.html

Reminds me of a paper published by the Journal of Irreproducible Results on how different a second paper had to be from the first in order to be considered publishable.

So the problem is that the PHBs don't see a need to upgrade. This is a perception problem. We can fix this.

Let's start adding this to the top of every web page we have access to. If the public web gets flooded with these, the PHBs are going to believe their jobs are on the line if they don't insist on an upgrade:

    <!--[if lt IE 7]>
        <div id="ie6message">
            <p id="ie6warning"><strong>Warning!</strong> The browser you are running is insecure and is putting your computer and network at risk. For more details, see <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_6#Security_issues">this reference</a>.</p>
            <p id="ie6replacements">We strongly recommend upgrading to <a href="http://www.getfirefox.com/">Firefox</a>, <a href="http://www.opera.com/">Opera</a>, <a href="http://www.apple.com/safari/">Safari</a>, <a href="http://www.google.com/chrome">Google Chrome</a>, or a more recent version of <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/downloads/ie/getitnow.mspx">Internet Explorer</a>.</p>
        </div>
    <![endif]-->

You are exactly right. A fantastic series conceived by Harlan Ellison and involving some of the greatest Science Fiction writers of the time, destroyed by bad acting, bad production, and bad pretty-well everything else. If you want a sense of how frustrating working on the series was, read Ben Bova's The Starcrossed. I especially like the early concept for the Internet, a booth where you can sit and ask a virtual person questions. Even his delivery was stuttering and with strange emphases in places, suggesting that his replies were composed of spliced together phonemes.

See this video for an introduction to the brilliant concept that was so ham-fistedly delivered in the original series.

Just make sure you get a converter box with Component Video out (also called YPbPr). Then you can use the Hauppauge HD PVR http://www.hauppauge.com/site/products/data_hdpvr.html to capture the hi-def video to a hard drive.

This is a solution that works for any HD settop box no matter what copy protection it provides, so long as it outputs component video.

If you live in North America, you have already seen Daylight Savings Time creep over more and more of the calendar. It is now the time used for 8 months of the year. So why every go back to Standard Time?

If we drop standard time, we can get rid of the ridiculous rule that says that one day a year there will be no time between 2:00 AM and 3:00 AM. Something happened on the Second Sunday in March at 2:41 AM? Never happened.

We could also get rid of the even worse rule that on one day a year all times between 1:00 AM and 2:00 AM will occur twice! Something happened at 1:24 AM on the first Sunday in November? Which 1:24 AM? The first one or the second one?

Eventually perhaps we could go to UTC and just have a different set of local business hours in each municipality. But somehow, "Noon" and "Midnight" seem to be too ingrained to get there just yet.