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Comment Re:They should do the same in The Netherlands (Score 1) 211

Right. The statement "Keeping DST means that the sun rises an hour later in the Winter" is untrue. Even if the entire US congress agreed, it won't make the sun rise earlier or later.

To make it true you have to write out the implicit bit that you meant but didn't say:

Keeping DST means that the sun rises an hour later relative to locally defined civil time. We agree laws can't affect the sun, so what they change is locally defined civil time.

Logically, we can flip the relative relationship to say: "keeping DST means that locally defined civil time is an hour earlier (than it would have been without permanent DST) relative to when the sun rises." Since the sunrise is constant we can drop it from the statement entirely to get "keeping DST means that locally defined civil time is an hour earlier (than it would have been without permanent DST)."

The vast majority of people don't get up much earlier in the morning than they have to to be at work on time. For those people, the last statement is equivalent to mine. It not only "works logically," it is what is actually happening. Ignoring that implicit relative in your statement gives rise to all kinds of silliness like "Sunshine protection act" and even "daylight savings time." No sunshine is being protected, nor daylight saved.

As you point out, DST makes you wake up an hour earlier. The transition to doing that is what people dislike. They tend to like the transition to not doing it in the fall, although some people still complain because they have OCD and they haven't figured out how to set the VCR clock yet. The bit we don't like is getting up earlier, and the proposal is to do that all the time.

When you actually look at it logically you realize something else: pretty much everybody is free to observe permanent DST whenever they want. All they have to do is get up an hour earlier in the winter than they would otherwise, i.e. at the same time they would in the summer. No time changes. Hardly anyone actually does this. Your boss probably isn't going to be mad if you get to work early. They're certainly not going to be mad if you get up early and enjoy an extra hour in the winter to do whatever you want. Yet almost nobody does this. Almost everyone gets up as late as they can and still meet their social obligations. Especially in the winter.

I wonder why?

Comment Re:Umm, no (Score 1) 211

Otherwise being near the timezone border would be an issue

It is. All the incresed heart attacks, strokes, car accidents and whatnot you hear about associated with the time change are also associated with living on the eastern side of a timezone, except every day, not just the one special day a year.

Comment Re:This is so stupid (Score 1) 211

US states can all switch to permanent standard time whenever they want. Some already have. There's a federal law that specifically prohibits switching to permanent DST because the whole country did it in the 70s and hated it so much they not only switched back but made it illegal for everyone.

But everyone (now) thinks they want permanent DST because long summer evenings are nice and they can't remember how much getting up an hour earlier in the winter sucks.

Comment Re:Everyone gets time from a smart phone (Score 1) 211

No, it was popular prior to clocks. You got up at sunrise because, as a diurnal animal, that's what your biology likes to do. Some people, many farmers for example, still do this.

"When the sun comes up" is hard to define exactly. The sun isn't a point so you have to decide whether it's the top, bottom, middle, whatever. There's lots of refraction too, so you see the sun come up before it actually does. So when we invented clocks we started using noon as a standard rather than sunrise. It's relatively easy to precisely determine the time of local noon, when the sun reaches its highest point.

The two are different, and that's the source of the problem. Noon stays the same year round, sunrise varies. DST is an attempt to use noon-based time but shift it to be a bit closer to sunrise-based time.

Comment Re:They should do the same in The Netherlands (Score 1) 211

Keeping DST means that the sun rises an hour later in the Winter.

No, it means people have to wake up to go to work and school an hour earlier in the winter.

If you ask people if they'd like to have year-round DST a lot of them will say yes. If you ask them if they'd like to have to wake up an hour earlier in the winter than they do now, a lot of them will say no.

Comment Re:Remove Encryption? (Score 1) 85

Exactly, changes have to happen, so just move your data and be happy. It's not a weekly, monthly, or even yearly thing. This is a once every decade change, and who can really complain? I'm sure some outlier exists that has a very specific reason to need HFS+, but the vast majority of people can't truly be affected. Even if you have a 30TB volume you would need to move, just buy a drive from Amazon, do the move, then return the drive. For some odd reason, Amazon will let you do that, not really sure why, but you can even be honest about it in the return information.

Comment Re:An AMAZING number of flaws (Score 2) 48

This is true, go into Microsoft Defender for Cloud or Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, or Intune, and see how many warnings can be "fixed" if you buy another product or service. Microsoft has turned Windows into a PaaS and DMaaS (Digital Molestation as a Service), but people don't want an OS that is a PaaS and DMaaS we want an OS that stays out of the way, and doesn't digitally molest us.

I think fixing bugs and real issues is fantastic, so I won't pick on them for solving 600 issues, that's fine, but it's the PaaS and DMaaS nature of their offerings which is the issue, IMHO.

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