I wish I had a beaver coat.

The original purpose of time zones was to standardize time across large geographic areas, primarily for railroad scheduling and communication in the 19th century.

Before time zones, each city or town used Local Solar Time (LST), where noon was set when the Sun was highest in the sky. This meant that every location had a slightly different time (about 4 minutes per degree of longitude). This worked fine for local activities but caused confusion as transportation and communication improved.

Time zones were created for new technologies. By the 1800s, trains could travel hundreds of miles in a day, passing through multiple towns with different local times. Schedules were unmanageable because every station used its own time. The adoption of the telegraph allowed instant communication across long distances, but coordinating business transactions was difficult, across long distances, without a common reference.

In 1884, the International Meridian Conference established the Prime Meridian (0 longitude) in Greenwich, England as the reference for time. The world was divided into 24 standard time zones, each covering 15 of longitude (about 1-hour difference per zone). Railroads in the U.S. adopted time zones in 1883, before governments made them official. Governments later formalized time zones, which became essential for air travel, commerce, and global coordination.

However, ships traveled with navigators who use sextants to calculate their actual position. As there are no cities or stations in the middle of the sea, only the destination port was important and arrival times in solar time had to be converted to the destination port's time zone. And communication with ships at sea was done with radio and Morse code, though that was not always reliable.

LST is still in use today. Astronomers track celestial objects based on sidereal time and solar time, since astronomical observations depend on when certain stars or celestial bodies appear in the sky and LST is used to predict sunrise and sunset. Solar panels use LST to align themselves for maximum energy efficiency based on when the sun is highest in the sky. Farmers use LST for things like irrigation, scheduling, and planting, which can be timed using solar noon.

Jewish traditions sometimes use solar calculations to determine important times, like Shabbat, which starts at sunset. Islamic prayer times are based on LST. Also, NASA and other space agencies use solar time on Mars (Mars Local Solar Time, or MLST) to coordinate rover operations based on the landing site’s longitude.

Now we have smart phones, which do all the time processing in the background, automatically. They calculate local time based on time zones and can easily calculate the time for another location. There are already applications available to track local solar time. Also use GPS to calculate actual position. While it would have its own complications, time zones could be replaced with a universal time system: Solar Mean Time based on GMT/UTC.

We already refer to 'our time' and 'your time' when scheduling, when we speak to others over distances. What we would gain by MST would be more precision and no more readjustment for daylight savings time changes. We could look up at the sun in the sky and know the exact time, like we did, long, long ago.

I think it far more important that it reduces our reliance on rare earth materials and even minimizes the amount of copper needed in the motor. And because it's not magnetic, I surmise won't affect compass readings due to magnetic fields?

Well, if it had been making money, I'll wager they wouldn't have ended it. I'd like to see a P&L for it.

Touche

Does that mean security procedures are only for the "little people"?

I remember reading a story just like this when the fledgling desktop computer stampede faltered and petered out.

That's what happens to any new industry/market/product comes out. Great guns at first and everybody tried to horn in and get some of the action. Then the market gets saturated and companies, distributors and sales outlets fall out like dead flies in a Raid bath.

This is where the weak ones get winnowed out. Only the strong - and smart - survive.

The by-product of using hydrogen and oxygen as fuel is the waste product is H2O, but that's only if you burn O2.

But combustion of hydrogen in air results, yes, in water, but also in Nitrogen Oxide (NOx), which is a lot worse than CO2.

Holy Saturday Morning TV, it's Fireball XL-5!

Great. Where do I get my Windows XP GUI?

Dang it, now everybody will want some space debris.

Maybe that's the true reason they changed it? Taking away the pun bait?

If that happens, services will be required to remove inflammatory posts, untruthful claims and falsehood.

We may never have to see his posts again.

Does this mean we'll have one subscription to rule them all?

I didn't think to mention IRIS by Lowe's. At least they offered refunds.