I remember seeing a discussion about a sci-fi show (Babylon 5, for anyone else who remembers the discussion) where someone said basically the same thing about a dead body sticking to the outside of a space station. If you do the math, though, you'll find that it doesn't take as much mass as you might think for an object to have enough gravity to pull in free-floating objects.

Wikipedia says Phobos' escape velocity is 11.39 m/s (41 km/h), which is enough to hold down a jumping human. So all the probe needs to do to reach an orbit around Phobos is slow down enough.

The Canadian province of Saskatchewan is geographically in the Mountain Time Zone (UTC07:00). However, most of the province observes UTC06:00 year-round. As a result, it is effectively on daylight saving time (DST) year-round, as clocks are not turned back an hour in autumn when most jurisdictions return to standard time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

They've been doing this for sixty years now and it seems to work fine for them. Certainly I would prefer the sun being highest at noon, but as long as it doesn't change twice per year - any system that keeps midnight and the change of date sometime when most people are asleep works for me. If some task works best in the daylight, then schedule it for whatever clock reading makes it best in the daylight.

It wasn't.

That's easy, just post a comment on Slashdot.

Just to correct one part of this, Python's virtual environments are in no way a virtual machine - they just alter the environment variable PATH and the search paths used by the Python interpreter to find installed modules. There's no additional hardware virtualization.

Actually, containers are similar. Normally, they use the same kernel as the host operating system. There is no virtualization unless you specifically need to run a different kernel (such as running Linux containers on Windows). Running a Linux container on a Linux host is more like chroot than a virtual machine.

Those were my thoughts, but then I thought "How are they measuring 'brightness'?" I could certainly believe that if the pre-industrial night sky was measured at x lux, that we could be at tens or even hundreds of that now. The full moon provides about 500 times the light of all the stars, so adding just 1/100 of the light of the moon to an otherwise moonless night increases the light by a factor of five.

True, a single clock for the whole planet would have some big drawbacks, mostly because it is very convenient to have the date change while most people are sleeping rather than while most people are awake, but we could probably work quite well with less than a half dozen time zones to set our clocks to. One for the Americas, one for Europe and Africa, and one for East Asia, and one for West Asia would probably do it. With five or six sun-hours between the East and West of these new time zones, midnight can be kept well within most people's sleep time, and locals could decide what clock-time is best for whatever activities are taking place. In the middle of the zone people might tend to have their lunches around 12:00, while in the East they eat at 09:00 and in the West they eat at 15:00h.

I suppose a downside is that national Television schedules would not be able to be printed for the whole country. "The 5 O'Clock News" would need to change their branding. Canada has done this to a minor extent since forever, as Newfoundland and Labrador being half an hour off has makes it common to hear "Watch the new episode of Hip New Show! 9pm on Mondays, 9:30 in Newfoundland."

I wouldn't say it has NO advantages - yes, in both cases when you plan a meeting you need to make sure everyone is available (which is also true if you live in the same house with everyone!), but if everyone is in the same time zone, you only need to check to see if everyone is available at the proposed time which can be done by asking them "Are you free at 11?"

This is MUCH easier than: "Are you free at 11?" - "Your time or my time?" - "My time." - "What time is that for me?" - "What time zone are you in?" - "I'm in Paris" - "How much different is Paris from New York?" - "Six hours" - "Which way?" - "Paris is later than New York" - "Are you free?" - "Yes, I am free" - "Oh crap, what date is this for?" - "Why?" - "Because Summer Time ends in Paris before DST ends in New York, so in late October there is only a five hour difference." - "What date exactly?" - "October 25, 2026 is when Paris goes off Summer Time, and November 1 is when New York changes." - "So is everyone free at 11, New York time on October 26?" - "I have no idea, I can't even remember which of us is in New York and who is in Paris".

But would we make all those changes though? In every town? Twice per year? I doubt it very much - the reasons for making each of those changes is relatively weak, and the reasons for making them twice per year even weaker. If it makes sense in the winter to run school hours from 8:15 to 2:45, then do that ALL YEAR, and if it makes MORE sense to do it from 10:30 to 5:00 then do that, again all year. School start times in one of the local school boards already range from 8:15 to 9:30 in different schools - this is at 44.3N so significant sun shifting happens - clearly there is AT least 75 minutes of flexibility in the system already. The yearly time changes are NOT needed for these schools as demonstrated by the fact that there are students already starting one hour earlier or one hour later than other students, at all times of the year. Yeah, the people in Anchorage have less daylight to play with, but shifting the clock twice per year doesn't change that.

Pick a time, any time, and stick with it. Adjust your start and stop time for events as appropriate to your local conditions. There are already SIGNIFICANT number of people who live in places that do not change their clocks twice per year - most of Saskatchewan for example is effectively on Mountain Daylight Time all year long even through geographically it is closest to the Mountain Standard Time zone. Those people seem to have made it work, since 1966.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Anyone south of Saskatchewan needs to be able to point to significant existing problems in SK to justify changing their clocks twice per year.

All of China does use one time zone, so that kind of thing is certainly possible. GMT has a lot going for it, but it feels kind of inconvenient for the date to change during daylight hours. GMT for Europe and Africa seems like it could work, maybe Alaska time for North America, giving midnight at 11 pm local for Hawaii, with the date changing happening in the wee hours for the rest of the continent.

Sure, you could just change the time that school starts for the few months of winter. And the parents who need to get their kids ready for school and/or drop them off at school can change what time they show up for work. And since the workers are showing up at a different time, businesses can change what hours they're open. And since these changes all have to happen on the same day, you'll need someone to decide what days the time changes should happen.

Congratulations, you've just invented Daylight Saving Time, just with everyone needing to remember new start times instead of changing the clocks.

Stop changing the clocks twice per year, but if there are reasons to set opening or closing times earlier or later, I am all for it. Sunlight at whatever-oclock isn't bright enough? Then start school at whatever-thirty or other appropriate time.

The study could have been framed "it would be best to wake up later in the day" rather than "we should make the clocks read different numbers so that waking up at this particular number is better for us".

The problem is not that specific number correspond to particular positions of the sun, but rather than problem is that particular activities are tied to particular numbers on the clock. Framed this way, the solution is obvious, change the activities so they occur at other numbers on the clock.

This, so much this.

While I personally would prefer "Standard Time" all the time, anything that removes twice-yearly clock changes would be an improvement. Local schools and businesses can then just set whatever opening and closing times best match the local situation - heck they could even change those individual hours throughout the year if they wanted. Making EVERYONE change EVERYTHING twice a year is just stupid.

Yeah, I thought of that after I posted. Unfortunately bribery isn't quite as illegal as it should be.

Congratulations, here's your medal for pedantic dickweedery. The example of shouting "Fire!" in a theater has always had the implicit assumption that there isn't really a fire. Everyone (except you, apparently) knows that, which is why nobody bothers saying it every time they bring up the example.