On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 01:33:00AM -0700, Ronald Chmara wrote: > I was born and raised in AZ, and I still don't get it. Do ya'll use > less whale lamp oil in your cars driving to work, or what?
Look at the Wikipedia article "Daylight Savings Time". An influential early proponent was British aristocrat William Willet, who disliked cutting short his golf game at dusk. The first implementations were by the Germans and their allies during World War 1, to save coal. The gains are dubious and the losses are documented. Personally I think it is a travesty, forced on us by arrogant authoritarians who like to dominate others. A lot of countries have repealed it. States can drop out, like Arizona and Hawaii did. Oregon ought to. Our arguments? Dropping out helps farmers. It reduces traffic accidents. It saves tweaking on the clocks and computers. It synchronizes us with our important Asian trading partners (China and Japan and Korea have all abandoned DST). And most importantly, it insures Portland's appearance in the tzdata tables! We can call our time zone "Ecotopia Intelligent Time", or EIT, which can include other patches of the west coast US and Canada as they "come to the light". Eventually, the only holdout may be regions around the Microsoft campus. That time zone would be "Bill's Unfortunate Lackeys Losing Synchronization, Horological Idiot Time". Or more simply, "WIN-0" time. The fool in Redondo Beach who thinks Oregon is in the Mountain Time Zone would be right at least part of the time. Personally, I like Cory Doctorow's suggestion in the fiction book "Eastern Standard Tribe". In a 24x7 world, you pick your own time zone, based on when your friends (wherever they are in the world) are awake. I hang out with computer geeks a lot, so I'm going for Hawaiian time, always GMT-10 (I woke up an hour ago). Two hours of morning screen glare avoided. And to make this more Linux relevant, perhaps we can write apps that help keep track of our friend's time zones. People will buy Android phones so that they know when preferred calling hours are. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
