I couldn't agree more about the confusion Paul. But as an Australian, I find the US system close to an abomination. But the non-US system(s) will gradually fade as Bill Gates continues his inexorable Americanisation (i.e. bastardisation) of the English language, and people are too lazy or stupid to change the formats to e.g. Australian English and dates rather than accept his defaults. For many years I worked in a herbarium where we had plant collections going back to the 1700s. Dates were always given as day / month / year in an unambiguous format using roman numerals for month: 13.xi.2013. Because the collections covered several centuries, the year was never abbreviated to two digits. It's not just dates that are confusing, it's also time of day. I can only shake my head at Virgin Airlines which lists all the departure and arrival times on their website in 12-hour format, but uses 24-hour on the e-tickets. At least the new urban public transport timetables released in Sydney a few weeks ago have changed from 12-hour to 24-hour format. I have to confess to arriving at Sydney airport for a 6:30 flight, but when I tried to check-in, I was told it was only possible 4 hours before departure, and my flight was at 18:30! As Homer J. would say "D'oh!" Cheers, John Dr John Pickard john.pick...@bigpond.com ---- Sunclocks North America <sunclock...@icloud.com> wrote: ============= This has always been a pet peeve of mine! All of these differing date formats are confusing, as you can never really be sure which one people are using. Here in Canada, it's even worse because some people put the month first like in the USA and others put the day first and yet others put the year first! Nobody can be sure if something like 10/11/12 means October 11th 2012, November 10th 2012 or November 12th 2010! At least now that we're in 2013, some of that confusion is gone for the next 87 years. I think that the best way which everyone in the world understands is to start a four digit year: yyyy/mm/dd, and all the confusion goes away with the simple addition of two characters. Plus the dates can be easily sorted numerically. It's pretty much the only date format I ever use unless I spell out the month. Paul Ratto SunClocks North America
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