Time, gentlemen, please?

The entire state of Arizona does not engage in this ridiculous, outmoded, insulting, stressful practice.

If the government issued an edict ordering all the citizens to get up an hour earlier every day from late spring to early autumn, we would rise up as one and throw the presumptuous SOBs out on their butts for far overstepping their constitutional authority.

But when a stupid, lying CLOCK tells us the same thing, we get up like good little boys and girls and do what it says.

Americans trust machines more than people. This is really sad.

If the nation is this desperate to save energy (and well it should be, beneath all the political and religious rhetoric it's the only reason we're in Iraq), our leaders should get more serious about TELECOMMUTING!

.
I hate it. It's stupid. And it's a real PITA.

The transition from daylight savings time to standard time and back is coordinated.
The time change takes place at 2:00 AM the first Sunday of April, and the last Sunday of October.

As others have stated, several states, parts of states, and towns and counties choose to not observe DST.

Most of the places that opt out of DST have predominately farm and ranch populations.

I am trying to remember the recent history of DST.

In the mid 1970's, Richard Nixon imposed year-round DST to save energy.
What this actually did, was reduce the size of the peak electrical load around 5PM.

I don't remember if it was under Kennedy, Johnson, or Nixon that we started DST to allow for more evening recreation time.

The father of DST was Benjamin Franklin.

DST is predominately a benefit for the outdoor recreation industry.
Golf courses,
Summer league sports,
and Boating all benefit from DST.

In states near the western end of a time zone, DST has the benefit of moving us closer to sundial time.

The industry that has the biggest problem with the DST transitions is the rail-roads.
They have trains stop and wait for the next proper time to move over the section of track they are using.
Large sections of the rail network have only a single track used by trains traveling at different speeds in both directions.
Perfect coordination of train schedules is critical.

Chas

The time change is for school children in today's world. When the 1 year that we didn't change (previous post above) occurred, there were some accidents involving children and crossing guards. The children would be in the dark during school year so the DSL was reinstated mainly for safety.
Also, the fall-back date was before Halloween and several years ago this was changed for safety at night.As the previous posts state, mainly farm and ranch areas do not use DST. The Amish in PA, OHIO, INDIANA do not observe this due to the farm animals which don't understand DST {when it comes to milking cows).
Our own observation here, with 3 Corgi dogs, is that pets want to be fed at the hours of their internal clock.So when DST exists, we feed them at 4PM instead of 5PM.

http://www.timezoneconverter.com/index.shtml

I found this website a few years ago but misplaced the URL-just located it. It has a good, fast time converter. Click on the left sidebar for interesting info on DST.
Originally, before Ben Franklin, an English builder had this idea. It hink this should explain the purpose better. [Uniform Time Act}

The best part of Queensland not having DST, Jules, is that if you go to Tweed Heads, NSW on New Years Eve, you can enjoy all the revelry at Midnight, then dash across the road to Coolangatta, Qld, and party on for another hour, then count backwards from 10 - 0 and kiss all the same girls again.

Life is good!!

Seriously, though, I was talking to an old bloke from Queensland who said that he was very happy that they didn't have DST because the extra sunlight faded all the curtains. I started to respond thinking that he was having a joke, and being a bit sarcastic, until I realised he was serious, so I quickly shut up and let him have his way. We can't have those curtains fading now can we.

We do have a bit of an issue here in South Australia though, because the meridian on which our local time is based is actually well to the east of Adelaide (about Mildura) so Adelaide is always about 15 minutes ahead of solar time anyway. The people in the West of the state are therefore significantly ahead of solar time, and then we add another hour for DST.

That area in the west is rural, and the kids have to catch the bus to school, and it often takes an hour or so for the bus to wind its way about and collect all the kids. Therefore many of them are out on the highway waiting for the bus and it is still dark, particularly at either end of the DST period.

Then in high summer, it doesn't get dark of an evening until 10pm or so. Ever tried getting kids to go to bed when the sun is still up and it is stinking hot? So the west coasters are not too happy about it, but we in the east of the state get on pretty well with it.

Alan

Quite apart from the interesting question of 'who the heck wants to change every clock twice a year', does anybody know why Win XP actually CHANGES the TIME STAMP of every file on your system?

This is (I think) only applicable to NTFS partitions, with various flumoxing consequences such as (a) all your file backups to another partition, drive or system that is not NTFS seem to be out of date by one hour, which plays merry hell with your incremental backup strategy, and (b) your web-site housed on a non-NTFS partition by your ISP likewise wants every file updated.

Do these guys at Microsoft really live in the same world as the rest of us? Evidently not.