Time Zone Database Has New Home After Lawsuit 238
networkBoy writes "ICANN has taken stewardship of the time zone database after its original operators were sued for copyright infringement by an astrology software company, saying they will 'deal with any legal matters as they arise'. From the article: 'Without this database and others like it, computers would display Greenwich Mean Time, or the time in London when it isn't on summer time. People would have to manually calculate local time when they schedule meetings or book flights.'"
Do It Yourself (Score:2)
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The database in question is just a list of what everybody around the world would type in.
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The database in question is just a list of what everybody around the world would type in.
... mixed in with a whole bunch of local politics. In Canada, Newfoundland is half an hour off the next time zone. Saskatchewan doesn't do DST. Etc., etc. Check into Brazil's troubles the last time DST was defined. It was a mess.
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That's not what the TZ database contains. It has city/country to timezone mapping, but it also has historical information. Timezones change, daylight savings time changes. The TZ database contains all that. That's why it is useful.
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For the vast majority of people that is sadly impossible.
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I was traveling through South America for a month, hit most of the major countries. It's bigger than you think. Five countries in four weeks is a lot. Anyways, I was using Ubuntu (9.10 UNR) and Gmail on a netbook to handle most of my affairs while I was out of the country.
I'm not sure what it was exactly, either the system clock or on google's end, but when I crossed from Brazil in to Uruguay, my system clock, gmail and gcalendar got royally screwed up, to the point that I was 3 hours early to my internatio
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This is the sort of routine task of calculation that we use computer programs to automate. Sure, it's not much trouble to do this trivial task once, on one computer. It's another matter to do this, and a few thousand other similarly trivial tasks on a few thousand servers in a datacenter daily.
Easy Solution (Score:2)
Why can't a group of people just derive the same information from different (public domain) sources?
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They can, but then they need to have enough funding to prove that is what they did in court. It does not matter if you are non-infringing if you don't have the money to prove it. Welcome to American justice.
Really? We're going to trust ICANN with this? (Score:4, Funny)
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Hmm, I don't think that the (non-US) governments whose countries use those gTLDs were really keen for them to be controlled from the US...
Rgds
Damon
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Hmm, I don't think that the (non-US) governments whose countries use those gTLDs were really keen for them to be controlled from the US...
What you are referring to are ccTLDs, which are different from gTLDs. gTLDs are the non-country domains, such as .com, .net, .mobi or .aero.
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On the bright side, at least we'll get to see GoDaddy commercials where Danica Patrick makes seductive innuendo about ISO 8601.
"Want to put your +11:00 in my 2011-10-17T17:21:00, baby?" *continues with random double entendres and IndyCar lingo*
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ICANN is not taking over maintenance of the timezone database. The plan has been for a long time to maintain it under the IANA.
While technically the IANA is part of ICANN, they are still quite distinct. I have nothing but respect for the IANA, while I have nothing but disdain for ICANN (the policy organization). The difference? ICANN's board is not able to meddle with IANA, or the IAB (Internet Architecture Board) would designate a new IANA. Without the IANA, ICANN could only set, but not enforce policy, a
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I should also note that the database is currently being maintained by Robert Elz, in the absence of a formally appointed TZ Coordinator. IANA has effectively accepted him as interim TZ Coordinator[1] by they way of adopting the release he made on October 10 as the initial IANA published tzdata file.
[1] Until a formal TZ Coordinator is chosen by mailing list consensus and confirmed by the IESG, as per the as yet unpublished RFC.
Lawsuit is totally baseless (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Lawsuit is totally baseless (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't matter if it's baseless and would get tossed out of court -- eventually. The former database maintainer didn't have the budget to fight back.
If you want to blame someone, blame the "justice" system that allows frivolous lawsuits to be filed in the first place.
Re:Lawsuit is totally baseless (Score:4, Informative)
Doesn't matter if it's baseless and would get tossed out of court -- eventually. The former database maintainer didn't have the budget to fight back.
If you want to blame someone, blame the "justice" system that allows frivolous lawsuits to be filed in the first place.
EFF is representing Arthur D. Olson (the former database maintainer).
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A system that forbids even the filing of frivolous lawsuits would be unfair. It would raise the burden too high on legitimate lawsuits. "Disallow" means you give the court clerks the authority to glance over documents and just shred them if they decide they're frivolous. Leave that decision up to the judges instead.
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Great. Now, how many million are you willing to spend on lawyers to say that in court?
My only question (Score:3, Funny)
Will I finally be able to buy my own vanity timezone for $200,000?
Oh yeah? (Score:2)
You know that, do you? I rather doubt it myself. The authors of the book on which much of the data in the database is based did a lot of research in the course of authoring it. There is data for many, and not a few obscure, locales at various times in history. You can't just call up the Time Czar and say "gimme all the information," you know. The linux time engine is not just for the present moment. It deals with historical time with its many local quirks too, AFAIK back to some time late in 1901 (1970-01-0
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Abolish time zones (Score:4, Funny)
And while we're at it, let's switch to metric clocks.
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What's wrong with time since the Unix epoch? I'm using that and I'm doing fine!
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What's wrong with time since the Unix epoch? I'm using that and I'm doing fine!
2038 called (it uses neutrinos). There is a bit of an issue [wikimedia.org].
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Time zones are not necessary in today's world.
And while we're at it, let's switch to metric clocks.
Sure, no problem. What is the current .beat?
Anybody old enough to remember Swatch Internet Time [wikipedia.org]?
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Sure, no problem. What is the current .beat?
Anybody old enough to remember Swatch Internet Time [wikipedia.org]?
Hey who are you calling old ? I bet you can still put a Beat clock applet next to your snazzy homepage hit counter if you want.
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The reason we need timezones is so that we can easily know whether or not a particular time is a reasonable time to be able to contact someone in a geographically distant location. If you are scheduling a teleconference with people from somewhere distant and I tell it will be 3:00 AM there at the time you are proposing, you know that, except in special edge cases, that is not a reasonable time to expect t
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So, in your world is 12:00 during the business day in Tokyo? How about Los Angeles? What about Harare?
Today you need to look up a database of time differences so you can tell what time it is now in Tokyo. If everyone used the same clock, you would need to look up what typical working hours are in Tokyo. Same work involved. Once you've called Tokyo a few times you would remember what their workday is. As an added bonus, there would be no confusion as to what *day* it is there, like there is now.
The reason we need timezones is so that we can easily know whether or not a particular time is a reasonable time to be able to contact someone in a geographically distant location.
If you base your decision on local time alone, you are going to be annoying a lot of programmers. 12:00 is far, far
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Having only one time solves a single problem - communication of time to a remote location. There is already a solution for that - use UTC or GMT. However, for everyday life it would really suck. Local time is better for most things because it is portable.
If I am New York and want to call California, I still need to know what is an appropriate time to do that - a single time zone does not help. As you said, I still need to do some sort of translation. However, what if I actually GO to California? With
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In the off chance that you are serious:
1) Most people still live by the sun. Some may be a few hours earlier than others (morning people) and some people may be a few hours later than people (night owls), but there is a definite correlation between when the sun is "up" and when people live their lives.
2) People find it easier to translate between time zones than they do between local norms. "Let's see, hour business hours are between 3.33 and 6.66 while their business hours are between 8.85 and 2.18. Whi
or... (Score:3)
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Just a quick question out of ignorance, how does the stardate communicate relative time frames?
Very carefully.
Re:or... (Score:4, Funny)
In Leonard Hofstadter's voice "please don't ask that please don't ask that oh crap, you asked that. We'll never make it to the movie now."
Wikipedia (Score:2, Interesting)
Can everyone just update the Wikipedia entry for your city with timezone information? It would be nice if it were in an easy to recognize format along with LAT/LONG position so this can all be scraped into a database via software.
Re:Wikipedia (Score:4, Informative)
That's fine for converting current times but for comparing an historical time to the current time you need to know if there have been any timezone changes. That's what this whole thing is about.
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It would seem that rather obvious point is beyond the intellect of many to realize.
Re:Wikipedia (Score:5, Interesting)
The database is more than just "what time is it in New York City?". It's also useful for answering questions like "On June 15, 1988 at 13:00 UTC, what time was showing on the clocks in Riyadh?".
(That particular question is why the zoneinfo entry for Saudi Arabia is almost ten times the size of any other entry.)
Slightly off-topic but... (Score:5, Interesting)
.
When are we going to start burning all the Astrologists as Witches?
This lawsuit would seem to be ample provocation.
.
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Hey, many of the witches I know would be quite offended if you started comparing them to astrologers!
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Can we put patent troll lawyers and most MBAs at the front of the line first?
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Hopefully never more in a world in which I live.
You know what's instructive? To contemplate the roll of human beings who Christians have burned at the stake, drowned, beheaded, tortured, and otherwise grievously harmed, then repeat the exercise for other religions, then finally point me to a case where astrologers have done that to anyone.
Woohoo timezones are copyrightable! (Score:2)
that's a new one... kinky, I like that... coming up next, specific types of breathing copyrighted too :)
ICANN TZ URL (Score:4)
Copyright, not patent; learn to read (N/T) (Score:2)
(N/T)
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Funny, You made me go back and check that I didn't screw up the summary. Glad I didn't :)
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry, patents? This issue involves copyrights .
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How can you copyright numbers?
This is just like a phonebook.
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...unless some of the numbers are intentionally wrong, as markers. Then *those* are fiction, and (some would argue) eligible for copyright protection.
Remember the old practice of cartographers adding fictitious details that would be unique to their work - same deal, in theory. If a rival's map had those features, it would be a slam dunk infringement.
I have no clue if such elements were present in the TZ list, however.
Re:So? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not semantics, it's two completely different areas of law. It's as different as condemning Mac desktops as being insecure virus magnets when you actually meant Windows desktops, and then when someone calls you out on it, pleading "oh, semantics police!" as a valid defence.
Intellectual laziness always tries to assert its own validity.
It leads to strange behaviors. For example, the afflicted will usually prefer to make themselves look stupid by trying to convince you that an obvious glaring error is somehow not an error, rather than admit they made a mistake like human beings tend to do from time to time. I guess they think they're fooling anyone.
The sentiment seems to be, "how dare you expect me to know the most basic things about a subject prior to taking a position on it?! I mean really, who do you think you are?" In a way, it's amusing. In another way, it's really pathetic.
Re:So? (Score:5, Informative)
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Also, copyright has independent conception as a defense, while patents do not.
If the same idea was concieved of independently, then the patent should be invalidated on grounds of obviousness.
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If some magical new type of network were conceived, zero latency wireless for the entire coverage of the solar system. That, would be something novel and patentable. And if it were called perhaps the hypernet. Someone would subsequently patent one click, or if voice activation worked, one word buying on a 'hypersite'.
Someone would have to 'conceive' of said thing, but it is obvious, regardless of that the patent would be granted.
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it was the wrong word but the sentiment remains true. ... Just absorb the relevant information and move on.
It's this attitude which fosters the spread of idiocy.
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The surgery to give you a functional brain is expensive and generally considered elective.
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You're making a mistake, in addition to the original. You're not moving on.
At this point, you're just an object lesson for other slashdot readers.
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oh lord the semantics police are on their way as we speak, red and blue lights whirling around like confused birds.
Well, excuse us for wanting to be correct. Do you enjoy it there in your misty, clouded, can't really see anything, "HOLY SHIT A BUS!" universe?
You work with tech? Do you program? What's your compiler say when you're lazy like this? It's people like you that keep helldesks [sic] busy.
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Well, excuse us for wanting to be correct.
There's nothing wrong with being correct, and there's nothing wrong with correcting people. However, when Frosty Piss posted his correction, he added nothing new to the conversation other than a correction. The discussion devolved into an argument over semantics.
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when Frosty Piss posted his correction, he added nothing new to the conversation other than a correction.
Blocking error prevents conversations from drifting into wrongness.
That's no big deal when it's kids yammering about who's ricer has the baddest flames painted on the side of his Honda, but important when talking about the law.
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Blocking error prevents conversations from drifting into wrongness.
I'm fine with that. But Frosty Piss didn't do that - he just made what seems like a pedantic remark. A useful correction would make at least a small effort to state why the correction was important.
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Blocking error prevents conversations from drifting into wrongness.
I'm fine with that. But Frosty Piss didn't do that - he just made what seems like a pedantic remark. A useful correction would make at least a small effort to state why the correction was important.
I think a useful reaction would be for the corrected one to notice they didn't understand the distinction between patents and trademarks, and to then hit a search engine for enlightenment. Instead, they shoot the messenger.
Anyone who's spent any time around here ought to know the difference between the two by now. FP handed him a clue, and was derided for it. Thanks a lot. Not.
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Anyone who's spent any time around here ought to know the difference between the two by now.
I'm going to have to call you out on that... anyone who has spent any time around here ought to know that a simple pedantic correction is going to lead to a flame war over pedantry. :)
Seriously, look at the thread after Frosty Piss's comment - the whole thread is poisoned. The only comments with any insight whatsoever are quickly reverted back to name calling.
Let me ask you, what point was he making, other than "you are wrong"? He didn't disagree or agree with the original post, and his correction made no c
Re:Ego? (Score:2)
do you always act like you program? do you go around at parties, telling people they're walking around in a misty clouded universe that only you can see through? Does the effort of holding the stick in your rectum cause you to be this annoying all the time? its people like you that need to lighten up.
You can't tell the difference between a party and a discussion about intellectual property law? Oh wait, you can but that would be inconvenient for you.
It's not a matter of "always acting like you program". It's a matter of having the slightest bit of discipline to handle the most basic things correctly. If you want a party analogy, it's like making sure you show up at the right address. What you're doing is showing up at the wrong address, knocking on the door, having it answered by a 90-year-old gr
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I can tell the difference between when I need to be an asshole at work vs choosing to be an asshole to everyone I meet. You're not having a discussion at work, no project depends on this, and one guy using the wrong word doesn't hurt anyone. Try and lighten up. Replace the word patent with copyright and re-read the comment. does it still make sense? then absorb it and move on. Does it not make sense? then it isn't worth getting into. http://lolpie.com/images/archive/content/1/3/lol-why-u-mad-tho-U9bbc.jpg [lolpie.com]
Correcting your mistake is not an asshole thing to do. You made a mistake. That's just a fact. It's not a matter of levity or gravity.
Being too proud to admit you should have gotten this right is an asshole thing to do. Just think for a second about why you're encountering so much resistance in this thread. Your lil' ego was bruised and apparently you don't handle that gracefully. You seem to be the only one who doesn't see that.
If "lightening up" is what you want so badly, start with yourself.
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Driven by hunger, a fox tried to reach some grapes hanging high on the vine but was unable to, although he leaped with all his strength. As he went away, the fox remarked, 'Oh, you aren't even ripe yet! I don't need any sour grapes.' People who speak disparagingly of things that they cannot attain would do well to apply this story to themselves.
Any grapes the fox cannot reach must be sour. Any Internet forum in which you can't get your shit together must be populated by angry people.
That's your mistake. For catching it, you're very welcome.
It is a big difference. (Score:2)
It is a big difference, and not just semantics.
If the database was a valid patent claim, then using any type of timezone database could be blocked, forcing everyone to use GMT.
Where it is copyright, they might be able to require people to buy their version of the database. But, copyright cannot be applied to purely factual data, ie. Los Angeles being in the Pacific Timezone which is GMT-9 or GMT -8.
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Since all three ideas were independently reached and no one copied the other they can all have copyright on such comments. See if you knew the difference between copyright and patents you would not keep embarrassing yourself like this.
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From what I understand it was a copyright violation where the "offender" had taken the timezone facts from a calendar made by the "offended" party.
But facts are facts and where you get them from would just be another question.
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Or make dollar signs light up in their eyes. I hope it's the latter, because that will hopefully do to them what similar crap did to SCO.
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I immediately went out and filed a patent on "noon". Sorry folks, we're first to file now... you snooze you lose.
Good for you, but I already copyrighted it.
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I immediately went out and filed a patent on "noon". Sorry folks, we're first to file now... you snooze you lose.
Good for you, but I already copyrighted it.
You both fail; I Trademark'd that shit years ago!
But for all those years you failed to refer to it as Noon®, so the trademark was considered abandoned. Now it's mine.
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Sorry folks, we're first to file now... you snooze you lose.
Especially now I've patented hitting the snooze button!
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Hah Hah I am suing you for patent fraud because you didn't disclose prior art in your filing.
Re:Use a local clock? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not a very good example of the importance of that database. It includes historic values, not only the current offset, that historic information is extremely useful. If you only have the current offset, applications has no way to know for example: what day is 20*365*24*60*60 seconds ago? and no, the answer is not exactly 20 year ago (ignoring leap years) because timezone changes means that not all days are 24 hours
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and no, the answer is not exactly 20 year ago (ignoring leap years) because timezone changes means that not all days are 24 hours
Time zones have nothing to do with how long a day is. Every time zone has 24 hour days. Unless you live in some weird alternate universe where some days are longer than others...
The changes in daylight savings time may impact exactly what time it is now but the only thing you have to deal with is whether you're currently in daylight savings time. Because within a year, switching to DST and back cancels itself out. A given year will have one day that acts like a 23 hour day and another that acts like a 2
Re:Use a local clock? (Score:4, Informative)
Actually in this universe not all days are the same length...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second [wikipedia.org]
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That makes sense. But it still holds true that the time zones aren't responsible for this change in the length of a day.
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Re:Use a local clock? (Score:4, Interesting)
Time zones have nothing to do with how long a day is.
The "TZ database" definition of a time zone is different from the definition of time zone used in many other contexts. It is defined as "any national region where local clocks have all agreed since 1970".
The relationship between local time in a given region and universal time can change for a number of reasons including regular daylight savings changes*, DST rule changes, changes depending on the governments view of the relative important of consistencey with local time vs consistency with neighbouring jurisdictions. Changes in who has jurisdiction over a given area and so on. Tracking these historical changes is nessacery if you want to accurately convert historic local time into universal time or universal time into historic local time.
* And these rules are NOT a simple case of "on day x of month y". In particular it is common to fix the change to a particular day of the week. For example the european rule is last sundays in march and october. The north american rule is second sunday in march and first sunday in november. Some places like israel have even more complex rules revolving around religious events.
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I see where the terminology confusion came about. A lack of precision in the original statement left it open to misinterpretation
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as other people have replied to you, Timezone changes have a relationship with day length, some changes are not DST based, In my country we switched a few years back from UTC-4 to UTC-4.5 (we were at UTC-4.5 in 1960 IIRC) those changes are sometimes politically motivated and unrelated to a yearly DST switch. The day the switch was done it was not a 24 hours day and that affect all date related calculation that cross that day
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Just for sake of completeness, not all timezone changes are in increments of an hour. There are multiple that do half hour, some do two hours, and I've seen quarter hours.
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Someone please mod up parent as informative.
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More likely use UTC for meetings, flights, etc. Its not a big deal and it solves a lot of problems.
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This. Please world. Make sense for just once? And kill "Daylight saving's time" while you're at it. Apple will be much happier.
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Many authentication protocols use GMT to time stamp the tokens as to reduce the chance of replay attacks.
If it's 11:00 your time and 1:00 someone else's time, you need to convert them into a standard time. GMT being that time. If GMT was copyrighted, and you couldn't use it, then many authentication protocols would break.
Effectively, timezone calculations would be outlawed.
Really really dumb idea (Score:2)
The problem is that we've got clocks. They've got noon and midnight on them. We've also got the sun. It rises at dawn, sets at sunset, and mid-way through the day it's straight overhead. And silly humans, we expect our clocks and the sun to be sorta-kinda in sync. We expect that mid-way through the sun's cycle, when it's straight overhead at what we call noon, our clocks are also going to be mid-way through their cycle and will be reading noon. We expect midnight on the clocks to be in the middle of the nig
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24 hour clocks. That is the 1st step. Everybody can count to 24 now and digital clocks are in the majority.
Not that many use analog clocks anyhow. I was shocked to hear of college students who didn't know how to read an analog clock! they don't teach that in school anymore... I remembered when I learned it but still... I would have figured it out without having it in school... I was surprised by how many managed to not learn it; just shows how uncommon analog clocks are.
So the sun would rise at 0 for me, i
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Having said that, I can also see value in not having to wonder if 23:58 is
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There are literally thousands of companies who have created time-zone databases in order to deal with the complexities that exists with all of this.
Do you have any evidence to back up this claim?
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.... There are literally thousands of companies who have created time-zone databases in order to deal with the complexities that exists with all of this. So for umpteen years / decades this has not been an issue, but now in the wake of a gazillion copyright infringment lawsuits this company now claims ownership? Wow. This is just stupid.
For values of "thousands" equal to "maybe two." Pretty much everyone uses this one.
Except Microsoft.
Cue "everyone of value." comment in 5... 4... 3...
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Modern astronomy is based on ancient astrology. Everything has to start somewhere. In the case of computer clocks, it isn't so much that our clocks are based on astrology, it's that timekeeping began by studying the stars - and in antiquity, that meant astrology.
Modern astronomy still uses some of the ancient astrological terms.