EU Polls The Public About Abandoning Daylight Savings Time (europa.eu) 254
"Following a number of requests from citizens, from the European Parliament, and from certain EU Member States, the Commission has decided to investigate the functioning of the current EU summertime arrangements and to assess whether or not they should be changed."
The EU has launched an official "online consultation" seeking input from the public. Long-time Slashdot reader mitch0 writes: The consultation was started after some member states expressed the opinion that the daylight saving time should be abolished within the EU. There were some local motions in member countries as well, but these cannot really proceed without full coordination with all member states.
So far it seems that most of those wanting to end the daylight-saving change would stick to summer time all-year round, but the questionnaire has a specific question about this issue so a more representative result is expected after the survey is closed in the middle of August...
Citizens can express their opinion about the summer time change by filling out a short online survey.
The EU has launched an official "online consultation" seeking input from the public. Long-time Slashdot reader mitch0 writes: The consultation was started after some member states expressed the opinion that the daylight saving time should be abolished within the EU. There were some local motions in member countries as well, but these cannot really proceed without full coordination with all member states.
So far it seems that most of those wanting to end the daylight-saving change would stick to summer time all-year round, but the questionnaire has a specific question about this issue so a more representative result is expected after the survey is closed in the middle of August...
Citizens can express their opinion about the summer time change by filling out a short online survey.
DST (Score:5, Insightful)
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They should eliminate it simply based on the increase in heart attacks it causes.
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They should eliminate it simply based on the increase in heart attacks it causes.
Triggers, not causes. A heart healthy person will get a heart attack from neither adjusting sleeping/waking preferences nor irritation it may cause.
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Triggers, not causes. A heart healthy person will get a heart attack from neither adjusting sleeping/waking preferences nor irritation it may cause.
Congratulations, you win today's "Pedant who added nothing to the conversation" award! Your prize is all the self-administered pats on the back you can manage.
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It's an important distinction. It's one thing to cause a heart attack in a healthy individual and it's something else to trigger a heart attack in an overweight person who smokes and drinks and is going to have one anyway triggered by something, if not the DST change.
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Actually, it was more predominant in those under 65 and no correlation was noted regarding pre-existing conditions. It did note that women were affected more than men, suggesting that the increased rate of sleep deprivation in women may play a factor.
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A heart healthy person will get a heart attack from neither adjusting sleeping/waking preferences nor irritation it may cause.
. . . which excludes about a third of the folks in the US . . .
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...which is not part the EU.
DST was framed. No wait, that was DSK.
Re:DST (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't that the one benefit of DST changes? If it wasn't for the clock change, those heart attacks would have happened at random. No way to plan for those. At least with the clock change you can prep for the increased load of patients, right?
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I thought this was a joke but it's modded insightful.
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That makes two of us.
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I see where you're going with this.
By your logic we should have the occasional mass shooting because that is much easier for emergency responders to deal with than individual shootings peppered across the country.
Got it.
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I take it that you've seen The Purge. Seems like it should work pretty well.
What real issue do you have with this sort of efficiency? It will make us better as a country. Dare I say, this sort of forward thinking could make America great again.
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Clock change happens on Sunday morning, the heart attacks happen on Monday morning, so the problem is work. Mandate no critical meetings in the morning and mandatory grace for being a few minutes late and we'll eliminate those and many more heart attacks.
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so the problem is work
Hell yeah. Sounds like an easy fix... Let's extend it to the rest of the year, just to be safe.
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They should eliminate it simply based on the increase in heart attacks it causes.
Duh. DST 1 hour shift is as stressful as one hour jet lag, what most people don't even notice while traveling. The event causes about same amount stress as when you watch TV-programming one hour later Saturday evening and then need to wake up ordinary time Sunday morning. That's what the actual event causes. But some people make it in their mind worse by worrying it beforehand and apparently enjoy being drama queens whole next week.
Amen!
That one hour difference is totally insignificant.
So many EU people fly for holidays to Greece or the Canary Isles and Brits go to France or the Spanish Costa's and they wouldn't even know the difference.
Re:DST (Score:5, Informative)
There is a rational reason. It is to make people wake up with the sun, more or less.
Here: http://gpinzone.blogspot.com/2... [blogspot.com]
Stop this madness (Score:2, Interesting)
That article has several logical flaws. While there may be benefits to *being on* DST, there are also significant drawbacks to *switching* to and from DST, as mentioned above. The article never admits those, or compares their relative risks.
Assuming it's true that changing clocks twice a year helps match "our modern clockwork-driven world adjust to our ancestral sleep and wake patterns", then wouldn't changing clocks 4 times a year be even better? Or every month? Why not every day? And instead of doing it
Re:DST (Score:5, Informative)
There is no rational reason why we have to fool around with our clocks twice a year.
No rational reason? Mid-northern latitudes (~40-50 degrees) have about 16 hours sunlight in summer, and only 8 in winter. In summer, 1 hour is added to the clock, so that the sunrise is not at 5am (6 instead), and people benefit from late sunlight since this is a holiday season. In winter with no hour added sunrises happens at an earlier time, otherwise people would go to work in total darkness.
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Then it should be done based on longitude, not latitude? That seems like a problem for people living in the far north. The rest of the planet super doesn't care what happens above 50 degrees north. Forcing 85% of the world population to change clocks for no apparent reason, to appease the 15% that live where this matters seems like a non-starter for me. Hard pass.
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Roughly half of Europe lives north of the 50 degree line.
Re:DST (Score:5, Insightful)
otherwise people would go to work in total darkness
so instead we go home in total darkness.
Re:DST (Score:4, Funny)
In winter with no hour added sunrises happens at an earlier time, otherwise people would go to work in total darkness.
Only people in suburban Detroit. The rest of us have working streetlights.
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In fact, there are a number of rational reasons *not* to make a change. I am a research professor, and time is my field, including chronobiology. I see that someone has already mentioned the heart attacks thing. But there are a number of other effects. Similar to the heart attacks, there is a spike in automobile accidents during time changes. More generally, and probably of more impact, every single person experiences increased stress, and reduced time and quality of sleep due to the change. So it's not onl
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What electricity savings from DST? Studies conclude that if anything, DST costs more electricity to cool/heat a building than it saves in lighting.
Re:DST (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep, and not only that, we see spikes in heart attacks/death every time we fsck with the clocks and having it mess with our internal clocks.
I wish we could abolish it in the US too.
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Yep, and not only that, we see spikes in heart attacks/death every time we fsck with the clocks and having it mess with our internal clocks.
I wish we could abolish it in the US too.
Nah, we should change the clocks 4 times a year to weed out even more of the weak from the gene pool.
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Generally everyone gets their time from a central source, usually the one feeding their cell phone or their network connection.
Generally people shouldn't generalise. My wristwatch doesn't get time from a central source. There's not an electrical component in it, let alone a network based one.
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Yes it does. It has a biological computer that keeps it synchronised to some authoritative source, unless you are claiming you have never adjusted the time it shows.
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Like I've never heard of people suffering because they travel a to/fro an adjacent time zone.
Yes I like DST and have NO sympathy for the whiners.
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LMGTFY:
https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
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When I click that link, the very first thing I see on the page is this:
In 2008, Energy Department experts studied the impact of the extended Daylight Saving Time on energy consumption in the U.S. and found that the extra four weeks of Daylight Saving Time saved about 0.5 percent in total electricity per day.
When I click on that link I go to this government page: https://www.energy.gov/article... [energy.gov]
On that page it says:
While this might not sound like a lot, it adds up to electricity savings of 1.3 billion kilowatt-hours -- or the amount of electricity used by more than 100,000 households for an entire year.
So... I'm not sure who's the liar here. Maybe you're just lying to yourself.
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There's been numerous studies. Yes, there's (probably) a tiny electric savings. There's also a loss from increased heating expenses, which are not usually electric. Overall studies have struggled to find a benefit and some have even shown an overall net loss. But we know people die in traffic accidents and from heart attacks at an increased rate afterwards--- the cost of the extra death exceeds a (doubtful) couple hundred million dollars in energy savings per annum.
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Re: DST (Score:4, Interesting)
So... I'm not sure who's the liar here. Maybe you're just lying to yourself.
From the looks of it the effect varies with the local climate [nytimes.com]:
But does daylight time still save energy? Not really, according to most research on the subject. Lighting has become a smaller part of overall energy consumption, and extending the use of daylight hours encourages people to use more air conditioning and heating. A 2017 analysis of 44 different papers on the subject found that, on average, the policy helped save 0.34 percent of electricity use. Places farther from the Equator (with mild summers and lower cooling demands) might save energy, but places closer to the Equator used more energy during daylight time, the researchers found.
I did find another study (PDF) [www.nmbu.no] from Europe though that showed that really far north like Scandinavia it didn't actually help much at all. So it looks to be a Goldilocks zone, if you can extend the number of temperate days where there's no major need for warming/cooling then you can save a bit. And if we're moving towards EVs then it'll be an even smaller fraction of total power usage. But it's still zero point something percent.
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... and the ability for people to go outdoors and work early in the morning.
Wait! What? I wasn't aware that I wasn't allowed outside early w/o messing with my clocks.
(Personally, I wouldn't mind everyone just using GMT and the time is the time.)
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Structural problems (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd imagine there's going to be quite a marked geographic divide on this. Southern Europe probably DGAF as they don't get the sort of seasonal variation in daylight hours you get in the north, and the very far north of Europe they have such extremes of variation in daylight hours that fudging the clocks by an hour makes no real difference. However there's going to be a band across the middle (UK, France, Germany, etc) where there exists the right balance between having a problem, and being able to somewhat remedy it by moving your clocks for a few months.
The problem of course is that whatever is decided is going to be foist onto everyone regardless of need or want, because that's how the EU rolls
Re:Structural problems (Score:5, Funny)
Plus they sleep all day anyway.
Re:Structural problems (Score:4, Funny)
Plus they sleep all day anyway.
. . . and the Southern Europeans respond with a chorus of:
"Only mad dogs, and Englishmen, go out in the noonday sun."
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. . . and the Southern Europeans respond with a chorus of:
"Only mad dogs, and Englishmen, go out in the noonday sun."
Uhh, it is:
Only mad dogs and other Englishman go out in the noonday sun.
Re:Structural problems (Score:4, Insightful)
Taking a nap at lunchtime would be good for the rest of us too.
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Wrong.
They spend more time at work.
Well, yeah, the office has AC.
since it is summer (Score:2)
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The sun is already up too early during summer, another half hour would make it a lot worse...
We should just accept that winter sucks, the nights are long no matter how we play with the clocks...
Just stick to summer time, that way at least the change to the sucky part of the year is gradual, and not a sudden one-hour shift a lot of people hate.
Not to mention that the one hour shift this way and that still causes issues in most IT systems that need to be cleaned up each year after the change... (mostly when t
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But it wasn't, it was our clocks that was set to summer time and suddenly the old "the sun is in the south at noon" no longer holds.
It usually doesn't anyhow, due to most people not being at the meridian for their time zone. In some cases, that has a much bigger impact than the one hour offset of DST. Almost all of Alaska, for example is more than one hour off already, and so is Western parts of Argentina. Western parts of China are tree hours off.
The solution that would solve a lot of problems in the modern world is to decouple time from the sun position. Have everyone use UTC, and adjust working/opening hours to what makes the mos
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I've been saying this same thing for years.
It all started when I was doing astronomy for a bit. Everything was in UT, and once I wrapped my head around that, everything time-related was so much easier.
If you work 9 till 17, and I work 15 till 23, it's damn easy to figure out when to schedule a conference call. If you work 9 to 5 and I work 8 till 4 and we're 5 timezones apart and you're on DST and I'm not, it becomes a hell of a lot harder to to figure out when we can do business.
But we can't even get the U
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If you work 9 till 17, and I work 15 till 23, it's damn easy to figure out when to schedule a conference call.
My former boss would have said 4, because that's the time that will inconvenience both the same amount...
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My colleague in the UK sets up a meeting and the mail says it was set up at UTC time which sound logic.
Only after accepting it shows they actually meant UTC+1 where I am.
Yes I know, Outlook is Microsoft.
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Have everyone use UTC, and adjust working/opening hours to what makes the most sense for any business. There would be no more problems with lazy developers using zulu time and aggregating data from different parts of the world. "Can we meet at 17:00" would be unambiguous without either part having to adjust to the other person's time zone and DST.
Having the date and day of week change during working hours in some parts of the world (East Asia, Australia/Oceania, America) might be a little bit inconvenient.
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Having the date and day of week change during working hours in some parts of the world (East Asia, Australia/Oceania, America) might be a little bit inconvenient.
Only until you can mentally decouple the sun from the time. On the plus side, it causes less confusions when dealing with people who are far away, because then the sun position won't come into the equation, because you just have to deal with time, not date and sun position.
For people in the far North (or South), it will be relatively easy, because near polar latitudes, people are well used to sun position varying widely compared to the clock anyhow.
The US South is going to be the problem. But then again,
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Its not going to work at different hours with UTC. It is going to work on Monday at 2000 and getting home at Tuesday at 0800.
Having the day change in the middle of the day would be very confusing. What does "see you tomorrow" mean then?
What it always has meant. When you decouple the date and day, you are free to use one without interference from the other. Solar position is local, but time is global.
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Not DST (Score:2)
I know DST is generally stupid and bad, but that's the wrong time to end. DST is the good time where you get home from work and can still actually see the sun. Humans still primarily do stuff in the daytime.
Let's make everything DST. Abandon "StandardTime" or whatever it is called in the sucky months.
Re:Not DST (Score:5, Informative)
The submission may have been a bit misleading, but it is not DST that is proposed to get abolished, but the DST change. So, each country is free to chose the timezone they'd like to remain in after the DST change is ended. There is a specific question for this in the poll as well (keep summer time, keep winter time or "don't care").
I sure as hell hope the DST change will be ended, and we'll stick to summer time.
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It really depends on the number of daylight hours you have. That hour change in countries with more hours of daylight, means not getting up in the dark in winter, nor wasting daylight in summer. Oh my god the horror of adjusting a clock twice a year, oh wait I don't, all my computerised gear does it automatically. I still have an old clock radio going, for no real apparent reason and I don't bother to adjust the time on that, just doing it my head as appropriate to the season.
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Not enough light in the morning? Start later. Not enough light in the evening? Start earlier.
Yeah, the farm animals will be totally OK with being fed/milked late every day.
Re:Not DST (Score:5, Informative)
How much light you have on a day depends on how close to a pole you live, and if it is summer or winter.
Judging from your username I suppose you are in Southern USA. Well, southern Europe is about as far north as northern USA.
For me in Stockholm in Northern Europe, the sun sets today at 10 pm and rises at 03:47 am CET. One hour forwards or backwards would not matter because it is TOO BRIGHT anyway.
BTW, in the middle of winter, if the day is cloudy it may only get as bright as the summer nights are darkest. But then we don't have DST.
Re:Not DST (Score:5, Insightful)
There's little point in me getting to school an hour before the prof, or to the supermarket before the staff.
And I hear there are these things called jobs where it's sometimes necessary for several people to be there together.
Many bussinesses (Score:2)
individually have different start times. 6 AM starts exist and 7 AM is reasonably common.
Try bringing the idea up at work.
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That means every company, school, transport system and whatever has to have two timetables.
Or they could just open at three fingers after sunrise, like they did before railways were invented.
Wish! (Score:2)
I wish they were polling and seriously considering it here, in the USA. I 100% want to abandon time changing and stay on DTS (summer time) year-round. Almost everyone I know wants it, too. It is ridiculous that we don't just act and do it.
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Reply to self on typo, that is DST, not DTS.
The DTS vs. Dolby Digital arguments can start somewhere else :)
Go full French (Score:2)
Decimal time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: Go full French (Score:2)
We tried that and it didnâ(TM)t work. So letâ(TM)s not try it again.
It already crashed their servers, ..! (Score:2)
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Probably says a thing or two, ...
Opinions are like arseholes, everyone has one?
Half an hour (Score:2)
Just stop messing with clocks! (Score:2)
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Saving, saving, saving ... (Score:3)
... not saving s .
Americans be like ... (Score:2)
... will it be a hard DSTXIT?
End DST Didn't they already do that? (Score:2)
Didn't they already do that?
Or is it just the FIA
I have noticed that all of the European Formula 1 races this season start at 8am Central Daylight Time or later, previously they started at 7am CDT
which is goof for me since I work every other weekend until 7am
Old Native American saying (Score:5, Funny)
Only the White Man would cut a foot off the top of a blanket, sew it on the bottom, and proclaim he had a longer blanket.
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You are an excellent candidate for my sig.
Should abandon CET (Score:5, Informative)
A lot of the western European countries (e.g. Spain, France) should abandon Central European Time (CET) of any type.
It doesn't make any sense since since they're in western and not central Europe.
That's one reason people eat so late in Spain, as they're to the west of England.
Instead they should use WET (Western European Time), i.e. essentially follow the UK....
Tyranny of the Majority (Score:4, Interesting)
I am an extreme night owl by nature. It's something generic according to the latest research. I try my best to fit in with "normal" people's schedule, and get by OK for most part with a painstakingly maintained bedtime. But twice a year, the time switch throws me off for weeks at a time. It has been a struggle of a lifetime.
If there is one textbook example of the tyranny of the majority, this is it. We need to get rid of it in the states too.
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I'm not a historian, but I've heard theories that the reason it was introduced in the first place was because of something like that. Crazy talk, I know.
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Originally it was to save on candles. I solved it a different way:I installed electricity.
Re: Been there, tried that (Score:2)
The primary reason in the US was lobbying from golf courses. They wanted more commerce in the evening.
Openning hours (Score:5, Interesting)
This has already been tried several times over the years and always with the same result: People discover that they don't like it being dark longer in the morning during the winter.
...which you can also compensate by changing working hours.
And several business have different opening hours during the seasons anyway (e.g.: due to reduced work force due to vacations in summer).
So giving summer-specific opening hours that also happen to take into account the variation of sun time isn't that far fetched.
(E.g.: public transport has different time tables at different time of the year, public services tend to have reduced opening hours due to lots of them going into vacations, hospitals emergencies work in shifts around the clock anyway, movie schedule change each week with new release, work-from-home and artists put their own work hours anyway, university research team tend to have the most WTF work hours specially for PhD students (except for that guy who has Eukaryotik cell cultures. He needs to feed them every 32 hours no matter how out of sync it gets with any rational work schedule), etc. Shops are about the only things which seem to open at a constant timetable.)
It used to make sense to shift clocks back in the industrial era when most of the activities were dictated by fixed time schedules and nearly everybody needed to be in sync (factory working ours).
Nowadays, in our mostly service-sector-based type of work, you need to check (e.g.: online on your smartphone) the opening hours and time schedule for probably around 7 out of 10 business. Supressing DST will simply make you check for the last remaining 3 too, instead of relying on fixed clock times.
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This has already been tried several times over the years and always with the same result: People discover that they don't like it being dark longer in the morning during the winter.
...which you can also compensate by changing working hours.
And several business have different opening hours during the seasons anyway (e.g.: due to reduced work force due to vacations in summer).
Next time think before you post.
In the economically significant parts of the EU in winter the sun comes up after 09:00 and sets before 17:00.
Already virtually everyone goes to work or school and returns in the dark, making the sun come up after 10:00 is just not acceptable.
DST work (Score:2)
In the economically significant parts of the EU in winter the sun comes up after 09:00 and sets before 17:00.
Already virtually everyone goes to work or school and returns in the dark, making the sun come up after 10:00 is just not acceptable.
This is not how DST works.
DST isn't active in the winter to begin with.
If the sun is up between 09:00 and 17:00, that is still going to be 09:00 and 17:00 wether DST exists or not.
DST is active in summer.
The same place would have sun in summer between 05:00 and 21:00 in the summer.
DST would shift by (+1) in the summer, corresponding to 06:00 and 22:00.
So somebody working 09:00 to 17:00, will only start working 3 hours after the sun rise, and will still get 5 hours of sun after the end of work ( <- that
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All it does is bring all kinds of complications
Like what? People don't even have to set clocks these days, it's all Internet-sync this, auto-adjust that.
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People still have clocks? I use my phone for all my timekeeping & alarm needs....
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Re: Been there, tried that (Score:2)
Duh, you get a smart oven which runs an outdated version on busybox and some simple cgi scripts that don't validate input properly, allowing hackers to gain root access to a device inside your home network.
Re:Let's do Metric Time Instead! (Score:5, Interesting)
No more need for time zones, or the dreaded DST, at all! One time zone to rule them all!
You're trying to be funny but actually in China this is exactly what they do. The whole country is on Beijing Time despite being what would normally be a 4 time zone wide country. And they don't bother with DST either.
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They tried DST for a few years, found no benefit, and promptly ended it. Something to be said about an authoritarian style government.
Re: Let's do Metric Time Instead! (Score:2, Insightful)
No, and that's why they're doing a public consultation rather than just telling everyone what's best! I know you Americans love to criticise the EU, but you really should educate yourself on how it works first.
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Buy shit made after Y2K.
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The EU has Public Consultations regularly, even if they only [slashdot.org] occasionally [slashdot.org] get Slashdot coverage. There are 21 open consultations [europa.eu] this very moment, if you feel that you have something to offer.
As for other matters... well, you're asked to select your representatives every 5 years for the EU Parliament and (I suspect) every 4 years for your national assembly and thus also the EU Council of Ministers. You can reach out to your representatives at any time, or work to replace them at the next election. And if y