Did you know daylight saving time will change next year?

[Ninong]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - This Halloween will be the last time most U.S. kids yell "trick-or-treat" in the dark, as next year's extension of daylight saving time promises to shed more light on traditional candy-gathering activities.

This year clocks will be turned back one hour on Sunday, October 29, bringing a close to daylight saving time and an earlier nightfall just before Halloween, which comes October 31. However, the U.S. Congress tucked a provision into last year's massive energy bill that will tack four extra weeks onto daylight saving time in a bid to save energy.

Under the new law, clocks will be moved forward an hour to begin daylight saving time next year on the second Sunday in March, instead of the first Sunday in April. It will end on the first Sunday in November, not the last Sunday in October.

[inwall75]

Ahhhh!!!!

Don't change things on me. My brother and sister-in-law live in Indiana which used to be in the Central Time Zone but ignored daylight savings time. I adapted to it. Then they switched to the Eastern Time Zone and adopted Daylight Savings Time. Even though technically, this made it easier on me (they are always ahead one hour), I still find it challenging to remember what time it is there.

[Poseidon]

Why can't they just leave the clock ALONE???? I hate changing the time!

[Ninong]

Daylight Saving Time starts this coming weekend!

[zhenya]

Daylight Saving Time starts this coming weekend!

Looks like I will be adjusting clock manually on my PC, cellphone, etc....

[Penguin]

Will this really save that much energy? I'm skeptical.

[Ninong]

Will this really save that much energy? I'm skeptical.

Saving energy is un-American! That's why the Bush Administration wants us to buy gigantic SUVs that will burn even more gas and stimulate the bottom line of the big oil companies.

“We need an energy bill that encourages consumption.” --George W. Bush, speech in Trenton NJ, Sept. 23, 2002. That would improve the temporary bottom line for the oil industry, but it makes America more dependent on foreign oil and hastens the depletion of oil and other energy resources. He offered a $10 billion gift to the oil companies to stimulate demand rather than a subsidy for conservation measures.

Or, to quote Ann Coulter, the well-known conservative Republican leader:

• The ethic of conservation is the explicit abnegation of man's dominion over the Earth. The lower species are here for our use. God said so: Go forth, be fruitful, multiply, and rape the planet — it's yours. That's our job: drilling, mining and stripping. Sweaters are the anti-Biblical view. Big gas-guzzling cars with phones and CD players and wet bars — that's the Biblical view.
  • Oil Good; Democrats bad; October 12, 2000

• God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, 'Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It's yours.'
  • Fox News; Hannity & Colmes; June 20, 2001
  • (References to Genesis 1:28. See also Dominionism)

[SPasse]

Hi All,

I would like to say that the DST change is a major pain in the butt for companies like mine that have tens of thousands of PCs that were programmed to make the DST time according the traditional time frames.

It is a PCs operating system that keeps track of the DST dates and millions of PCs had to be software patched to be compliant to the new standard.

This is a “mini Y2K” for computers that have processes that are time of day dependent.

Regards,

Scott

[Ninong]

Scott,

I was surprised to read in an article yesterday that many of these firms seem to have been caught by surprise. Is it possible that not a single employee in those firms was aware of the pending change? This provision was in the 2005 energy bill. It's been common knowledge for more than a year now.

Is it possible that major corporations don't keep up with changes that affect their operations? Or perhaps they just decided to do nothing until the last minute?

[SPasse]

George,

For most companies, two years is considered “long term planning”. This is something that American companies are notoriously bad at.

I think that the implications of this change on a “PC/computer based society” were not thought through until the deadline was very near.

Even the federal government was seriously considering postponing the implementation of the upcoming change. That would have really be a debacle. People/companies would have to back out of whatever changes that they had already implemented.

Regards,

[FONT='Verdana','sans-serif']Scott[/FONT]

[Ninong]

This is weird. My computer didn't change to DST yet, so I went to the Microsoft site to download the patch, or whatever it's called, and I got a message telling me that my computer already had the "fix" installed. I think all of that stuff is supposed to download automatically or something.

Anyway, I wonder how come my computer's time is still an hour slow? It's a Dell computer that I bought in October 2002. It's running WinXP with Service Pack 2.

[SPasse]

George,

Did you re-boot it?

Sometimes the patch doesn’t “take” until after a re-boot.

Regards,

Scott

[Ninong]

I can't download the patch because I got a message telling me that my computer already has it installed. That's because I receive all Microsoft updates automatically as they are released. And since I turn off my computer every night, it gets rebooted at least once a day.

[SPasse]

George,

Also make sure that you are still in the right time zone.

We had some people that ended up in strange time zones after the patch.

Regards,

Scott

[Ninong]

Scott,

It had me as "central standard time" and the box to check to automatically adjust computer for daylight saving time was blank. I know that that box used to have a check mark in it. I just checked it and the computer's time instantly changed to the correct central daylight saving time.

I think that when that patch was downloaded, it somehow removed the checked option to automatically update my computer when DSL changes. I have never had to change it myself during the four years I have owned this computer.

Anyway, it's fixed now.

Thanks!