oh god that's tonight... damn

yup. you'll lose an hour of sleep, and i've heard on nbc news that the lost hour of sleep will increase the chance of you having a heart attack by 5% in the next 2 weeks

;)

lol what the heck that's hype if i ever heard it.

i won't actually lose sleep normally i would hardly sleep on a saturday night but tonight i'm grounded. so i'll be getting more than normal... unless i sneak out of course ;)

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/359/18/1966

I didn't realise the zones moved into DST at different times - the UK won't switch until the end of the month or so.

US Congress changed it for the US a couple of years back.

Why?

Why DST? Because governments thinks that they can trick people into getting up earlier (for our own good, of course) if they abuse their authority to set standards of measurement by lying to us about what time it is.

...of course if you move your clock up manually now because you're in the U.S... you'll have to move it back again when the U.K. and others move to DST... I'm going to leave mine as it is and just remain cognisant of that fact.

Dexter, why would we have to do that?

Does GMT actually change because of DST?

Chrispminis, ah - my misunderstanding of GMT - I thought since the UK uses GMT that if they also use DST that by definition GMT moved by an hour in the UK and thus the system clock would shift by an hour at that time. However it seems that it is unconnected. BST (British Summer Time) is GMT +1. Thus I should change my clock now so that it matches GMT +9... and I won't have to change it again until the fall.

oops, GMT -7, I mean.

so if i'm in the US central time zone and I was on CST, which I took to be GMT -6... that means I go to GMT -5... which when we're not in dst is EST... right?

So now I should tell people that I'm on CDST right? Or just EST? Or should I assume they know that America is on DST and say CST? Lol

Actually, it's CDT just as I'm in EDT.

CST = GMT-0600,
CDT = EST = GMT-0500
CT is either CST or CDT, depending on the time of year.

If anyone knows of a good FOSS PHP library that handles timezones, including DST, I'll use it, but tracking DST for the globe is definitely not something Id like to get involved in :-(

Until then you'll have to remember to reset your phpDip clock, just like your other ones

(The other option is to replace the time with age, so instead of 1:00pm it'd say 4 hours ago, but I don't think that'd be a good solution)

Of course it doesn't change automatically! This site has people from both the northern and southern hemispheres on it, and depending upon which side of the Equator you call home you'll end up changing your clocks different directions at roughly the same time of year.

... not to mention how some localities, particularly those at lower latitudes, ignore Daylight Savings Time. I think at least part of Arizona is this way.

Or you could set all of the clocks in your life, including this one, to GMT (or whatever you arbitrarily pick) once and never change them again. Just remember where you are and what month it is when you look at your watch.

@Fig - DST was originally introduced as a energy saving strategy. It did not work as intended - people tend to drive more, etc.

But what it does do is increase consumerism. People coming home from work are more likely to stop off and pick up gardening equipment or that new DVD or whatever if it's still light out. DST was moved up a month in the US because businesses lobbyed for it.

British Summer Time (BST) doesn't begin until the last Sunday in March, so the UK is still in GMT for now. So to hear the Americans talking about moving clocks this early really confused me! And the clocks changing is for the farmers, or at least that's what I've always been told...

Here in WA we've been using DST for the last 3 years before it gets put to a vote this year as to whether we keep it, and it looks ~50:50

I don't envy the guys who have to write time code which accounts for timezones :-(

British Summer Time, which advances the legal time by one hour during the summer months, is done in order to promote greater efficiency in the use of the daylight hours and of artificial lighting.

It was originally introduced as a wartime measure in 1916. It has been continued through peacetime as well, with occasional variations such as double summer time (advancing the clocks by a second hour for part of the summer) in World War 2.

Hmm, actually to those who're answering me - I know about DST, and I thought it was for the war as CG said.
My question was actually why the US have moved their's back to 7 months not 6
ps: thank goodness for the sending two message notice - i didn't notice a spelling mistake until then

Seriously, they moved it back for the reasons I stated above. More daylight after workdays is good for business and companies lobbied Congress to move DST to an earlier date.

NPR did a long segment on it yesterday.

Ah sorry, I misread the comment - didn't see the last line, very bad of me sorry!

@Toby Bartels: No, I think you misunderstood the question. Not "why DST", but "Why did Congress change it for the US?". Unless he really meant that, in which case I will probably end up looking like a complete idiot. And I don't know the answer.

And it's not just the government abusing power. The idea was first taken seriously when a huge group of parents wanted their children to not have to wait at the bus stops in the dark (their reasoning was mostly either crime issues or because their children were scared, or they thought they were). There were of so many of them lobbying for some sort of change half of Congress probably would have lost re-election if they had all opposed it.