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Daylight Wasting Time: "Here's two thoughts for the day, on the topic of DST: Oh, brother. I've done work on systems that track time in fine detail, and I don't think anyone, myself included, appreciates how titanically awful this change is going to be. I don't believe anyone has counted the cost in man power to fix every piece of legacy code that cares about time down to the minute, or the second. Payroll systems, medical, banking, even some legal software, are going to have to be patched. Sun is even going to need to release patches for every dusty old version of the JDK that's still hanging around on the nouveau-legacy systems out there. If someone had put the idea in a prominent labor organizer's head that he could play ball with his kids after work if he negotiated Summer Hours with the factory, we wouldn't have needed Daylight Savings Time to be legislated. Like the 5-day work week, we'd have de facto DST without all of the screwy, inconsistent bookeeping. The time difference between 1 am today and 1 am last Tuesday would always be 168 hours, give or take a leap second. No problems. 9-5 business hours are a convention, are they not? Why couldn't we have a convention that business hours from April to October are 8-4, instead of changing 9-5 to be 8-4? "