Subject: Re: time zones

From: "Greg FizPatrick" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 04 Feb 2000 23:08:56 CET

Thanks Rives

I am really happy that I made somebody laugh today.   No, I don't know 
Joanna Petre, but it sounds as if she has an interesting, if difficult  job.

Thanks for some alternative examples to the Kingdom of Swat.  I think you've 
got the picture, there is a big spread on the organizational capacity of our 
world's societies.

There is probably some sort of logical correlation between what your 
reporting and the fact neither The Lebanon or Georgia (country) are exactly 
hot houses of information technology growth.

I am going to try to be terse.

People who collect and publicly share information of societal interest, 
spending their own, often unpaid time to do so, are to be admired and 
thanked by all.

Any knowledge that can be codified, will be.

All codified knowledge useful to transactional processes in commerce or 
science will be digitized.

All digital information will be stored on computers.

All computers will converse with other computers through networks, some 
public some private (if only virtually so).

Any transactional process that can be safely negotiated with out human 
intermediation, will be.

The above transitions and their effect will not occur evenly across the 
strata of our societies or spread linearly across the planet.  On the 
contrary.

The impending growth in, by humans, unintermediated machine negotiated 
transactional processes will nescesitate a new system of trusted parties, 
authoritive sources, and new liability structures.

Some of this will be fun and a lot will not.

Have a nice weekend.

Greg

From: Rives McDow <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>
Subject: time zones
Date: Fri, 04 Feb 2000 11:27:44 -0800

Dear Greg,

    Are you familiar with who officially tracks the time changes for the
United States?  If not, I would recommend that you and Doug contact her
before volunteering to host an authoritative list of time zone changes in
the world.  Your image of this happening automatically using little bots
actually got me to laugh out loud at its absurdity (It is really true humor,
as it has a bit of hoped for truth in it).  There is much more to time zone
data than can be put on a server in each country.  If you have any doubts
about this, call Joanna Petre, try to find out what Lebanon will do about
daylight savings (or their local equivalent, which I would call political
savings time rather than daylight savings time) in the year 2000, or try to
find out if Georgia (country) will implement daylight savings in the year
2000.  Then wait four months to see what happened in these last two
countries, and check again in July.  You will be surprised, and so will your
little bots!

    At this stage of development of time zones in the world, Olsen's list
works very well, as it leaves the authority where it in reality currently
resides, in the hands of the locals.  No government has as yet successfully
implemented a country-wide method of time-keeping if that country has
multiple time zones, with the possible exception of Brazil.  I have also
seen breakdowns there in authoritative directives, which is why I say
possible exception, as they do a good job in spite of the locals.

Sincerely,

Rives McDow

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