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Massachusetts Commission Considering a Potential Move to the Atlantic Time Zone

posted by Fnord666 on Sunday October 29 2017, @05:25PM   Printer-friendly
from the far-east dept.

takyon writes:

The Special Commission on the Commonwealth's Time Zone will vote on November 1st on a final draft of a report recommending that Massachusetts move to the Atlantic Time Zone from the Eastern Time Zone:

A commission is studying the possibility of having Massachusetts join the Atlantic Time Zone, putting it permanently an hour ahead of its current Eastern slot.

That would mean later sunsets in the colder months, and would put the state on a zonal par with the likes of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and Bermuda rather than the rest of the eastern United States.

The 11-member commission submitted a draft report on the move in September, and will vote on a final one on November 1. If that gets a green-light, the recommendation will go to lawmakers—who may or may not pursue the move.

Maine and New Hampshire would likely join Massachusetts in switching to the Atlantic Time Zone.

2014 editorial on the benefits. Also at NBC.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 1) by pTamok on Monday October 30 2017, @10:17PM (1 child)

    by pTamok (3042) on Monday October 30 2017, @10:17PM (#589727)

    If you look at the definition of UNIX time [wikipedia.org], you'll see why that might not be correct.

    Unix time (also known as POSIX time or epoch time)[citation needed] is a system for describing a point in time, defined as the number of seconds that have elapsed since 00:00:00 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), Thursday, 1 January 1970,[1][note 1] minus the number of leap seconds that have taken place since then.[1][2][note 2] It is used widely in Unix-like and many other operating systems and file formats. Because the same timestamp can refer to two distinct instants of time around a leap second, it is neither a linear measure of time nor a true representation of UTC.[note 3] Unix time may be checked on most Unix systems by typing date +%s on the command line.

    The 32-bit representation of Unix time will end after the completion of 2,147,483,647 (231 - 1) seconds from the beginning (00:00:00 1 January 1970), i.e., on 19 January, 2038 03:14:08 GMT. This is referred to as the "Year 2038 problem" where the 32-bit Unix time will overflow and will take the actual count to negative.

  • (Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Monday October 30 2017, @11:52PM

    by Aiwendil (531) on Monday October 30 2017, @11:52PM (#589767) Journal

    Yikes, thanks for pointing that out.
    Well, the notion of using all seconds since epoch still holds true as a decent solution - just seems we ran out of shortcuts.