In an article about the impending change to Daylight Saving Time (man, I always want to say “Daylight Savings Time”), CNN outlines the general technical issues that may arise, issues that anyone with half a brain has already thought of. (They do not bother to answer Sam’s question about farmers, although to be fair he didn’t ask them directly ;>)
I thought the last few paragraphs were interesting (and funny, in the case of Palestine):
Some European countries changed dates in response to a European Union directive to standardize daylight time beginning in 1996. That led to problems with Finnish dates in at least one version of Windows.
A few countries even change dates every year.
Israel, for instance, bases daylight time on the lunar Jewish calendar, and Palestinians change their clocks at different times as an assertion of independence. Windows doesn’t even provide an auto-adjust option for the time zone covering Jerusalem.
Moti Tzur, a sales manager at Sakal Electronics Ltd. in Jerusalem, says the constant changes do little to confound manufacturers, sales representatives or consumers.
“We get up and change the time on the VCR ourselves,” Tzur said. “These things come with directions.”
But while other countries have coped, Americans have largely become complacent and expect many clocks to change automatically because dates have been set for two decades, said Lauren Weinstein, a veteran technologist.
“Missiles won’t be launching but it’s still going to cause a lot of hassle,” he said. Risks grow when “things advance to the point where you expect things to happen automatically and you expect it to be correct.”
Yup, we Americans are all about being complacent.