Daylight Savings Time and me. chaos

huh. my laptop clock suddenly spun ahead by 1hr today morning, and gosh -did i just miss the submission deadline for my automata verif assignment :P

This whole daylight savings funda seems so fuzzy and confusing. I hear that the laws regarding DST are in constant flux, even today.

News: Indiana just started observing DST from today!! and in Aug. 2005, the US Congress passed an energy bill that included extending Daylight Saving Time by about a month. Thus, beginning in 2007, DST will start the second Sunday of March and end on the first Sunday of November!!! (gotta rmbr this now :P)

-- frm the archives --
Daylight savings time rules vary by location (as well as historically) -- for example some parts of Indiana don't obey Daylight Savings, India, Japan don't use it at all and in some countries (like Israel) it happens at a different time every year.

For example, in the year 1977, the United States was running on year-round Daylight Savings Time due to the energy crisis. Similarly, during World War 2, the United States went on DST all year round. And between 1945 and 1966, the DST rules varied from region to region.
The DST cutover dates in Israel are decided on a year-by-year basis by the Knesset. As a result, there is no deterministic formula for the day, and therefore no way to know it ahead of time.

So, these DST changes twice a year are like having the Y2K problem over and over, but without the media hype.. huh?

more observations:
1. The time zones in the US are not fixed. They've been changed 50 times! Detroit one day woke up and said "we're now an eastern time zone city" to be the same as NY and soon after Chicago (for awhile) said -- "hey, we wanna too!" and they did AND they observed DST so for a period, Chicago was one hour AHEAD of D.C.

2. Stalin put the USSR on DST one April and forgot to change it back in October and the USSR was "off" by an hour for over 60 years.

3. China, which spans five time zones, is always eight hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time and it does not observe DST. Though China is roughly the same size east-west as the USA, there's ONE time zone -- everyone is on Beijing time so in parts of western China, the sun rises at 12PM!

4. Widespread confusion was created during the 1950s and 1960s when each U. S. locality could start and end daylight saving time as it desired. One year, 23 different pairs of DST start and end dates were used in Iowa alone. For exactly five weeks each year, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were not on the same time as Washington D.C., Cleveland, or Baltimore—but Chicago was. And on one Ohio to West Virginia bus route, passengers had to change their watches SEVEN times in 35 miles!

5. The U.S. has imposed DST in the countries it has occupied -- they put Japan on it during WWII, S. Korea in the 50's, etc. (Part of the Kyoto Accord is that Japan must observe DST?). In Japan, after WWII in 1952, it was abandoned because of strong opposition by Japanese farmers.

6. Most of Canada uses Daylight Saving Time. Some exceptions include the majority of Saskatchewan and parts of northeastern British Columbia. In the fall of 2005, Manitoba and Ontario announced that like the United States, they would extend daylight time starting in 2007. The attorney general of Ontario commented that "it is important to maintain Ontario's competitive advantage by coordinating time changes with our major trading partner, and harmonizing our financial, industrial, transportation, and communications links." Other provinces have indicated that they may also follow suit.

7. It wasn't until 1996 that our NAFTA neighbors in Mexico adopted DST. Now all three Mexican time zones are on the same schedule as the United States.

8. Also in 1996, members of the European Union agreed to observe a "summer-time period" from the last Sunday in March to the last Sunday in October.

9. Most countries near the equator don't deviate from standard time.

10. In the Southern Hemisphere, where summer arrives in what we in the Northern Hemisphere consider the winter months, DST is observed from late October to late March.

11. Three large regions in Australia do not participate in DST. Western Australia, the Northern Territory, and Queensland stay on standard time all year. The remaining south-central and southeastern sections of the continent (which is where Sydney and Melbourne are found) make the switch. This results in both vertical and horizontal time zones Down Under during the summer months.

DST, the OldNewThing