[ale] erasing a hard drive

[The Don Lachlan]

On Sat, Aug 27, 2011 at 10:35:51AM -0400, Jim Kinney wrote:
> In Ethiopia the day begins at dawn which of course varies slightly
> throughout the year.
> Yeah. Policy made by non-scientists that pertain to science.
> On Aug 27, 2011 10:27 AM, "Mike Harrison" <cluon at geeklabs.com> wrote:
> > I'm currently dealing with a (foreign) legal system that is defining:
> > The last day of the month at exactly midnight, as the last timestamp of
> > the day, and they want data readings timestamped '2011-09-01 00:00:00' to
> > be what they think of as '2011-08-31 00:00:00' not groking that is the
> > begining of that day, not the end of it.. at least as far as the OS
> > (Linux of course) and MySQL are concerned.

That the "day" begins 12:00P and ends 11:59P is just a convention. There's
no natural law involved. As long as the "day" is approximately 24 hours,
it's scientifically correct. This doesn't mean GNU/Linux will support their
uncommon but scientifically correct calendar...

And the US has plenty of unscientific conventions: Time zones are loosely
based upon when the sun rises for that area and daylight savings is even
worse, making one day as short as 23 hours and one day as long as 25 hours,
accomodating the dramatic shift in sunrise.

And as someone who had to patch systems for the modified Daylight Savings
Time in 2007, I won't critique Ethopia's convention.

-L