In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Steve Allen writes: >On Thu 2005-08-11T14:40:10 +0200, Poul-Henning Kamp hath writ: >> Because the food industry is required to provide trackability for >> food and the requirement is UTC time. > >Not over here it isn't. I'm pretty sure the time stamps on the milk >cartons are local time, and I don't think I care much whether the >clock on the dairy was accurate to a minute.
You don't. The food FDA does. The knowledge may not have left the dairy's computers, but the moment 8 people get sick in the same neighborhood, the FDA will be matching batch-numbers and asking for production lots, timestamps, production line coincidence etc etc. I know the USA is a bit less tighthly regulated, but over here the law is that the identities and addresses of all employees who have been involved in the production of a given unit of milk product SHALL be available within 6 hours of the question being asked. I have noticed that when ground beef in the USA is recalled, it is often in quantities of hundreds of tons, which might indicate that a quite granular approach is being taken, over here they usuall just cancel a few hundred kilos. >It seems to me that this one would be pretty simple to fix. >If every factory started using TAI (or, horrors, GPS time) >and a few lobbyists went to the government to have TAI declared >as a legal time scale (just as the metric system was declared legal >here well over a century ago, and it, in truth, the actual standard >by which things operate) then there could hardly be as much objection >as the dairies are having right now to the new Daylight Saving Time >legislation. You think making a such legislative change to time will be that easy in the country which has not yet gone metric ? :-) I hate to repeat this again and again, but any solution which is predicated on "fixing the computers" is not economically feasible in the short term. -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 [EMAIL PROTECTED] | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.