Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 22:25:41 -0400 From: John Hawkinson <jhawk@MIT.EDU>
[ I had originally sent a version of this on Tuesday morning, but it failed to go through because apparently lecserver.nci.nih.gov is still firewalled, and elsie works only because of an MX record. ]
Yes, things are still much messed up for me as well. I am getting no copies of email (I had to FTP the mail archive from elsie to see your mail). Also, the email headers get rewritten to be from tz@lecserver.nci.nih.gov, so when people reply to email their messages do not get through. Perhaps we should move the list elsewhere? I can volunteer the GNU email server <http://lists.gnu.org/>, if that would help.
HR numbers are per-year (e.g. HR.6 of the 109th Congress), and are really only useful before bills become laws. I expect it will be assigned a Public Law number sometime this coming week, and that will appear at "http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:HR00006:@@@S".
Can we wait until then and include that number?
I wouldn't wait. We can update the comment later.
p.s.: I keep wondering if its a good time to propose changing the default name of US timezones to US/Eastern -style rather than America/New_York, because our timezones are set based on national policy
Unfortunately that's not quite true. The daylight-saving rules are national policy, but whether to adopt daylight-saving is decided more locally. (Speaking of which, what is the story on Indiana? <http://www.perrycountynews.com/articles/2005/08/15/top_story/t1.txt> says that Indiana will observe DST starting next year. Is that really true?) Also, time zone boundaries move. So, for example, US/Eastern is not correct for Monticello, KY, as it will mishandle time stamps before 2000 (Monticello switched from Central to Eastern in fall 2000). We will continue to support names like US/Eastern indefinitely, but the location-based names are more accurate.