Nathan Myers wrote on 1997-03-21 06:05 UTC:

Maybe there should be another list to help discover strategies to influence idiot politicians. I hope that those of you who are interested in the idea will create that list, instead of using this one.

We had already a discussion a few months ago, to set up some sort of "International Time Zone Information Center" that publishes an annual newsletter, which would be sent to every government and informs the buerocrats in charge about - what time zone rules exist all over the world - what headaches time zone changes cause for software folks - distribute research results about time zone changes - discuss possible standards for common time zone rules - motivate governments to announce time zone changes to the center at least 24 months in advance History shows, that politicians often lack basic astronomical knowledge and do not fully understand how their time zone changes relate to sunrise/sunset times in various parts of their countries during the year. Politicians also have very little idea about hundreds of millions of Windows95 PCs that switch automatically according to the old rules. We just need someone dedicated, who could offer the resources to run this information center. See the tzarchive starting at 1996-09-05 for further ideas and discussion. <ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzarchive.gz> Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Science grad student, Purdue University, Indiana, USA -- email: kuhn@cs.purdue.edu