In message <20050811140613.GA20727_at_ucolick.org>, 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
phk_at_FreeBSD.ORG | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
Received on Thu Aug 11 2005 - 09:45:24 PDT