Doug
Really sorry about the closing quote.
As for the date formatting I am so locked into my little part of the world
here in southeastern Pennsylvania, I find I am hard pressed to even think of
New Jersey, much less other parts of the planet. I guess one of these days,
one of my projects, will wind up in a Day/Month/Year place and my phone will
ring with a customer complaint. Old programming habits are hard to break,
especially when there is no direct or immediate negative feed back.
Actually we earthlings ought to take a new look at all things temporal. Why
24 hours, why 60 minutes. Hell, I say we should Metricize (new word) the
whole shebang. How about:
1 year = 10 months
1 month = 10 days
1 day = 10 hours
1 hour = 10 minutes
1 minute = 10 seconds
1 Second = 10 centaseconds
1 centaseconds = 10 millisecond
and so on until we get really small increments of time. We do not need to
fix up the bigger increments of time as they already fit nicely into the way
the rest of the world does metric thinkspeak stuff. Man think how easy date
math would be! We call the whole new system the "Terran Calendar". We
could set it up so old 1/30/1947 (my born on date in mm/dd/yyyy format)
works out to 00010101 (it just looks binary 21, but its not really). That
is year 1 month one and day one. I could celebrate my next birthday on New
Years Eve.
Hmmm.... Let me see If I just paid $3.50 for a gallon of gas that'd be
what?? 92 and a half cents per liter? What's that in Canadian dollars,
euros, pesos? Ah Hell, as long as we are doing the time stuff, lets fix all
the currency stuff too. We could call it the Terra. Yea that's it, we set
a date, and everyone turns their old money in for Terra's. We could put my
picture on the one terran note. Just think of the standardization we could
achieve in cash register design!
How about language, do the residents of this one little planet really need
all of these languages? Even those of us who speak English can't agree on
something simple like how the hell to spell color (colour). Lets start a
new language Terran! Think of the wasted resources our planet could reclaim
in "English to Spanish" dictionaries alone. Boggles the mind.
Come on you and me!! We could fix up the whole planet in just a couple
weeks if we really put our minds to it. We'll put your picture on the 5
terran note.