Yeah, making up rules in the heat of the moment just to shut someone up is gonna make bad rules that deserve malicious compliance. Dead right.

UTC exists as a historical compromise because the British felt that GMT was the bees knees and the French felt differently. The letter order is most definitely a compromise between French and English word order. You can call it Universal Time Coordinaire.

Historically, GMT became the international time reference point because the Greenwich observatory used to be the leader in the field of accurately measuring time. It probably helped that the British navy had been dominant earlier and lots of countries around the world and across time zones had been colonised by the British.

UTC is an international standard for measuring time, based on both satellite data about the position and orientation of the earth and atomic clocks, whereas GMT is a time zone. Nowadays, GMT is based on UTC not independent telescopic observation.

What’s the difference? You can think of a time zone as an offset from UTC, in the same sense that a 24h clock time is an offset from midnight. GMT = UTC+0.

Technically, UTC isn’t a valid time zone any more than “midnight” is a valid 24h clock time. UTC+0 is a time zone and UTC isn’t in a similar sense that 00:00 is a time in 24hr clock and “midnight” isn’t.

Of course, and perfectly naturally, I can use midnight and 00:00 interchangeably and everyone will understand, and I can use UTC and UTC+0 interchangeably and few people care, but GMT = UTC+0 feels like the +0 is doing nothing to most eyes.

Fun fact: satellite data is very accurate and can track the UTC meridian independently from the tectonic plate on which the Greenwich observatory stands. The UTC meridian will drift slowly across England as the plates shift. Also, the place in the stars that Greenwich was measuring was of by a bit, because they couldn’t have accounted for the effect of the terrain on the gravitational field, so the UTC meridian was placed several tens of metres (over 200’) away from the Greenwich prime meridian. I suspect that there was a lot more international politics than measurement in that decision, and also in making the technical distinction between UTC and GMT, but I’m British, so you should take that with a pinch of salt.

The problem isn’t having empty values, it’s not tracking that in the type system, so the programmer and the compiler don’t have any information about whether a value can be null or not and the programmer has to figure it out by hand. In a complex program that’s essentially completely impossible. The innocently created bomb that causes your program to crash can be in absolutely any value.

There are ways to track it all by disallowing null and using optional values instead, but some folks would rather stick with type systems that haven’t moved on since the 1960s.

In a discussion about whether null should exist at all, and what might be better, saying that Optional values aren’t available in languages with type systems that haven’t moved on since the 1960s isn’t a strong point in my view.

The key point is that if your type system genuinely knows reliably whether something has a value or not, then your compiler can prevent every single runtime null exception from occurring by making sure it’s handled at some stage and tracking it for you until it is.

The problem with null is that it is pervasive - any value can be null, and you can check for it and handle it, but other parts of your code can’t tell whether that value can or can’t be null. Tracking potential nulls is in the memory of the programmer instead of deduced by the compiler, and checking for nulls everywhere is tedious and slow, so no one does that. Hence null bugs are everywhere.

Tony Hoare, an otherwise brilliant computer scientist, called it his billion dollar mistake a decade or two ago.

Well, UTC didn’t exist in 1800, it would have been GMT, and that might not have been too popular so soon after the war of independence. Even if you convinced all of the USA to use one time zone for the railways, it would be different elsewhere and you’d still get time zones.

Maybe you’d get further with the project with the airlines in the first half of the twentieth century, but I’m not sure that that level of internationalism would have gone down well in a rather war torn world.

Yeah, Seasonal Affective Disorder is a recognised medical condition and its symptoms get worse the further from the equator you live. Don’t know why folks are downvoting you for having it.

Not any more. But some of the IRS guys are smokin’ hot, I’m sure, if that’s what you’re into.

Just a reminder to our American cousins that in British English, trump means the noise an elephant makes but also to fart: “Sorry I trumped.” Donald the Trump is a noisy noxious unwanted thing on the world stage.

This is the way.

Exactly. Very well done indeed. It has a simple beauty.

Wise person: “Those who do not know history’s mistakes are doomed to repeat them.”

Actual Nazis: Great idea. Let’s burn some books.

That is lovely. You and your mum and her friend rock. Have a great day. Every day. It sounds like your mum is a fantastic person and passed that on to you.

WIN.
Er, for my friend.
Yesss.
I mean yes.

META.

I was puzzled at first: “That’s unclear. What progress is she making? 8 months since what? 8 months weight loss? Yeah she looks great, well done, her. What’s this community? RIP and TERROR? No, she’s not doing well at that at all! She looks really alive and friendly. Wait, no, it’s the transfem community?! Oh wow, yes she IS doing well.”

If you were at all worried about whether you pass, I can assure you that you pass. Go you! And you dress well.

I hope you have a life full of happiness and peace from here on in.

Whilst I don’t disagree with your facts, I disagree with your tone.

It’s really understandable for EU folk to be angry with us. Our newspapers are toxic, the BBC promotes Farage and we were always going for British exceptionalism, with Brexit being the ultimate act of We’re Better Than You sentiment.

Me, you, 48% of the then voting public, Scotland and NI didn’t buy it, correct, but genuinely the right approach to EU irritation with the UK is apology, not “stop being mean” and not “it wasn’t my part of the UK”.

We’re not out of the woods yet. Britain’s most unelectable politician of all time, with nine losses in hand-picked constituencies may well win Clacton because the stupidly corrupt Conservative party couldn’t keep their stupidly corrupt MPs honest. How “we’re not a bunch of racist loonies” is that going to look across the channel? Yes, a bunch of us are going to turn away from the stupid racist Conservative party, but a lot of them are going to turn to the even more stupid, even more racist, even more anti EU Refuse UK Party.

There’s absolutely no chance of us getting a fishing exception. That was highly contentious when we were one of the big three EU countries. No way would they agree to that whilst also letting us back in after throwing all our toys out of the play pen.

If a kid throws their ice cream on the floor, giving them another one soon afterwards doesn’t in any way teach the other kids not to throw their ice cream on the floor. This is very firmly a “no ice cream for you then” situation. I think labour realise they if they tried to rejoin, they would get a very rough ride indeed from the EU with massive amounts of playing hardball and that the best they can hope for in the next five years really is some softening and smoothing of the deal for being cooperative. We agree to fund EU science a bit, they let us back into erasmus, that kind of thing (although specifically not that).

But joining the EU takes a decade or more sometimes, and the “but it’s really very simple, we follow most of the EU rules already because we’re a former member” is as stupid as the “oven ready deal” and “German car manufacturers will insist we get a great deal” nonsense.

It was. A lot of right wing loonies in the EU dropped their leave the EU stance because everyone around the EU saw what a stupid and annoying thing it was to leave.

Of course we do, but it ain’t gonna happen. Best you can hope for is the custom union in seven to ten years’ time.