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Comment by jankeromnes | Hacker News Reader

GMT is deprecated, please use UTC instead: "GMT is no longer precisely defined by the scientific community" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time

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Trying to tell the Brits not to use GMT is like trying to tell the HN audience that there are exactly 1000 bytes in a kilobyte ;)

Or getting Americans on the metric system.

Or getting them to use a sensible way to state dates.

Agreed. Ditto for most of Europe. Everyone should standardize on YMD. Lexical sorting and least-to-most specific times make the most sense.

Or just [year].[day#]

Like 2016.276

You start by making gun calibres metric. Then they either start using the metric system or stop using guns. Win either way.

No then we just end up with two standards, like a 9mm caliber which is the same as the .380 ACP and others (diameter wise)

As a Brit who's spent the last few months arguing with Windows 10 about just what time it is - for the love of all that's holy people, save us from GMT/BST.

UTC is for life, not just for summer.

I don't get the downvotes. This is precisely the kind of pedantry for which I come to HN.

Perhaps because of the misleading partial quote from Wikipedia.

The full sentence is "For most purposes, UTC is considered interchangeable with GMT, but GMT is no longer precisely defined by the scientific community."

The ESA website gives all times for the descent ±20 minutes, so GMT, which is ±0.9s from either UTC or UT1, is fine.

To be fair it is a BBC site - if they started reporting times in UTC then it would just confuse the vast majority of their readers.

This may be true generally, but given the subject of the article this would be an ideal pilot for a gradual changeover

But most of don't want a changeover. So no.

Most of us don't want sustainable energy, agriculture, etc., that doesn't mean we don't fight tooth and nail for them...

It's possible (probable?) an absence of sustainable agriculture and / or energy may present an existential crisis at some point.

Agreeing on a set of weights and measures not so much.

I was simply presenting a counter-example to the argument: We don't want to change so we shouldn't change.

I'm not sure who "most of us" are, but either way, I wasn't suggesting "we" did. Just replying to the gp that this would be the least abrasive way if the bbc did wish to.

>> The moment of flatline in the control room is still expected at 11:18 GMT; 12:18 BST; 13:18 CEST +/- 2min

If the BBC's Science Correspondent had mostly been concerned with not confusing the vast majority of users, they'd have quoted the time of descent in BST first and qualified it with GMT and others. Instead they gave their preferred "standard" time first and then qualified it with a daylight savings time that is currently relevant to the vast majority of the BBC's readers.

You may complain to the editor if the scientific papers coming out of this use GMT, but this isn't aimed at the scientific community; the story in the #1 spot on http://www.bbc.com always aims for a way broader audience.

Instead of arguing about this ad infinitum, we should just collectively execute

    ln -s UTC GMT

and call it a day. It wouldn't break backward compatibility with anyone's usage, would it?

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