So you want to abolish time zones
No no no no no.<p>The author is making it easy for himself with a contrived example with a key information already available.<p>> I want to call my Uncle Steve in <i></i>Melbourne<i></i>. What time is it there?<p>In a world with timezones, if your uncle is on the Internet and says "call me at 13h30" but doesn't tell you where he is, you can't call him, because you dont't know when is 13h30. (Think about that... he just gave you the time, but you still don't know the time...)<p>With timezones, you can't just give the time, you must also give a location. "Time" doesn't exist with timezones, only "time-location".<p>It's as if a physicist couldn't give you the mass of something without giving you the color.<p>"This table is 10kg-blue, which is the equivalent of 20kg-pink." (Because kg-colors aren't equal everywhere.)<p>On the other hand, with a universal time (UTC for example), 13h30 is the same for everyone, everywhere. The time can be given without any other information. If someone says call me at this number at 13h30, I can just do that without having to know where he is.<p>Let's look back at the initial problem:
> I want to call my Uncle Steve in <i></i>Melbourne<i></i>. What time is it there?
Well, if I have a universal time, it's very easy: it's the same time as where I am!
I don't even need to ask google! Beat ya!<p>But of course the author want to know if he can call someone out-of-the-blue by knowing where he is. Well, if you can use google to tell you what is the time in another timezone, you can use google to tell you what is the usual waking hour in this location. You don't need additional information in this example.<p>With universal time, the worst case scenario is needing the same amount of information as we do today (current time + location). The best case scenario is having a sane way of communicating time.