Supervillain Plan
Supervillain Plan
[On the left of this single panel comic Black Hat sits on a high throne, showing a fist, and looking down to Cueball and Magan who stand in front of him on the right.]
Black Hat: ... then, after our drones take control of the cities, we will detonate the devices. California will break off from the mainland and drift out to sea! Megan: How far out to sea? Will it put any of the cities in the UTC-9 time zone? Black Hat: What? I don't know. Megan: One request: Can we make sure this doesn't happen during the daylight saving changeover?
[Caption below the panel:] You can tell when someone's been a programmer for a while because they develop a deep-seated fear of time zone problems.

In this comic Black Hat is a supervillain , befitting his character . He plans to use drones and explosives to move the entire State of California into the Pacific, a la Lex Luthor in the 1978 Superman movie.
His henchmen are Cueball and Megan . The latter appears to be a programmer who is concerned that the mission (and hence the drones' coding) may have to account for time/date adjustments, such as time zones and daylight saving time (DST), which would be a factor if the event took place on the wrong date or the landmasses were pushed too far apart. (Though by coding the drones on UTC, the drones would not need to change time zones, except for displaying the local time for some reason, which would likely be unneeded.)
In computer programming, working with dates and times can be complicated. Think about leap years or leap seconds , the non existing year zero which even worse for scientists does exist in astronomical calendars , or the Y2K and year 2038 problem. Nevertheless in this comic there is only a time zone problem mentioned. To handle this the tz database , also known as tzdata , provides all relevant information for every country back to 1970 and, less accurate, before. But it's still up to the programmer to use this data in useful ways.
Supervillains have reason to fear daylight saving time issues. In 1999, two coordinated car bombings ended up killing the terrorists transporting the bombs when they exploded one hour early. Details explained e.g. on the Darwin Awards site.
Time zones and DST can give seemingly nonsensical results when used improperly. For example, a flight going west might leave at 02:00pm and reach its destination at 03:00pm while the reverse flight will leave at 02:00pm and arrive at 05:00pm. In both cases, the travel time is two hours, but the one hour difference between the two time zones makes it seem otherwise. You might even find yourself arriving at your destination at an earlier time than your departure! DST can also makes a given time mean two different things, if after 01:59am you go back to 01:00 am, 01:30am can either be one hour after 00:30am, or one hour before 02:30am. Or in the reverse change, some dates don't actually exist, like 02:30 when going straight from 01:59 to 03:00. Humans often avoid this issue by being in only one place at the same time [ citation needed ] , or by sleeping when the DST changes happen, but computer communications often span over large distances, and drones don't need to sleep at night. Megan wants to make sure she won't have to deal with the difficult problem of communication between drones and other systems with those issues, where a single poorly communicated date can have disastrous effects (although possibly far less disastrous than moving California into the sea [ citation needed ] ).
California is currently located entirely within the UTC-8 time zone (at standard time PST , while in summer PDT is at UTC-7 ). But after Black Hat's actions California is at risk of floating West into the next time zone at UTC-9 .
However, in reality, time zones in the United States are determined by Department of Transportation regulations , and California's time zone is not defined based on its longitude. Consequently, even if California were pushed out to sea, its time zone would remain the same unless the Department of Transportation issued a regulation otherwise, so Megan can rest easy. (On the other hand, Black Hat could alter the time zone of any of the East Coast states except Maine if his drones could push the state east of 67°30' W. longitude, since the Eastern Time Zone's eastern boundary is mostly based on longitude, except for Maine.)
Note: Megan should be happy Black Hat hasn't planned to involve Arizona in his scheme .
A "tick tock article" is a term in journalism for a step by step account of an event or timeline, such as this one recounting the end of the 2011 MLB regular season . Such an article published for an event during the change to or from Daylight Saving Time would need to account for the changeover, making the timeline confusing for those unaware of the switch.
[On the left of this single panel comic Black Hat sits on a high throne, showing a fist, and looking down to Cueball and Magan who stand in front of him on the right.]
Black Hat: ... then, after our drones take control of the cities, we will detonate the devices. California will break off from the mainland and drift out to sea! Megan: How far out to sea? Will it put any of the cities in the UTC-9 time zone? Black Hat: What? I don't know. Megan: One request: Can we make sure this doesn't happen during the daylight saving changeover?
[Caption below the panel:] You can tell when someone's been a programmer for a while because they develop a deep-seated fear of time zone problems.
