I think Swatch Internet Time is more practical in day-to-day use. Swatch Internet Time divides the day into 1,000 units instead of 100,000 so is much more succinct. People rarely need <1 sec precision when communicating with each other, and when they do, they can just use decimals.
I’d argue GPTS has some unique strengths that make it stand out and way better than Swatch, not just for everyday stuff but also for where timekeeping is headed. Here’s why:
Precision Without the Hassle: Sure, most people don’t need sub-second precision when chatting about meetups. But GPTS’s 100,000 pulses per day—each about 0.864 seconds—give you that granularity baked in. No need to mess with decimals like you would with Swatch’s 86.4-second beats. For example, in GPTS, you can say “P042K” (short for P042000) for a rough time, but if you’re syncing an AI process or timestamping a transaction, the full precision’s right there. Swatch feels like it’s asking for extra steps when accuracy matters.
A Human Rhythm: This is where GPTS gets interesting. Each pulse is roughly 0.864 seconds, pretty close to the average human heartbeat (around 0.83 seconds). It’s not just a random division—it’s a rhythm that vibes with us biologically. Swatch’s beats, at 86.4 seconds each, don’t have that kind of intuitive hook. GPTS feels less like a clock and more like a pulse we already know.
Global Sync Made Simple: GPTS resets every day at midnight UTC, giving everyone a universal reference point. That’s huge for coordinating across time zones or logging events globally—think distributed systems or even just planning a worldwide launch. Swatch Internet Time is universal too, but without that daily anchor, it’s trickier to tie it to real-world moments.
Swatch had its moment in the ‘90s, but it didn’t stick—maybe because it’s too detached from how we live and work now. GPTS, with its precision, human connection, and global reset, feels like it’s built for today’s challenges, from casual use to tech-heavy applications IMO.
If you really want to onshore production, you don't increase taxes on the import of raw materials, parts, and components, you only do so for finished goods. That isn't what this administration has done though. They say they want to increase domestic manufacturing, but their actions clearly prove that that is not their goal.
Both of your examples are cloud services, not software run locally on users' own hardware. If they intend the license to be limited to cloud services like Firefox Sync, then they should say so.
Aviation still uses AM radio which is more susceptible to noise than FM or digital modes but it does so for two very important reasons.
The first is that, with AM, if two or more people are transmitting on the same frequency at the same time, they can all still be heard. With FM, the strongest signal will suppress any weaker signals and only one signal will be heard.
The second is that even very weak AM signals have the chance to be received and understood. The human ear is very good at picking out human voices from noise. Weak FM signals just drop out completely.
Is there any reason other than debugging purposes that the cf-cache-status and cf-ray headers are included in every response? Why don't they remove those unless a debugging setting is enabled in the CloudFlare dashboard?
Rapid tests do not need to be updated for new variants because the proteins that they detect do not change quickly. This has been verified by several studies and continues to be monitored for emerging variants.
What is with this article? Was it written by AI? It starts out talking about satellite imaging showing the plane in the jungle and then has randomly interspersed paragraphs talking about barnacle shells and ocean searches.
The antiquated AM mode and the lack of encryption or even digital encoding is a safety feature for air traffic voice communications. Very weak signals still have a chance of being intelligible and if two signals are transmitted at once on the same frequency, both can still be heard.
Yeah but it's terrible for security. Also digital modes work just fine at the same range - I have no problem hearing ADS-B messages from up to 200mi away from my ground level antenna, where the max range is only limited by the curvature of the planet.
And note that the real problem is with authentication (MACs, or digital signatures), not encryption. Public availability of those records is actually probably beneficial. It's a common misconception to think that you need to encrypt while in reality you perhaps need to encrypt, but first you absolutely must authenticate.
You don't really need more security, because if a pilot gets an ATC instruction that doesn't make sense, they're going to question it. Pilots aren't following instructions blindly, everything is mentally cross-checked against what we expect should be happening for situational awareness. (And ATC would also hear the interloper and immediately speak up.)
On top of that, almost everyone in the US also has some form of collision avoidance technology now, as well (either TCAS or ADS-B).
And there's plenty of times where the only time I could hear ATC was with the squelch full open, trying to pick a faint signal out through the static. Digital modes are terrible for this.
Eh, I get a lot of pushback in this thread. But I'll reply.
We're talking about something like a landing clearance. It doesn't have to be completely off the chart. And yes you can inject a message like that successfully, without the ATC ever knowing.
TCAS is equally broken - doesn't have authentication codes / signatures. It's actually more vulnerable since it has higher priority than ATC.
Digital modes can encode speech more efficiently than analog modes, thus reaching further on the same link budget. For example ADS-B is "audible" as far as the curvature of the planet allows - my own antenna can hear messages from up to 200mi away.
At least in the ham radio community, experience is that digital radio sounds better further, but at the extreme ends of signal reception the digital signal becomes completely unusable before an analog signal becomes unintelligible.
Up in the air, I can also hear AM analog voice transmissions from 200 miles away, so that's not really a good measure of performance. Both modes already do that. Benefit of having an unobstructed line of sight from several miles of altitude. :)
I mean, to put it simply it would just work with a digital mode. But that's not the point, the main point is that there is no authentication mechanism. Such systems are indeed being abused, for example trains were recently halted in Poland. This happened because they have an un-authenticated channel of communication that allows anyone to do that:
It's only a matter of time before this happens in aviation, but unlike in the trains case it doesn't have to be just an availability problem (all trains stopped safely), it can be a "remote code execution" problem.
Is this an actual problem that is happening in practice, though? How many instances of "unauthenticated" airband communication have caused an accident? I don't know. Even if the answer is nonzero, I'd be willing to bet it's less than ten in decades.
It took 6 months to find him, and mind you that that guy was the opposite of clever (he was talking from his bathtub, from what I remember, and he started out not even knowing the ATC language).
Also, it really makes sense to think ahead just a bit, you know. Not everything has to be triggered with an accident, and in this case we're likely talking about terrorism, since no one would do this without realising just how bad the legal consequences are.
https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-observ...