[pavel_lishin]

> having one time zone for a country approximately the same size as Canada (5,000km wide) seems silly

Why?

In America, people already get up at 7am (insert your own time here, obviously) regardless of what the local sunrise actually is - which varies based on how far north or south you live.

It's pretty arbitrary. But one time zone at least makes the arbitraryness easier on coders.

[dedward]

It's arbitrary to a degree, but having a single timezone for Russia, or even the US, would amplify the effect. It's no big deal now because you are used to season changing, sunrise changing, etc - but if suddenly you had to get up for work and endure, say, 5 hours of darkness, or perhaps only 1 hour of daylight left..... it would be ugly. That's why we have timezones.

[anigbrowl]

Couldn't you just get up at, say, noon, work from 2pm until 10pm, and go to bed at 4am? This would be a bit confusing at first but it's basically what people do now. Solar noon would be at a different chronological time for everyone outside of GMT but you'd only have to make the adjustment once, plus it would provide an economic stimulus to compass manufacturers :-)

[pavel_lishin]

Yes, this is exactly what I meant. I didn't mean that the whole country would get up at 8am, no matter what the local solar time was. That would be kind of ridiculous.