For timekeeping, you’re correct that timezones shouldn’t affect anything. But in some parts of law, the local time of a particular place (eg state capital, naval observatory, etc…) is what might control when a deadline has passed or not.

If we then have to reconcile that with high speed space travel, then there’s a possibility of ending up in a legal pickle even when the timekeeping aspect might be simple. But now we’re well into legal fanfiction, which is my favorite sort but we don’t have any guardrails ground rules to follow.

Up until the astronaut part, I was fully convinced that this is a law school theoretical question for an inheritance class, because that’s exactly where the vagaries of “is she my sister?” would also arise.

Then again, if we include time dilation due to near-lightspeed travel, we then have to deal with oddball inheritance cases like if your sister dies mid-travel but then you also die. The Uniform Simultaneous Death Act adopted by several US States would only apply if the difference in time-of-death is within 120 hours, but the Act is silent as to which reference plane will be used, especially if your sister is considered to be traveling “internationally” due to being in space, thus not being in the same US state or time zone as you might be in.

So maybe the entire question is a valid inheritance case study after all.

All it did was a lookup into a fairly sparse array. All the kerfuffle about it was unduly placed.

I once had the mispleasure to face a Bash script that was 35 lines tall but over 800 columns wide. The bulk of it was a two-dimensional array – or rather, a behemoth that behaved like an array of arrays – with way, way too many fields.

If that wasn’t bad enough, my code review to essentially rotate the table 90 degrees was rejected because – and I kid you not – the change was unreviewable in any of our tools and thus deemed too risky to change. /facepalm

The gall of some people.

OSM can definitely find you a bank near a freeway ramp, but it can also find you a bank near a creek to make an inflatable boat getaway. What it can’t do is arrange for decoys to confuse the police while you eacape.

The inflatable boat robber was ultimately caught and sentenced a year later.