Time zone abbreviations can cause confusion

Launchpad lists times in your selected time zone. According to your person page, your time zone is currently set to "Australia/Sydney", so you see the times in EST. If you'd prefer to see times in UTC, you can select that time zone from the "Person Details" form.

If you aren't logged in, all the times are displayed in UTC. The default time zone for new accounts is also UTC.

Excuse my idocy. see the updated description and name.

The time zone database used by Launchpad is "pytz", which in turn uses the Olson time zone data (the same data used by most UNIX systems).

That data uses the "EST" abbreviation for Australian Eastern Standard/Summer Time. Furthermore, they've discussed the abbreviation issue multiple times. Patching the abbreviation into Launchpad's copy of pytz would be a future maintenance problem, and would make us inconsistent with Linux's date/time presentation.

So the base issue here seems to be that the time zone abbreviations are ambiguous. Assuming we don't modify pytz, two possible solutions are:
1. include the text "local time" every where we display times.
2. use numeric time zone names instead (e.g. +1000 or +1100 instead of EST)

This isn't really a pytz bug -- pytz is accurately presenting the data in the Olson database. Moving back to Launchpad, since the initial bug was presentation of times in Launchpad.

After talking with Matthew, we might try out numeric time zones instead.

Everything has now moved to either a date or `X {hours,minutes} ago', but the tooltips still use the misleading abbreviations. It's particularly bad due to EST not just meaning US and Australian Eastern Standard Time, but also Australian Eastern Summer Time. Summer time started here yesterday, and I was rather confused when I saw times were still cited as being in EST, when it is in fact AEDT.

Also, the times on https://launchpad.net/sprints/uds-boston-2007 are cited as being EDT... US EDT, that is. But that's not specified, and there's no way to check what offset it is, or convert it to local time. That was the first time I had seen an absolute time on LP since summer time started, so I presumed it meant AEDT. I was apparently wrong.

Replacing the abbreviations with offsets, or just using UTC now that most things use the new timestamp display format, would make things easier.