Logic would suggest 12:01pm comes after 12:00pm and 12:01pm is certainly not a minute after midnight. Therefore to assume 12:00pm is mid-day and 12:00am is midnight is quite logical.

Then again; you're quite correct in saying 12 noon cannot be either am, nor pm.

Maybe we should all use the 24 hour clock and take my German made cooker as a guide (it goes 23:58, 23:59, 24:00, 00:01) so, apparently, 00:00 doesn't exist either!

Re my (UK) insurance policy mention earlier, many are 00:01 year n - 23:59 year (n+1) minus a day.So if it's life insurance, make sure no-one turns off the life-support equipment in the two-minute gap. Your relatives would be less than happy.

I think it's the same for most motor and home policies (always start at 00:01 and end at 23:59).
So either they can't work out when 12pm (or 12am) is, or those two minutes (one either side of midnight) must be an extremely dangerous time of day (to be excluded from most insurance policies).

Mental note - when drunk out of my skull and whacked out on weed, I must not drive home at midnight and crash into the front door

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

Re my (UK) insurance policy mention earlier, many are 00:01 year n - 23:59 year (n+1) minus a day.So if it's life insurance, make sure no-one turns off the life-support equipment in the two-minute gap. Your relatives would be less than happy.

LOL, mine with Direct Line I *think* is 00:00 to 23:59 - so only 1 minute gap with them

NPL should know:

In reference to www.npl.co.uk/science-technology/time-frequency/time/faqs/is-midnig...:

Is midnight 12 a.m. or 12 p.m.? (FAQ - Time)

There is no confusion when using the words 12 noon (or mid-day) and 12 midnight, although the use of 12 midnight can raise the question of 'which day?'. To avoid confusion in, for example, an insurance certificate, it is always better to use the 24-hour clock, when 12:00 is 12 noon and, for example, 24:00 Sunday or 00:00 Monday both mean 12 midnight Sunday/Monday. It is common in transport timetables to use 23:59 Sunday or 00:01 Monday (in this example), or 11:59 p.m. or 12:01 a.m., to further reduce confusion.

There are no standards established for the meaning of 12 a.m. and 12 p.m. It is often said that 12 a.m. Monday is midnight on Monday morning and 12 p.m. is mid-day. This puts all the times beginning with 12 and ending with a.m. in the same one-hour block, similarly with those ending with p.m. It can also be argued that by the time you have seen a clock showing 12:00 at mid-day it is already post meridiem, and similarly at midnight it is already ante meridiem. Times in the first hour of the day are sometimes given as, for example, 00:47 a.m., with 00:00 a.m. corresponding to midnight, but with a time twelve hours later given as 12:47 p.m.

Another convention sometimes used is that, since 12 noon is by definition neither ante meridiem (before noon) nor post meridiem (after noon), then 12 a.m. refers to midnight at the start of the specified day (00:00) and 12 p.m. to midnight at the end of that day (24:00). Given this ambiguity, the terms 12 a.m. and 12 p.m. should be avoided.

whereas legal firms subscribe to the 12am = midnight:

Evening Legal Secretary (5pm - 12am) - Trendy Law Firm! job ...

Temporary Graveyard Legal Secretary (12am - 8am) job search ...

Legal Evening Document Production Operator � 4pm � 12am job ...

Service Desk Analyst (Evening Shift 4pm - 12am)

EDIT: BT, as quoted by BatBoy, have plainly got it wrong, ambiguous and/or unclear

Edited by XRaySpeX (Sun 06-May-12 23:20:14)

At least, in your edit, you come back to what matters. Nobody else seems interested. The quote from an unknown source is

They say, insist even, that the product is totally unthrottled except for P2P between the hours of 4pm-12 pm.

To which he adds

To me, that means P2P is unthrottled only from noon till 16:00.

I submit that the only possible sensible way to interpret the "BT" quote is that, (give or take a minute to avoid ambiguity), P2P is throttled between 16:00 and 23:59, and unthrottled between 00:01 and 15:59.

Personally, I believe the quote is from someone talking tripe. Rare though that is from ISP support.

Yea, it shouldn't have been an afterthought. I think too fast