Google gave every advertiser six weeks to set their timezone, else the account will be stuck on Pacific Time forever. And if you change your timezone to something else, you can never change it again:
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2006/06/six-weeks-to-set-your-time-zone.html

What's with that? People sometimes make mistakes that need to be corrected, and even some countries occasionally change their timezone.

Timezone conversion is a trivial programming task. Can anyone think of a reason why this bizarre requirement is imposed?

I've said it before and I'll say it again: too many PhDs and too few practical real-world people.

Interesting. First of all that link returned a "Forbidden" message and now it's redirecting to "data:text/html," (which isn't a valid URL, of course).

Looks like they're still playing with the post or something...

Ah – seems to only affect IE. They're got a weird IFRAME in the post:

<iframe style="position: absolute; display: block; opacity: 0.7; z-index: 500; width: 18px; height: 22px; top: 76px; right: 399px;" src="data:text/html," id="gn_notemagic" frameborder="0"></iframe>

You should answer his questions, noth HTML-Hacking (TM)

> I've said it before and I'll say it again: too many PhDs and too few practical real-world people.
Good one ;)

Roger I only see a reason in the datestorage and calculation. It maybe is to intense for 100 of thousands of customers to recalculate the timezones. Or maybe there are any laws/regulation on how a "day" is calculated (like Google starts the day, while my day is 9 hours old. Or they need to sync this with their data centers. All GMT customers are on data centers in the UK and all PST are on the west coast of the US. But this are all guesses and can be completly wrong and the reason is more simple.
As you do, I do not see any "real" technical problems with time manipulation.