[time-nuts] Fwd: UTC - A Cautionary Tale

Poul-Henning Kamp phk at phk.freebsd.dk
Wed Jul 13 15:27:12 EDT 2005


In message <E1Dsmga-0002mU-26 at febo.com>, "Jack Hudler" writes:

>Personally I think we should recall the US delegation, line them up and have
>them shot.  :)

"One has to also wonder how such a narrow working group
(or even the larger ITU) believes itself empowered to make a
unilateral change that would affect so many other interested parties
(literally everybody, everywhere).  "

ITU is a UN organization, so every country appoints somebody to sit
there and represent them.

With respect to the "so many other interested parties", and in
particular "(literally everybody, everywhere)" I noted an distinct
lack of of "everybody" when I tried to find "interestedparties" for
an article I wrote about this in the danish weekly "The Engineer".

The interesting thing will be to see how many people care and what
they care about after Jan 1st.  Maybe one final leap-second is just
what we need to settle this ?

I can see four outcomes:

	0. Nobody cares, nothing happens.
		Leap seconds can survive.

	1. Nobody cares, a lot happens.
		Leap seconds certainly dies.

	2. People care, spend money, nothing happens.
		Leap seconds status undetermined.
		Cost concerns will count against leap seconds.

	3. People care, spend money, a lot happens.
		Leap seconds die.

Anyone want to take a bet ?

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.




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