[time-nuts] Re: UTC

Poul-Henning Kamp phk at phk.freebsd.dk
Fri Jul 29 02:19:13 EDT 2005


In message <20050728.162059.104074939.imp at bsdimp.com>, Warner Losh writes:

>	Within the respective zones created under the authority of sections
>	261 to 264 of this title the standard time of the zone shall insofar
>	as practicable (as determined by the Secretary of Transportation)
>	govern the movement of all common carriers engaged in interstate or
>	foreign commerce. In all statutes, orders, rules, and regulations
>	relating to the time of performance of any act by any officer or
>	department of the United States, whether in the legislative,
>	executive, or judicial branches of the Government, or relating to the
>	time within which any rights shall accrue or determine, or within
>	which any act shall or shall not be performed by any person subject to
>	the jurisdiction of the United States, it shall be understood and
>	intended that the time shall insofar as practicable (as determined by
>	the Secretary of Transportation) be the United States standard time of
>	the zone within which the act is to be performed.
>
>I have not been able to find the actual regulations delegating this to
>NIST (only statements to that effect on the NIST web site), so I'm
>unable to tell how much deviation is allowed from the mean solar time
>to still meet the statuatory langauge of 'based on'.

It may not be delegated to NIST, NIST may merely be advisory to DoT,
which USNO probably also is.

The other important bit is that ITU is an UN organization, so the
US Government decides who get to wave the USAs vote card and therefore
presumably also what they wave it for.

So even if NIST went wild and put the TF460 proposal in front of
7A, the USA may still not actually vote for that when it gets to
the plenipotential assembly.

I'm surprised nobody has found out _where_ in the US the proposal
originated ?  Was it DoD[1] ?  DoT[2] ?  DoE[3] ? NIST[4] ?

There must be something which can be done with a FoIA request ?

Poul-Henning

[1] likely in my mind.  They have a war or two going on, they are
not in a position to take a couple of hours off to see what doesn't
work afterwards.

[2] Since, per above they're responsible for this area.

[3] Responsible for all the nukes, including the one on alert.

[4] I somehow doubt it.  Why would they remove the one feature which
allows them to get a bit of publicity every so often ?

-- 
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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