Rob Seaman wrote on 2003-06-05 16:04 UTC: > Surely we should characterize and fully understand the implications of > our actions *before* we act. Is that really an unreasonable request?
To quote (not verbatim, but in essence) what several people said on that at the meeting: Ron Beard: Several calls of the SRG have not resulted in any substantial data on what a change would cost or damage. John Seago: In many environments, even getting an answer to the question of what it would cost to abandon UTC ~ UT1 would cost substantial amounts of money. William Klepczynski: In safety-critical navigation systems, leap seconds will over time cause catastrophic system failures that will cost many lives. This long-term risk should justify even considerable one-off expenses to fix permanently the problem of a commonly used non-uniform precision timescale. [... all quotes modulo my rapidly decaying memory of course ...] Markus -- Markus Kuhn, Computer Lab, Univ of Cambridge, GB http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ | __oo_O..O_oo__
