Steve, Your proposal is commendable, nuanced and well thought out.
I think you underestimate some of the technical and practical issues, but that can be hashed out. But how do you propose to get the attention of the people who will need to allocate significant IT resources and budget to these changes ? WP7A isn't going to be able to. At the very moment WP7A comes out with anything that would indicate software updates, all civilized countries will run home, do hearings and study groups and come back and say "This is far too expensive, and we can see no sufficient big benefit for the expenditure". Try to study what happened when ITU changed the channel grid to 9kHz in Europe. That was a change that merely involved changing some crystals and tuning some radios a bit. The only reason they got it through in the end, was that it enabled some very big european countries getting more broadcasting channels. Leapseconds carry no such political benefit and will not get the necessary attention, which is, btw, one of the major arguments against them: people do not take them seriously. If a leap second caused a big catastrofe, people would take leap seconds seriously, and they would be gone, before WP7A could even order coffee for their next meeting. So yes, you have outlined a possible technical fix, but that is not the problem that is hard to solve, the one you need to solve first is "who is going to pay, and how do we make them ?" Poul-Henning -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 [EMAIL PROTECTED] | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list [email protected] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
