In message <[email protected]>, Rob Seaman writes: >Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
>> The ITU proposal does not in fact talk about civil time at all, >>it talks only about the timescale civil time is defined relative >>to: UTC. >Civil timekeeping is a worldwide system. No it is not. UTC is a "worldwide coorporation" or "worldwide coordination" if you will. There is no international entity which can mandate what civil time must be in any particular country, and therefore there is no other system than what emerges through voluntary coordination and cooperation. And the cooperation only happens to the extent people want to, there are no penalties for deciding on stupid timekeeping in your own country. Nobody can prevent your government or my government from defining local time as UTC + Xh 31 minutes + 41.5 seconds. UTC is not civil time anywhere, unless the local government decided that the offset between civil time and UTC should be zero, and these governments are as free as all other governments to change their mind and the constant, or even to make it a variable if they wish. 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
