On 9/20/2011 12:18 PM, Warner Losh wrote:
On Sep 20, 2011, at 9:51 AM, Gerard Ashton wrote:
On 9/20/2011 11:24 AM, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
In message<[email protected]>, Gerard Ashton writes:
On 9/20/2011 5:53 AM, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
Earth orientation is one factor in the time of sunrise and sunset, and
that is important
at perhaps minute precision for many purposes, such as avoiding
violation of laws
regarding turning on automobile headlights, and the taking of game.
Show one single court-case, where the exact time of sunrise or
sunset has been a crucial factor, with a precision better than three
minutes, and I'll belive you.
I have no way to document the hunters who refrained from taking a deer one
minute after
what the hunter believed to be the legal hunting hours expired.
The hunters in the US that I know that deal with sunrise/sunset laws deal with it by going
"Yup, I could still see, sun must have been up." or "No, it was starting to get a
little dark." I don't know anybody that's out in the back country with sunrise/sunset tables
and a watch that's accurate to more than 5 minutes unless they are using one of these new-fangled
GPS receivers.
Then again the laws about hunting in the US that I'm familiar with tend to be dusk/dawn
laws not sunrise/sunset laws. Mostly because sunset is hard to observe in the bottom of
a valley with irregular mountains all around, but dusk is easier to know (which likely
explains the "heck, it ain't dark, I didn' t need a flashlight to see the deer well
enough to shoot it" attitude).
Warner
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I think this is another instance of a type of problem that frequently
comes up in this list;
actual consequences of time standards and rule, in the field, are hard
to find because
individual instances are seldom important enough to become major news
stories, and
the cases we would be interested in are typically impossible to search
for using
search engines. No one has performed the kind of polls that would elicit
the interesting
cases, or such polls have not turned up in searches. Corporations that
have experienced
problems might prefer to keep them quiet to protect their reputations
(or no such cases
occurred; no way to tell the difference). So we have no choice but to
suppose that
the letter of the law/rule/regulation/standard is important, else why
bother to establish
the law/rule/regulation/standard in the first place.
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