On Jan 9, 2012, at 6:24 AM, Rob Seaman wrote: > Ian Batten wrote: > >> The invocation of "won't somebody think our of great^8 grand children's >> watches!" is disingenuous. > > And it's a straw man erected by the folks who want to redefine UTC.
Actually it is a fair engineering question: Why pay the cost of leap seconds when we can keep civil time aligned to the sun with time zones once every N generations. >> It is a hell of a stretch to claim that re-aligning time zones once every >> ten generation is unreasonable. > > Again, a straw man. The proponents of the Draft revision in front of the ITU > have not suggested anything like this. But there also has not been the > slightest attempt to work through the implications of such a notion. It isn't a straw-man argument. > Redefining UTC will break things immediately in astronomy and aerospace and > related applications. And it will break things at unpredictable intervals > over the decades and centuries to come. And it will leave any purely atomic > timescale many minutes or hours in error at a future epoch with no plan for > mitigation. It is not unreasonable to expect due diligence in planning for > these eventualities. It breaks earth-facing applications and nothing else. No examples have been given of what it breaks apart from that. Warner _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list [email protected] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
