Warner Losh wrote:
> So I can't do operations on UTC time stamps that are more than 6 months in
> the future?
It depends what operations, and what a timestamp is deemed to mean. Currently
UTC approximates UT; it is stationary wrt time-of-day. Myriads of human
activities are diurnal and time-of-day is the pertinent timescale. Measuring
future or past intervals in SI-seconds is beside the point for these use cases,
an exercise in fitting a square peg in a round hole.
The plight will be writ large should the notion of timezone roulette be
implemented. In that case, over the centuries it will be similarly
unpredictable what timezone a particular country or province, state or city
observes - will observe - or did observe at some past moment (without
consulting some big book of timekeeping trivia). What is a curiosity
currently, the adjustment of a timezone, would become commonplace and
historians won't be able to "do operations" on UTC timezone offsets as Zefram
noted:
>> Other direction. Paris's UT+1h would become TI+1h, then TI+0h, TI-1h,
>> TI-2h, and so on. ("TI" meaning the no-leap-seconds time scale that
>> succeeds UT in common use.)
Even the direction of drift will be a matter of debate as demonstrated on this
list.
Rob
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