On Sun 2014-02-16T10:20:40 -0800, Brooks Harris hath writ: > >These are questions better posed in the context of the tz mail list. > Perhaps. But it revolves around UTC.
Yes and no, and there are significant cultural differences between the folks on the tz mail list and the folks who drive issues in the ITU-R. Even in the EU where there actually are international rules about zone offsets and dates of change, the papers presented at the two Future of UTC meetings show that there is no consistency about whether the national-language versions of the EU directives intend for the zone offsets to be from UTC or from GMT. And in the tz mail list the philosophy is very powerfully that tz does not prescribe anything, they only describe what people actually do. That was the way that the CCIR operated through 1963, too, but after that things changed. In 1964 the IAU expressed concern about the lack of clarity of concepts and produced a powerfully clear statement giving the definitions and utility of various time scales. See it at http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/note1964en.html I find it ironic that they admit that the current scheme may not ultimately be optimal, and that the new scheme of leap seconds was deemed to be more optimal, yet utterly rejected by POSIX and all the other computing standards bodies. But starting the year before that there were as many as three different meetings per year by different international bodies who wanted to have some sayso over the time scale used in radio broadcast time signals. So coincdentally 1964 was the year that the term UTC was first used in print, and that 1964 IAU statement was the last time that clarity of concept was relevant. After that the process was about control, not clarity of concept. At least at first there were apologies expressed by the participants. More recently it has been all out turf war with no mention that the other side might have valid points to be considered. -- Steve Allen <[email protected]> WGS-84 (GPS) UCO/Lick Observatory--ISB Natural Sciences II, Room 165 Lat +36.99855 1156 High Street Voice: +1 831 459 3046 Lng -122.06015 Santa Cruz, CA 95064 http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/ Hgt +250 m _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list [email protected] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
