Although this is (as Ken says) a long and somewhat rambling dissertation, I agree with almost all of the points made (many of which I haven't seen yet in this forum).
The one statement that I have some concerns about is this one: > (3) Searching for a better way of addressing the two major categories > of precision time needs that UTC attempts to reconcile, > ... is what I had originally > hoped LEAPSECS would be about. Alas, it appears to not be. :-( I'm not aware that there are "two major categories of precision time needs". As I see it, there is only one category of (absolute) precision time need, which is satisfied by TAI. UTC and its derivatives are useful for civil time, not because they are precise, but because they are derived from TAI. That means that we need only one real-time broadcast time instead of many, because applications that need the others can derive them from TAI with the addition of publicly available and agreed-on information from non-real-time sources. /glen -----Original Message----- From: Ken Pizzini [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: January 24, 2003 6:00 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [LEAPSECS] what should a time standard encompass? On Sat, Jan 18, 2003 at 08:10:56AM -0700, Rob Seaman wrote: > If there is a change to the civil time standard (currently UTC), > a prudent suggestion might be that the legal and technical precision > of the standard should be improved, not simply left for our > grandchildren's grandchildren to figure out. I've seen you make statements of this ilk, that we should be making civil time definitions more precise rather than less, a few times. However I continue to be in the dark as to how the issues of precision timekeeping relate to the needs of a civil time standard. Civil time should be precise relative to what metric? ... This message may contain privileged and/or confidential information. If you have received this e-mail in error or are not the intended recipient, you may not use, copy, disseminate or distribute it; do not open any attachments, delete it immediately from your system and notify the sender promptly by e-mail that you have done so. Thank you.
