Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
It is not unrelated to why some of us think that changing the definition of UTC is infinitely more possible than changing the rest of the worlds educational level with regards to timekeeping.
Not unrelated, simply completely irrelevant. Your argument, apparently shared by the folks pushing the ITU proposal, is not without merit. Folks don't understand civil time issues now and we have little hope they ever will, so why not take the purely pragmatic action of redefining UTC? The failure of your argument is not that public policy in an imperfect world sometimes requires compromise. The failure is that the compromise being offered doesn't address the problem at hand. Clive D.W. Feather wrote:
The problem here is Microsoft, whose software appears to believe that the current LCT here is "GMT Daylight Time".
The case has been repeatedly made that since the world tolerates large excursions in civil time such as caused by the varying local Daylight Saving Time policies, that the world's institutions and populace will be able to simply ignore leap hours on those rare occasions when they are needed. What is offered up is evidence for the exact opposite. We're shown that Daylight Saving has been mishandled in a trivially simple instance and that the GMT standard, synonymous with UTC, is capable of misinterpretation (by minions of the richest man on Earth) completely distinct from leap second related issues. Nothing about the ITU proposal would mitigate the situation being discussed. And in fact, the analogy between DST and leap hours is faulty. TV's talking heads carefully remind us twice a year either to spring forward or to fall back. DST is a periodic effect. Leap seconds - or leap hours - are secular effects. DUT1 builds up to a high water mark and then the total is transferred to the list of historical leap seconds. It would be the constant daily persistence of a large DUT1 that would make leap hours unpalatable - not only the large corrections that would be needed every few hundred years. And if civilians are surprised by the requirements of civil time now, how much more so they will be in a world in which the last leap hour troubled their great-great-...-great-grandparents? The current DST and leap second standards are much more balanced where it counts - society's talking heads remind the populace twice a year about DST and roughly once every two years about leap seconds. This is just about right from the point of view of reaching the widest possible audience of civilians. The reality is that we don't need - and shouldn't desire - a compromise that will wholly satisfy nobody. What we need - and what we should all desire - is rather a consensus that leads to joint actions supported by all affected communities. Compromise is a symptom of terminating a discussion too soon. The two sides (or more than two sides) are still separated by a gulf of disagreements. Averaging the two positions - or worse yet, having one side trample the other's - cannot possibly produce the optimum solution. Contrast this with a well-formed consensus - several disagreeing factions are locked in a room until they all agree on a common vision of how to proceed. Call this the "Twelve Angry Men" effect. That one faction or another may have to completely change their original position is a strength, not a weakness. Ideally none of the factions even arrives in the room with a specific position to bargain over, but rather arrives only with general requirements and objectives. What is needed is civil time to continue to reflect solar time as it has since literally the dawn of time. Our policies, standards, mechanisms and procedures for making this happen have changed several times throughout history. It is unsurprising that they would need to change again. We would be more productive if we focussed first on the transport mechanisms and procedures that we foresee will be necessary to support third millennium civil time and only later return to the specifics of the standard(s) that will be transported and the policies that those standards will implement. Rob Seaman National Optical Astronomy Observatory
