Thanks to Steve Allen for his excellent efforts to enable public discussion of the proposals to abolish leap seconds, difficult though that task has been, given the official secrecy that has surrounded it. See e.g. this quote from a Wall Street Journal article in July Why the US wants to end link between time and sun http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05210/545823.stm
For now, U.S. officials still regard their proposal as secret, despite Dr. Gambis's email and the public comments. The head of America's delegation to the ITU's timing committee, D. Wayne Hanson of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, declined to take calls on the matter. Through a spokeswoman, he said that the U.S. proposal is a private matter internal to the ITU and not for public discussion. For a while, the proposal was made public: On Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 06:33:22AM -0700, Steve Allen wrote: > The draft US document which is under consideration for submission is > available for review and still open for comment > > http://www.fcc.gov/ib/sand/irb/weritacrnc/review/nc1985wp7a/01.doc > > The significant difference from last year seems to be that leap seconds > would stop not in 2007 but rather five years after the ITU general > assembly approves the change. This URL no longer works, but yields this un-encouraging message: Not Found The requested object does not exist on this server. The link you followed is either outdated, inaccurate, or the server has been instructed not to let you have it. [They could at least offer some entertainment under the circumstances :-) e.g. Marvin the Paranoid Android moans about requests for missing pages: http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/humor/marvin-the-server-404.html ] If anyone knows of a new place to find the latest proposal, please post it. And does anyone know where to find an archive of the comments made in response to the proposal? In the meantime, I highly recommend Steve's excellent web page at http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/nc1985wp7a.html which summarizes the cogent arguments of who disagrees with the proposal. Neal McBurnett http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/
