On Fri 2006-04-14T09:43:45 +0200, Poul-Henning Kamp hath writ: > If you put a provisional table of leapseconds into your products and > reality turns out differently, who is liable for the discrepancies ?
It's a good question. My immediate response is that my notions are also part of the "Full Time-Scale-Aware Lawyer Employment act of {YA}" > If you add 10 more leapsecond opportunities per year you will > decrease reliability of the provisional table, compared to if > there is only two opportunities per year. The motivation is that allowing ten more per year requires action on the part of all systems to upgrade anything which now believes only June and December (and they get ten years of notice to do so). More importantly, it allows the IERS to react better to any surprises in decadal fluctuations of LOD. I should add one more culturally-derived defense of a possible problem. The DUT1 signals which only allow as much as 0.7 or 0.8 s of magnitude. What sorts of applications will be affected by that? Paraphrasing Westly in the fireswamps of The Princess Bride DUT1 signals? I don't think they exist. Well, I don't think anyone uses them. If there are still many applications for DUT1 signals, most likely they are for sextant-style navigation. If the leap seconds are being predicted five years in advance then the annually published navigation almnacs can incorporate projections which are as good as the broadcast signals. -- Steve Allen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> WGS-84 (GPS) UCO/Lick Observatory Natural Sciences II, Room 165 Lat +36.99858 University of California Voice: +1 831 459 3046 Lng -122.06014 Santa Cruz, CA 95064 http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/ Hgt +250 m