>If we regard UTC as >a contract between the precision timing community and - well - >everybody else, [...]
Regarding an intenational treaty as a contract is not only pointless, it is downright silly. International law is decided by governments, on the rather general assumption that people have the governments they deserve. Contracts on the other hand are bilateral agreements between consensual partners of any kind, with the provisio that both parties must sign of their own free will. Should you doubt this point, let me remind you that the US Congress had no ability to negotiate the contents in for instance the Geneva or Warszawa conventions once they were agreed to internationally, at that stage it is a take it or leave it thing. More to the point, none of the persons to which these two treaties directly applied had any say in their construction, but through their governments representative at the respective drafting sessions. But you could conceiveably argue the point, that ITU-R only controls time, as far as it pertains to telecommunication and radio transmission of time signals, and that each country is free to use another timescale for civilian time. Unfortunately, the Metre-Convention and the Longitude Conference has nailed your left and right feet to the floor [1], so in practice ITU-R gets to decide all time. Poul-Henning [1] Thus making the Warszawa Convention at lot less applicable. -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 [EMAIL PROTECTED] | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.