On 12/14/2014 09:04 AM, Brian Inglis wrote: > Legal civil time in most countries is defined as mean solar time, where it > is not still defined relative to GMT, as it is in most countries in the > Commonwealth of Nations deriving their common laws from England, and many > allied European and Asian countries.
Hm. Is that really the case? The current German legislation refers to "coordinated world time" (which might be taken as referring to TAI just as well as to UTC, as far as I can understand) and assigns the task of "distributing the legal time" to the PTB (which could be construed as ruling anything besides DCF77-based notions of time "not the legal thing"; BTW, DCF77 announces leap seconds only about an hour before the fact, with no specs *asserting* so that I could find). http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/me_einhg/__4.html > I am somewhat surprised that no lawyer has, as yet, argued for phone > evidence to be discarded because telco equipment uses TAI or GPS time > scales which have no legal basis in any country. Too easily countered by actual measurements showing that the equipment's notion of time never strayed more than a worst-case total of X ms (or, a la rigeur, X seconds) from the notion mandated by the legalese, I'ld guess. It's not like the courts would turn a blind eye to evidence just because they'ld prefer an official endorsement by the parliament. (Always assuming that the facts needing confirmation allow for that much deviation, of course. But high-speed trades aren't concluded on devices on a GSM network, are they?) Regards, J. Bern -- *NEU* - NEC IT-Infrastruktur-Produkte im <http://www.linworks-shop.de/>: Server--Storage--Virtualisierung--Management SW--Passion for Performance Jochen Bern, Systemingenieur --- LINworks GmbH <http://www.LINworks.de/> Postfach 100121, 64201 Darmstadt | Robert-Koch-Str. 9, 64331 Weiterstadt PGP (1024D/4096g) FP = D18B 41B1 16C0 11BA 7F8C DCF7 E1D5 FAF4 444E 1C27 Tel. +49 6151 9067-231, Zentr. -0, Fax -299 - Amtsg. Darmstadt HRB 85202 Unternehmenssitz Weiterstadt, Geschäftsführer Metin Dogan, Oliver Michel _______________________________________________ questions mailing list questions@lists.ntp.org http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions