Dear Wolfgang,
You ask:
> Who cares about UTC in every-day life?
Well all diallists and anyone who uses astronomical tables
care about UTC precisely because it is, currently, guaranteed
the same as UT1 to within 0.9s and we can ignore that difference.
When UTC-UT1 is even a few seconds, never mind a large fraction
of an hour, we won't be able to ignore the difference.
I'll go further. Everyone who ever sets a clock or a watch uses
UTC or some very simple offset from UTC (usually an integral
number of hours). There are quite a lot of people who own watches!
Moreover, most e-mail headers, certainly including yours, implicitly
refer to UTC. Your header said...
Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2005 08:10:15 +0200 (MEST)
That +0200 refers to the offset from UTC.
So the answer to your question is simple:
`Almost everyone in the civilised world cares about UTC.'
It is true that some of them don't know that they care :-)
Frank H. King
Cambridge, U.K.
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