[tz] Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to retain “leap second”

Random832 random832 at fastmail.com
Fri Nov 20 05:16:33 UTC 2015


On 2015-11-20, Paul Ganssle <paul at ganssle.io> wrote:
> At least they seem to be deferring decision rather than
> actively deciding in favor of leap seconds. Still, is anyone
> actually advocating in favor of leap seconds? Who is being
> helped by keeping mean solar time at noon UTC or whatever the
> point of leap seconds is?

I got into an argument about this with ESR (in an NTPsec
announcement thread on his blog) a few months ago and he said:

> You think a timescale which is an integer number of seconds
> offset from TAI and which is within a second or so of London’s
> Mean Solar Time is wholly unnecessary. This demonstrates that
> you aren’t a marine navigator, an astronomer, or (where it
> bites especially hard) an aviator. It’s from these people that
> the real-world pushback against decoupling international
> standard time from mean solar is coming, and they have good
> reasons.

So, those people, I guess. It's still not entirely clear to me
why they need civil time coupled to it, but there you go.



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