[tz] New Yorker article on David Mills and NTP

[Steve Allen]

On Tue 2022-10-04T22:51:35-0400 Steve Summit via tz hath writ:
> As I understand it, one way of looking at the new, leap-secondless
> plan is that if you wait long enough, the multi-minute jump that
> you then need isn't a "leap" anything, it's a political change
> to the definition of a time zone, readily handled by the well-tried
> mechanism that we on this list all know and love.

Puttig the onus onto legislators is perhaps payback for the fact that
the inception of the leap second was prompted when Germany passed a
law that made mean solar seconds illegal.  With the telecom technology
of 1970 the only viable option for a single time scale that could be
broadcast everywhere as legal time was TAI offset by leap seconds.
This was adopted despite a report from astronomers which pointed out
that the leaps of time would wreak havoc for automated systems when
such systems would become commonplace.

--
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