On Jun 15, 2007, at 1:42 AM, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
Everybody with a checkbook were potential victims of Y2K bugs. Changes to, including abolishment of, leapseconds will only affect people who measure positions of celestial objects with high precision.
One cost is the uneven burden of remediation to those who would be definitely affected by this redefinition of universal time. ("GMT may be regarded as the general equivalent of UT.") Astronomy would indeed be facing a very large unfunded mandate merely to retain our current functionality.
There is at least a 1.000.000:1 ratio between those two populations worldwide.
The other, much larger cost will be borne by the very much wider community of those potentially affected. The cost of Y2K was so large because of the inventories that had to be conducted of vast swaths of software and embedded systems.
I know it is a article of faith with some that nothing outside of astronomy and sextant navigation could possibly care about mean solar time - but that doesn't make it a true assertion. In particular, I believe a dispassionate observer has great reason to be concerned with dependencies, potential and established, in DOD systems.
I used the subjunctive "would", above, for the cost to astronomy since this only kicks in when the policy actually changes. At some point the cost of the DUT1 inventory will kick in merely at the report of a possible change to the definition of UTC. I suggest that the precision timekeeping community should bear the cost since it is their actions that will have triggered it.
Rob Seaman NOAO
_______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list [email protected] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
