On Oct 22, 2010, at 9:05 PM, Jonathan E. Hardis wrote: > Now comes the moment of self-appraisal.
This "moment" has come a dozen times before on this mailing list(s). > Leap seconds have been around since 1972 (IIRC). Leap seconds are a means to an end. Civil time is (obviously) derived from mean solar time. The ITU-R can cheat for some purposes for some period of time. However, the moon exists, tides exist, the day lengthens. See dozens of previous threads. > we have had, since 1972, an explosion of digital infrastructure that is > designed and built without regard to leap seconds. Spend even one sentence in the proposal speculating on system engineering issues related to that infrastructure. > Minutes contain 60 seconds ... period. An SI second is not 1/86,400 of a day. Pretending it is, legislating it, don't make it so. It ain't brain surgery to collect use cases, discover requirements, write them down, build trade-off matrices, perform sensitivity and risk analyses, and do all the normal system engineering that would be performed by - say - Cisco building another network switch. The ITU-R draft is an embarrassing exercise in avoiding due diligence. The ubiquity of crappy digital technology is an argument for better system engineering, not for abandoning any semblance for a Hail Mary pass. Rob _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
