In message <20101222181206.gh3...@ucolick.org>, Steve Allen writes: >On Wed 2010-12-22T09:51:15 -0800, Steve Allen hath writ:
>=> processes which will kill or destroy things if their clocks are >unhappy with a difference between broadcast time and civil time > >Can anyone give specific examples of the last? I don't think you understand Steve. Broadcast time *IS* civil time, it is broadcast as a service to civilians. Take Germanys DCF77 as example: DCF77 is the official legal time of Germany[1]. If you want to prove in court what time something happened, you have better be prepared to link it to DCF77 signals. If you change the broadcasts to disseminate something that does not correspond to civil time, the thing that will get killed and destroyed is your civil liberties: Under the Bush-inspired "terror-laws", there is no 15 year[2] penalty associated with tampering with "technical stuff that we need to run the country" as one civil servant summarized the law. Good luck convincing the germans that DCF77 should differ from civil time by some seconds, for the convenience of astronomers who do not use DCF77. Poul-Henning [1] DCF77 does not transmit UTC, it transmits German summer or winter time, as indicated by one of the bits. It does not transmit the numeric difference between broadcast time and UTC nor for that matter DUT1. [2] Possibly 20, this is from memory. -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 p...@freebsd.org | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs