On 2011-02-08 16:29, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote, answering Rob Seaman:
> Civil timekeeping is a worldwide system. No it is not. UTC is a "worldwide coorporation" or "worldwide coordination" if you will. There is no international entity which can mandate what civil time must be in any particular country, and therefore there is no other system than what emerges through voluntary coordination and cooperation. And the cooperation only happens to the extent people want to, there are no penalties for deciding on stupid timekeeping in your own country. Nobody can prevent your government or my government from defining local time as UTC + Xh 31 minutes + 41.5 seconds.
In 1884, an international conference decided: That the Conference proposes the adoption of a universal day for all purposes for which it may be found convenient, and which shall not interfere with the use of local or standard time where desirable. That this universal day is to be a mean solar day; is to begin for all the world at the moment of mean midnight of the initial meridian, coinciding with the beginning of the civil day and date of that meridian; and is to be counted from zero up to twenty-four hours. That international agreement has since become, and still is, the rationale for the worldwide use of UT, UT2, and UTC as the basis for the definition of all local civil time scales, even at those strange places where the civil time scale is defined as UTC + 31 min + 41.5 s. The proposed distribution of a translate of TAI as the time scale to be distributed worldwide, and thus to be taken as the basis of all civil time scales, amounts to the abrogation of this decision of 1884. So many esoteric technical issues have been raised in the discussion about this matter that I am wondering whether the ITU-R people may still be aware of the importance of their decision: they are going to revise the agreement of 1884. Michael Deckers. _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs