On 17 Jan, 2012, at 04:38 , Nero Imhard wrote: > On 2012-01-16, at 21:20, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote: >> It would require a lot of editorial work in a LOT of international documents > > So what's new? Doing things right is always harder. > Using "it's too hard" as an argument is a copout. > But at least you are saying it aloud. ITU isn't.
So what is the "right thing"? Am I correct in assuming that it would be something like the following? - They agree that starting in 2018 time services should stop disseminating UTC and begin disseminating TI. TI won't exist until then because it needs to be a leap-less timescale which matches UTC at the change over, so it can't be defined until they know what UTC will be then. - They announce that on 2018-01-01 time services should begin disseminating TI and cease to disseminate UTC, and that after that date all references to UTC in their documents should be interpreted as TI until they get around to fixing that. Also, to avoid confusion about what time it is, they declare UTC to be defunct (the IERS will never announce another UTC leap second, which essentially makes UTC go away in any case; there is no physical definition of UTC which does not depend on IERS administrative action) and that TI should be used as an approximation to the now non-existent UTC when needed. - They fix up their documents to replace UTC with TI as they get around to it. As far as I can tell the only difference between this and just redefining UTC directly is to ensure continued full employment at the ITU for years to come making and publishing those changes (since all the ITU itself does is to organize conferences and conventions, and to publish the documents that its members tell them to). If the difference between the "right thing" and the "wrong thing" is to provide additional employment opportunities in the ITU publishing department then I'm not sure the ITU would object to that. If there are concerns about doing it this way I would assume they are not the ITU's. Dennis Ferguson _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
