I wrote: > My humble opinion is that in 1972 leap milliseconds should have > been introduced (i.e., set the UTC day length to an integer number > of milliseconds, ...
Markus Kuhn replied: # As I explained here before, this is not feasible. It messes up any form # of standard frequency transmission that is not a multiple of 1000 Hz, # ... Yes, we've discussed this before. As always in this list, the answer would be: use TAI. The real point is that any solution will be an engineering compromise. All we can hope to do is to keep the costs to a minimum. When people know about a problem up-front they can usually work round it fairly cheaply. It's the problems which people don't know about until too late which cause the greatest costs. Therefore, I think the emphasis in any solution should be to put most of the work on those who understand and care about these problems - those responsible for such things as frequency standards. I don't believe that the leap hour solution answers this point at all well - because eventually it'll affect everybody. But then, I don't think anybody on this list has really spoken up in favour of leap hours - or have I missed something? Happy aphelion everybody, Ed.
