In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, "Se eds, Glen" writes: >Hmm... there is certainly a problem when it comes to specifying legal time >referring to the future: sun time is not predictable into the future with a >high degree of precision. People wanting that kind of precision in legal >documents would have two choices:
In my 20 years in the computing business, I have yet to see one single instance where the duration until a future legal event was specified with second precision. I have seen many instances where the future legal event was locked to a legal time with second precision. The distinction is important it be aware off. Contracts may run until "Noon, 12 december 2012", but they do not run "for 252460800 seconds". And I seriously do not belive that they will, until a lot of things change radically, including wrist watches. On the other hand, past events are routinely timestamped, sequenced by these timestamps and time-intervals between them calculated with sub-second precision. I belive the same holds true for scientific applications: The desire to be able to calculate a delta-T in a sane manner (ie: without lookup tables) pertains almost exclusively to events already in the past. Poul-Henning -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 [EMAIL PROTECTED] | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
