On Sunday 01 July 2007, Roedy Green wrote: > On 25 Jun 2007 18:46:25 -0700, Paul Rubin > <http://[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted > > someone who said : > >You cannot accurately compute > >the number of seconds between Nixon's resignation and 1800 UTC today, > >unless you take into account the leap seconds have been occurred > >between then and now. > > There are two valid answers to those questions. In a court of law, > say did some document arrive before deadline, you must use civil > time. Arguing leap seconds would not fly. > > On the other hand, if you used civil seconds to computer satellite > orbits, tiny errors mount up quickly in the calculation.
"civil" time/seconds ? I dare say that if they exist, they are variably defined. I know for a fact that here in Germany, official time is based on UTC, NOT UT (was GMT) or some other approximation of local time. Ergo, you *can* argue leap seconds in a court of law as they *are* "civil time". In fact Wikipedia [1] makes it sound like UTC is used in the US, and as leap seconds are part of UTC, you could probably argue with them in a US court as well Also, UTC and UT/GMT are always less than a second apart, so who cares... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Time_Zone etc. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list