Re: [LEAPSECS] Do lawyers care (know) about leap seconds?
On 1 October 2014 21:19, Hal Murray hmur...@megapathdsl.net wrote: The leap offset data doesn't change very often. Why should it be distributed via NTP rather than with the time-zone database or something similar? Because NTP already has support for it, and the data received by NTP is then clear and complete. Stephen ___ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
Re: [LEAPSECS] Do lawyers care (know) about leap seconds?
On 2 October 2014 00:00, Greg Hennessy greg.henne...@cox.net wrote: On 10/01/2014 09:33 AM, Stephen Colebourne wrote: We also need - a clear smoothing/smearing standard, mapping from UTC (with leap seconds) to smoothed-UTC (86400 secs per day, no leap seconds). This could be UTC-SLS, Google smear or something else, so long as there is a clear well-defined standard. I think there are significant number of people who disagree on if this is something we 'need'. I think there are people who think abolishing leap seconds is easier and find smoothing to be undesirable. There is clearly a global desire for access to an atomic-time accurate second clock, and there is clearly a global desire for a clock that has 86400 second days. I firmly believe that there is a desire amongst the vast majority of people (not necessarily this list) to retain the importance of the solar day in timekeeping. Given where we are the two main options are - abolish leap seconds - keep leap seconds and define a mapping to 86400 second days My previous post outlines what is necessary for the latter strategy to work, which is a smoothing mechanism. Ultimately, smoothing to 86400 second days is what most systems do today (including POSIX) its just that there are many different smoothing mechanisms, and it would be much better to coallesce around one standard one. Stephen ___ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
Re: [LEAPSECS] Do lawyers care (know) about leap seconds?
In message CACzrW9BueiVGHtZD5pTWPcWAEHqtBSR5++=2dzyxowgw7os...@mail.gmail.com , Stephen Colebourne writes: On 1 October 2014 21:19, Hal Murray hmur...@megapathdsl.net wrote: The leap offset data doesn't change very often. Why should it be distributed via NTP rather than with the time-zone database or something similar? Because NTP already has support for it, and the data received by NTP is then clear and complete. And because the typical update cycle for the time-zone database is highly erratic and nonexistent on many legacy platforms. If leap-seconds were announced 10 years in advance it would be different. -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 p...@freebsd.org | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. ___ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
Re: [LEAPSECS] Do lawyers care (know) about leap seconds?
Ian Batten via LEAPSECS leapsecs@leapsecond.com wrote: I can't think of any (country, religion) pairs where the religion has a deep embedding of solar time and the country is sufficiently in hock to the religion that it would alter its civil timescale to suit. There were some relics in the tz database of an attempt to support local apparent solar time in Riyadh in the late 1980s, though it seems this was an experiment with the code rather than an implementation of a time standard that people actually used. https://github.com/eggert/tz/commit/a9ac0f6938c416f724a52115ca7b0b7abb13c347 Tony. -- f.anthony.n.finch d...@dotat.at http://dotat.at/ Trafalgar: Cyclonic in northwest, otherwise mainly northerly or northwesterly 5 or 6. Slight or moderate. Showers in northwest. Good. ___ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
Re: [LEAPSECS] Do lawyers care (know) about leap seconds?
Warner Losh i...@bsdimp.com wrote: |On Oct 1, 2014, at 10:15 AM, Tony Finch d...@dotat.at wrote: | Steffen Nurpmeso sdao...@yandex.com wrote: | I cannot imagine you wouldn't agree that having CLOCK_TAI (and | CLOCK_LEAPDRIFT) make things easier. | | For most purposes we need civil time, and a TAI clock doesn't solve the | problem that civil time is too difficult to get right. | |The “just use a different timescale” argument never will have much traction |until the primary timescale is implemented correctly, robustly \ |and universally. |UTC isn’t today. No. The missing traction is that i as a user-space programmer only have access to a normalized artificial clock that has leap seconds incorporated. I do not even have access to a table of leap seconds through any official interface, in order to redo that normalization (which is a very complicated and expensive task even otherwise). As a person bound to standard interfaces i'm blind, deaf and dumb regarding the clock. Things would be completely different if there would be CLOCK_TAI (and CLOCK_LEAPDRIFT), and any computer that uses NTP has in theory easy access to all the necessary data, but unfortunately that is thrown away before it hits the wire. I'm not gonna argue UTC is a shitty timescale as i don't know, it may be, but i'm happy it is 12:10:04+0200 right now etc., nor do i condemn RFC 5905's A primary server is synchronized to a reference clock directly traceable to UTC (e.g., GPS, Galileo, etc.) (the following 104 pages of this document may be the problem instead), in the end it is a time-protocol and that's what it delivers, but i'd wish it would also deliver me with eight more bytes of information that it itself readily has available, or maybe 12 (though 48:16 bits should instead be sufficient for quite some time too). Nothing more, nothing less. But especially not: throw overboard an entire timescale. That's not what i intend. --steffen ___ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
Re: [LEAPSECS] Do lawyers care (know) about leap seconds?
Hal Murray hmur...@megapathdsl.net wrote: | (Nonetheless i repeat that having TAI plus the current LEAPDRIFT at hand | would ease date and time calculation algorithms, and also that i don't | understand why the existing information is thrown away instead of being | delivered along with the UTC information over NTP.) | |The leap offset data doesn't change very often. Why should \ |it be distributed |via NTP rather than with the time-zone database or something similar? The Olson now IANA database is where i get the leapseconds from. But if it came with, say, NTP and made available via a standardized system call (as via CLOCK_LEAPDRIFT) then user space programs would be able to differentiate in between their normal POSIX time, the TAI and the leap-second caused offset to TAI. All this self-synchronizing and in realtime, an active internet connection presupposed. None of these is true for the timezone database. --steffen ___ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
Re: [LEAPSECS] Do lawyers care (know) about leap seconds?
It's a shame that the representative from the Muslim community didn't manage to make it to the consultation session I was at. I suspect that in fact the Muslim community are less concerned that you might think, because the sighting of the moon for the purposes of the end of Ramadan is done optically, not by prediction, and only sets a day, rather than a time, anyway. I can't think of any (country, religion) pairs where the religion has a deep embedding of solar time and the country is sufficiently in hock to the religion that it would alter its civil timescale to suit. If churches want to keep a different time they can, after all. ian Islam is divided between those who want a global Islamic calendar so that Ramadan is easily predicted and everyone celebrates Ramadan at the same time and those who insist on direct observation. Here in Queens, NY, where there is a large Muslim population, the beginning and ending of Ramadan is always a bit confusing since it is on different days for different congregations and different traditions. It is common for some people to be celebrating Eid and feasting while their friends are still fasting. The biggest precise timing issue in Islam is in relationship to prayer times (Salat). It is important to know the precise local time of sunrise and noon. This is because prayer is strictly prohibited at these two moments. Since the prayer times as defined by the Qur'an predate clock time, clock time standards are not really an issue. The issue in Islam is the techniques used in converting back and forth between the traditional times and clock time. Most Muslims don't worry about how this is done, but simply consult software applications that automatically do it. As the more observationally minded Muslims would put it, clock time is European time not Muslim time and there is a danger of relying on it too heavily as opposed to direct observation of the skies. Even the Muslims I've talked with who rely on smartphone apps to know the prayer time say that they often prefer to check what their phone says against the sky if they can . . . And then some complain about working in windowless environments. Cheers, Kevin ___ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
Re: [LEAPSECS] Do lawyers care (know) about leap seconds?
Steffen Nurpmeso wrote: This approach would satisfy all parties: humans can continue to enjoy the cultural achievement of a clock that exactly describes their home planet, and engineers can use TAI for satisfying airplane schedule calculations for businessmen. Businessmen can keep whatever time they like for internal use, but whenever a businessman communicates with a customer or another business, the courts will interpret any times stated as being the legal time of the applicable jurisdiction, although in many cases the businessman and the other parties have the option of agreeing to a different time scale. So the businessman who uses TAI internally must either take great care to convert this to the appropriate legal time scale when communicating to outsiders, or must form a contract with each and every external contact to use TAI instead of the legal time scale that would normally apply. ___ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
Re: [LEAPSECS] Do lawyers care (know) about leap seconds?
|Warner Losh i...@bsdimp.com wrote: | | No. The basic point is that people are ignoring the standard because it | is hard to implement. | |Given the perpetual arguments on this list, I am not surprised by the |reaction of the people participating in the UK consultation: techies |should buckle down and implement it properly. yes. |But my experience in the IETF is that it is normal for engineers to work |around or ignore awkward requirements when the cost of complying is too |high. See the thousands of IETF documents that never lead to a deployed |system. yes. |And successful standards usually follow a successful implementation, |rather than the other way round, mainly because there's no substitute for |practical experience when it comes to ironing out the interop and |deployment difficulties. |So I wonder how to effectively communicate the surprisingly large effects |that seemingly small technical details can have on the success or failure |of a standard. Especially to non-technical people who are rightly |impressed by the fondleslab in their pocket and wonder, if phones can be |so smart, why is time so dumb? And to technical people who have less |experience of the mind numbing futility of standards development. It would be much easier to ask POSIX for a CLOCK_TAI clock_gettime(3) if a TAI clock would be easily accessible on end-user systems. Unfortunately NTP doesn't include an 8-byte TAI field in their packet but only send out UTC. Ironically NTP primary servers are defined as (RFC 5905, 2.): A primary server is synchronized to a reference clock directly traceable to UTC (e.g., GPS, Galileo, etc.). That is, to my understanding, that atomic clock signals are used by NTP but then this TAI is thrown away instead of being delivered as a regular part of NTP. I think it would be an immense improvement if TAI would be delivered as part of NTP and made available to normal user-space programs via a new CLOCK_TAI. Even better would be an additional CLOCK_LEAPDRIFT that simply returns the current (at the time of the system call) relative distance. This approach would satisfy all parties: humans can continue to enjoy the cultural achievement of a clock that exactly describes their home planet, and engineers can use TAI for satisfying airplane schedule calculations for businessmen. --steffen ___ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
Re: [LEAPSECS] Do lawyers care (know) about leap seconds?
But the basic point still remains: If you have to sugar coat the actual standard with a fake standard to paper-over people’s inability to deal with the actual standard, this suggests that you have the wrong actual standard. I would agree that we have the wrong actual standard. We've had leap seconds since 1972, but POSIX still mandates we ignore the leap seconds in places. It would be nice if the standards and the practices match. Some people want to change the standards, and others want to change the practices. ___ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
Re: [LEAPSECS] Do lawyers care (know) about leap seconds?
Steffen Nurpmeso sdao...@yandex.com wrote: This approach would satisfy all parties: humans can continue to enjoy the cultural achievement of a clock that exactly describes their home planet, and engineers can use TAI for satisfying airplane schedule calculations for businessmen. No. Planning for human events in the future needs to be based on the local time in a particular place. http://fanf.livejournal.com/104586.html Tony. -- f.anthony.n.finch d...@dotat.at http://dotat.at/ Trafalgar: Cyclonic in northwest, otherwise mainly northerly or northwesterly 5 or 6. Slight or moderate. Showers in northwest. Good. ___ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
Re: [LEAPSECS] Do lawyers care (know) about leap seconds?
For most of human history there were no global time standards. In Europe, many city states had their own distinctive times--Nuremberg Time, Italian Time, Bohemian Time . . . The first wave of global standards were implemented by colonialism and empire. Implementing global standards without the power of empire is unprecedented in human history. Trying to devise a standard that satisfies the diversity of human behaviors is particularly difficult, particularly when there is nobody on the planet who knows the diversity of human behaviors--even among those of us who specialize in the study of such diversity. Cheers, Kevin Kevin K. Birth, Professor Department of Anthropology Queens College, City University of New York 65-30 Kissena Boulevard Flushing, NY 11367 telephone: 718/997-5518 We may live longer but we may be subject to peculiar contagion and spiritual torpor or illiteracies of the imagination --Wilson Harris Tempus est mundi instabilis motus, rerumque labentium cursus. --Hrabanus Maurus On 10/1/14 8:02 AM, Greg Hennessy greg.henne...@cox.net wrote: But the basic point still remains: If you have to sugar coat the actual standard with a fake standard to paper-over people¹s inability to deal with the actual standard, this suggests that you have the wrong actual standard. I would agree that we have the wrong actual standard. We've had leap seconds since 1972, but POSIX still mandates we ignore the leap seconds in places. It would be nice if the standards and the practices match. Some people want to change the standards, and others want to change the practices. ___ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs ___ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
Re: [LEAPSECS] Do lawyers care (know) about leap seconds?
On 1 October 2014 13:02, Greg Hennessy greg.henne...@cox.net wrote: But the basic point still remains: If you have to sugar coat the actual standard with a fake standard to paper-over people’s inability to deal with the actual standard, this suggests that you have the wrong actual standard. I would agree that we have the wrong actual standard. We've had leap seconds since 1972, but POSIX still mandates we ignore the leap seconds in places. It would be nice if the standards and the practices match. Some people want to change the standards, and others want to change the practices. It doesn't work well because there are two different requirements in tension - the desire to work in terms of solar days and the desire to define an absolute second. Like it or not, UTC itself is a perfectly valid mechanism to bridge the gap between the two. So, why do engineers not adopt UTC properly? I posit it is because the leap second simply is generally not important enough to care about at the business level, thus there is no reason for the engineers to care. Where the business does care, such as in TV/finance/web, the requirements are driven from the business and engineers have no choice but to care. The problem is that UTC and its transmission as a broadcast time scale only covers part of the need, and without the rest it tends to fail. We also need - reliable transmission. It is absurd that we cannot get all NTP servers to send out the leap second info at the right time and with minimal/no human intervention. A central web service of leap second data wouldn;t be that hard... - a clear smoothing/smearing standard, mapping from UTC (with leap seconds) to smoothed-UTC (86400 secs per day, no leap seconds). This could be UTC-SLS, Google smear or something else, so long as there is a clear well-defined standard. - operating system support for the smoothing/smearing standard. An application/language can then choose whether to use UTC (and handle leaps) or smoothed-UTC (when the business doesn't care about that kind of detail. Abolishing leap seconds is another approach, but it works by putting a head in the sand and ignoring the underlying tension with solar days. And my big fear is that some more religiously minded countries might choose to carry on using leap seconds because of the higher value they place on the Sun in timekeeping. Having two countries permanently differ in current time by a few seconds would cause engineers far more problems than leap seconds do today. Stephen ___ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
Re: [LEAPSECS] Do lawyers care (know) about leap seconds?
On Oct 1, 2014, at 6:02 AM, Greg Hennessy greg.henne...@cox.net wrote: But the basic point still remains: If you have to sugar coat the actual standard with a fake standard to paper-over people’s inability to deal with the actual standard, this suggests that you have the wrong actual standard. I would agree that we have the wrong actual standard. We've had leap seconds since 1972, but POSIX still mandates we ignore the leap seconds in places. It would be nice if the standards and the practices match. Some people want to change the standards, and others want to change the practices. Another example of well-intended people sugar coating the UTC standard and causing problems. It is precisely well-intended efforts like this which has made it effectively impossible to implement the UTC standard pedantically correctly. UTC gets a number of things right, as a purely academic standard. And it is quite useful for those purposes. However, as a real-world standard, experience of the last 42 years of implementation suggests that it is hard to actually, really implement. On the other hand, the POSIX standard is easy to implement and generally hard to get wrong. As a programming standard, it has made things easy. It is this experience that leads many to desire that harmonization between the two go POSIX (time w/o leap seconds) instead of UTC, which gets the agreement better, but had weird warts to make synchronization appear invisible (but the :60 and time time-slip for those not implementing it exposes this invisibility as being illusionary). Warner signature.asc Description: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail ___ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
Re: [LEAPSECS] Do lawyers care (know) about leap seconds?
Gerard Ashton ashto...@comcast.net wrote: |Steffen Nurpmeso wrote: | | This approach would satisfy all parties: humans can continue to enjoy the |cultural achievement of a clock that exactly describes their home planet, |and engineers can use TAI for satisfying airplane schedule calculations for |businessmen. | |Businessmen can keep whatever time they like for internal use, but |whenever a businessman communicates with a customer or another business, the |courts will interpret any times stated as being the legal time of the |applicable jurisdiction, although in many cases the businessman and the |other parties have the option of agreeing to a different time scale. So the |businessman who uses TAI internally must either take great care to convert |this to the appropriate legal time scale when communicating to outsiders, or |must form a contract with each and every external contact to use TAI instead |of the legal time scale that would normally apply. That doesn't sound overall interesting to me, as i personally neither like businessmen nor lawyers having plenty of negative examples at hand. Of course this is a superficial view, i am able to give you examples of actual characters in each profession (even a strong and noble one regarding a judge), but exceptions confirm the rule. I cannot imagine you wouldn't agree that having CLOCK_TAI (and CLOCK_LEAPDRIFT) make things easier. Not an easier way than not throwing away already available information before it hits the wire. So what do you want? No, i cannot build a satellite. And i will not speak against leap seconds only because they are managed by someone located in France. --steffen ___ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
Re: [LEAPSECS] Do lawyers care (know) about leap seconds?
Gerard Ashton said: Businessmen can keep whatever time they like for internal use, but whenever a businessman communicates with a customer or another business, the courts will interpret any times stated as being the legal time of the applicable jurisdiction, although in many cases the businessman and the other parties have the option of agreeing to a different time scale. About 3 years ago I gave a paper on this topic to a law conference. One of the things I suggested then is that laywers should start adding choice of timescale clauses to the choice of law clauses they already use. Whether anyone has actually done so, I don't know. -- Clive D.W. Feather | If you lie to the compiler, Email: cl...@davros.org | it will get its revenge. Web: http://www.davros.org | - Henry Spencer Mobile: +44 7973 377646 ___ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
Re: [LEAPSECS] Do lawyers care (know) about leap seconds?
Tony Finch d...@dotat.at wrote: |Steffen Nurpmeso sdao...@yandex.com wrote: | their home planet, and engineers can use TAI for satisfying | airplane schedule calculations for businessmen. | |No. Planning for human events in the future needs to be based on the local |time in a particular place. http://fanf.livejournal.com/104586.html Oh, yes, this heated discussion made me erratic. I'd use a date+time indicator plus a location indication too (i said organization-internal shorthand of TZID for the latter on the TZ list). (Nonetheless i repeat that having TAI plus the current LEAPDRIFT at hand would ease date and time calculation algorithms, and also that i don't understand why the existing information is thrown away instead of being delivered along with the UTC information over NTP.) --steffen ___ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
Re: [LEAPSECS] Do lawyers care (know) about leap seconds?
Kevin Birth kevin.bi...@qc.cuny.edu wrote: For most of human history there were no global time standards. In Europe, many city states had their own distinctive times--Nuremberg Time, Italian Time, Bohemian Time . . . But before there were standard times there were standard representations of time, e.g. the 12/24 hour clock and base 60 fractions. Tony. -- f.anthony.n.finch d...@dotat.at http://dotat.at/ Trafalgar: Cyclonic in northwest, otherwise mainly northerly or northwesterly 5 or 6. Slight or moderate. Showers in northwest. Good. ___ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
Re: [LEAPSECS] Do lawyers care (know) about leap seconds?
Steffen Nurpmeso sdao...@yandex.com wrote: I cannot imagine you wouldn't agree that having CLOCK_TAI (and CLOCK_LEAPDRIFT) make things easier. For most purposes we need civil time, and a TAI clock doesn't solve the problem that civil time is too difficult to get right. Tony. -- f.anthony.n.finch d...@dotat.at http://dotat.at/ Trafalgar: Cyclonic in northwest, otherwise mainly northerly or northwesterly 5 or 6. Slight or moderate. Showers in northwest. Good. ___ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
Re: [LEAPSECS] Do lawyers care (know) about leap seconds?
The 12/24 clock was only standard in England and France. Nuremberg hours (separate counts for daytime and nighttime) lasted until 1811, Italian hours (1-24 beginning at evening twilight) until the 1860s, Japanese time until 1873. I don't know when Bohemian hours were done away with. Some parts of France used canonical hours until the early 20th century. There is also Chinese time, Hindu muhurtas, Jewish zmanim, and the prayer times in Islam--all of which are different from the 12/24 hours with 60 minutes. Standard times before the 19th century are an illusion created by only focusing on the history of the representations that lasted into the present and those representations became global because of empire and colonialism. Cheers, Kevin Kevin K. Birth, Professor Department of Anthropology Queens College, City University of New York 65-30 Kissena Boulevard Flushing, NY 11367 telephone: 718/997-5518 We may live longer but we may be subject to peculiar contagion and spiritual torpor or illiteracies of the imagination --Wilson Harris Tempus est mundi instabilis motus, rerumque labentium cursus. --Hrabanus Maurus On 10/1/14 12:13 PM, Tony Finch d...@dotat.at wrote: Kevin Birth kevin.bi...@qc.cuny.edu wrote: For most of human history there were no global time standards. In Europe, many city states had their own distinctive times--Nuremberg Time, Italian Time, Bohemian Time . . . But before there were standard times there were standard representations of time, e.g. the 12/24 hour clock and base 60 fractions. Tony. -- f.anthony.n.finch d...@dotat.at http://dotat.at/ Trafalgar: Cyclonic in northwest, otherwise mainly northerly or northwesterly 5 or 6. Slight or moderate. Showers in northwest. Good. ___ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs ___ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
Re: [LEAPSECS] Do lawyers care (know) about leap seconds?
On 1 Oct 2014, at 14:33, Stephen Colebourne scolebou...@joda.org wrote: Abolishing leap seconds is another approach, but it works by putting a head in the sand and ignoring the underlying tension with solar days. And my big fear is that some more religiously minded countries might choose to carry on using leap seconds because of the higher value they place on the Sun in timekeeping. Having two countries permanently differ in current time by a few seconds would cause engineers far more problems than leap seconds do today. And by a varying few seconds, too. It's a shame that the representative from the Muslim community didn't manage to make it to the consultation session I was at. I suspect that in fact the Muslim community are less concerned that you might think, because the sighting of the moon for the purposes of the end of Ramadan is done optically, not by prediction, and only sets a day, rather than a time, anyway. I can't think of any (country, religion) pairs where the religion has a deep embedding of solar time and the country is sufficiently in hock to the religion that it would alter its civil timescale to suit. If churches want to keep a different time they can, after all. ian ___ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
Re: [LEAPSECS] Do lawyers care (know) about leap seconds?
On 10/01/2014 09:33 AM, Stephen Colebourne wrote: We also need - a clear smoothing/smearing standard, mapping from UTC (with leap seconds) to smoothed-UTC (86400 secs per day, no leap seconds). This could be UTC-SLS, Google smear or something else, so long as there is a clear well-defined standard. I think there are significant number of people who disagree on if this is something we 'need'. ___ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
[LEAPSECS] Do lawyers care (know) about leap seconds?
So you are saying that the UTC standard is so broken that you have to invent your own, which is not standardized by any standards body[*], to get around it? UTC is the required time base for business and has some odd quirks which mean that to comply with it you have to be an expert on the esoteric quirks of UTC, like the 61 second minute. Saying that it has to be sanitized before feeding it to the end user says implies that the standard isn?t really a standard and you have to ?fake it? by some weird means to keep user?s happy. How many contracts worry about seconds? I think it's common for contracts to start one minute before or after midnight to avoid an English language ambiguity. Things like midnight Monday might be the midnight at the start of Monday or the midnight at the end of Monday so contracts usually use 00:01 or 23:59. A bit of googling found a web page describing that, but I don't know what they teach in law schools. Do other languages have the same problem? How many languages have a simple and unambigious way to say midnight at the end of xxx? -- These are my opinions. I hate spam. ___ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
Re: [LEAPSECS] Do lawyers care (know) about leap seconds?
I think lots of contracts for the use of computers where time matters, such as online auction sites, contain language that the parties agree to use the time as maintained on a particular computer system, such as the electronic auction site's computers. -Original Message- From: LEAPSECS [mailto:leapsecs-boun...@leapsecond.com] On Behalf Of Hal Murray Sent: Tuesday, September 30, 2014 2:23 PM To: leapsecs@leapsecond.com Cc: Hal Murray Subject: [LEAPSECS] Do lawyers care (know) about leap seconds? . . . How many contracts worry about seconds? I think it's common for contracts to start one minute before or after midnight to avoid an English language ambiguity. Things like midnight Monday might be the midnight at the start of Monday or the midnight at the end of Monday so contracts usually use 00:01 or 23:59. A bit of googling found a web page describing that, but I don't know what they teach in law schools. Do other languages have the same problem? How many languages have a simple and unambigious way to say midnight at the end of xxx? -- These are my opinions. I hate spam. ___ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs ___ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
Re: [LEAPSECS] Do lawyers care (know) about leap seconds?
Hal Murray said: How many contracts worry about seconds? Ones to deal with electronic trading, domain name registration, and such topics. I think it's common for contracts to start one minute before or after midnight to avoid an English language ambiguity. Things like midnight Monday might be the midnight at the start of Monday or the midnight at the end of Monday so contracts usually use 00:01 or 23:59. A bit of googling found a web page describing that, but I don't know what they teach in law schools. They didn't suggest it on my law course. I found a law case (sorry, no cite) that was decided on a matter of 8 seconds - from memory, an email sent 8 seconds after a midnight deadline. -- Clive D.W. Feather | If you lie to the compiler, Email: cl...@davros.org | it will get its revenge. Web: http://www.davros.org | - Henry Spencer Mobile: +44 7973 377646 ___ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
Re: [LEAPSECS] Do lawyers care (know) about leap seconds?
Television, cable, and internet advertising. In broadcast (including cable) the contracts are in video frames, in the North America and other NTSC standards countries this is on the order of +- 1/30th second (with some small variance for technical error). Lots and lots of commercials, lots and lots of money, with lots and lots of liablity for not broadcasting exactly what you promised. And its monitored by lots and lots of lawyers. On 2014-09-30 03:55 PM, Clive D.W. Feather wrote: Hal Murray said: How many contracts worry about seconds? Ones to deal with electronic trading, domain name registration, and such topics. I think it's common for contracts to start one minute before or after midnight to avoid an English language ambiguity. Things like midnight Monday might be the midnight at the start of Monday or the midnight at the end of Monday so contracts usually use 00:01 or 23:59. A bit of googling found a web page describing that, but I don't know what they teach in law schools. They didn't suggest it on my law course. I found a law case (sorry, no cite) that was decided on a matter of 8 seconds - from memory, an email sent 8 seconds after a midnight deadline. ___ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
Re: [LEAPSECS] Do lawyers care (know) about leap seconds?
On Sep 30, 2014, at 3:46 PM, Warner Losh i...@bsdimp.com wrote: But the basic point still remains: If you have to sugar coat the actual standard with a fake standard to paper-over people’s inability to deal with the actual standard, this suggests that you have the wrong actual standard. No, the basic point is about sugar coating physical reality with a fake reality. Atomic time and mean solar time are two different things. Diurnal cadences are governed by the synodic day. Countdown timers by the SI-second (or rather, by a frequency standard). Various options have been suggested over the many many years of this discussion. Only one non-physical non-option has ever been considered by the ITU. It is the ITU who are being tedious. Rob Seaman National Optical Astronomy Observatory ___ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
Re: [LEAPSECS] Do lawyers care (know) about leap seconds?
On Sep 30, 2014, at 5:05 PM, Rob Seaman sea...@noao.edu wrote: On Sep 30, 2014, at 3:46 PM, Warner Losh i...@bsdimp.com wrote: But the basic point still remains: If you have to sugar coat the actual standard with a fake standard to paper-over people’s inability to deal with the actual standard, this suggests that you have the wrong actual standard. No, the basic point is about sugar coating physical reality with a fake reality. No. The basic point is that people are ignoring the standard because it is hard to implement. UTC isn’t reality. UTC is one conventional way to label seconds. It happens to be the standard way to do so. UTC with leap second smearing is a different, also arbitrary, way to label seconds. It is not the standard way to do so, but does match traditional ways. The specific point I made was that one should not be “sugar coating” the standard to give to end users. If the standard is a good standard, it wouldn’t need the sugar coating. This has nothing at all with our old argument. Atomic time and mean solar time are two different things. Diurnal cadences are governed by the synodic day. Countdown timers by the SI-second (or rather, by a frequency standard). Various options have been suggested over the many many years of this discussion. Only one non-physical non-option has ever been considered by the ITU. It is the ITU who are being tedious. True, but not really the point I’m arguing. Warner signature.asc Description: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail ___ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
