Re: Equitable estoppel
On Dec 17, 2006, at 11:48 AM, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote: Regarding an intenational treaty as a contract is not only pointless, it is downright silly. Regarding me as an expert on international law is what would be silly :–) The point was to elaborate, in the context of UTC, on some issues raised by Parrish. I'd be delighted to see real lawyers consulted on the real world implications for real civil timekeeping. Evidently this is non-trivial. To not seek legal counsel prior to instituting an historically unprecedented change in the nature of civil time would be absurdly foolhardy. The concept of estoppel is quite general, however, and one might expect that it would apply even more to treaties than to contracts. Two or more parties negotiate some complicated freeform agreement. One of the parties presses for a certain provision. In good faith, the others reluctantly agree. Simple playground rules (i.e., what one might hope to apply at the level of governments :–) suggest that those other parties have a veto over future changes to that provision. But you could conceiveably argue the point, that ITU-R only controls time, as far as it pertains to telecommunication and radio transmission of time signals, No. I argue that interval time (TAI, etc.) and time-of-day (civil time) are two different things. This is a point of fact, not of law. And I argue that while ITU-R has some authority over the UTC standard as pertinent to the transmission of time-of-day, it does not over its fundamental nature as a flavor of Mean Solar Time. Time-of-day is what the name says - and is defined by cultural norms, statutory and common law and international agreements arising out of the Meridian Conference, for instance. The worldwide civil time consensus based on GMT that has proven so durable has far more reality than the hazily imagined mistaken best interests of some telecommunications multinationals. And no, I don't think embargoing leap seconds for 600 years corresponds to a practical approximation to time-of-day. It is a ridiculous shell game trick. and that each country is free to use another timescale for civilian time. Well, yes. If not, you're going to need a heck of a treaty to implement a viable leap hour instrumentality six centuries hence. Few of today's signatories may even exist. Others may arise whose opinion of early 21st century timekeeping is less than nil. Civil clocks display subdivisions of the civil calendar, and thus of the mean solar day. Wishing won't make it otherwise. Rob
Re: Equitable estoppel
> So they effectively create a new time scale which began 2000-01-01, > which increments with magical SI seconds that presumably are intended > to have the same length as those in the TT coordinate frame, which is > presumably intended only to be valid within geostationary orbit > (Mondiale), yet which is intended to be valid for the next 32800 years. > It is apparently motivated by UTC and TAI and GPS time, but not > explicitly based on them. Perhaps a little off-topic and I'm not sure if anyone mentioned this yet but several of us heard at PTTI a few weeks ago that Galileo has decided to use the same epoch as GPS for their internal, continuous, non-leap time scale I didn't check the ICD but I assume this is partly to be compatible with existing satellite timing applications and partly to avoid polluting the otherwise well-defined meaning of TAI -- the paper clock upon which UTC is based to which the national realtime UTC(k) are steered. So this is good news - at least it's one example where a perfectly good timescale is not destroyed by usurping its name for another purpose. /tvb
Re: Equitable estoppel
On Sun 2006-12-17T18:48:16 +, Poul-Henning Kamp hath writ: > Regarding an international treaty as a contract is not only pointless, > it is downright silly. In this is the kernel of what seems to have been Dennis McCarthy's greatest fear ever since the 1999 CCTF meeting -- loss of hegemony. > Contracts on the other hand are bilateral agreements between > consensual partners of any kind, with the provisio that both > parties must sign of their own free will. That doesn't stop people from designing standards and systems based on certain characteristics of UTC which are perceived to be reliable. A recent example is ETSI Standard: Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM); Multiplex Distribution Interface (MDI), ETSI TS 102 820 V1.2.1 (2005-10) http://webapp.etsi.org/action/PU/20051101/ts_102820v010201p.pdf Note that their definitions in section 3.1 they don't get the French for UTC right. They give no notion of the relativistic concepts of proper or coordinate time, but instead rely on "standard SI seconds". They do not give any references for the definitions of UTC or TAI. So they effectively create a new time scale which began 2000-01-01, which increments with magical SI seconds that presumably are intended to have the same length as those in the TT coordinate frame, which is presumably intended only to be valid within geostationary orbit (Mondiale), yet which is intended to be valid for the next 32800 years. It is apparently motivated by UTC and TAI and GPS time, but not explicitly based on them. > But you could conceiveably argue the point, that ITU-R only controls > time, as far as it pertains to telecommunication and radio transmission > of time signals, and that each country is free to use another > timescale for civilian time. China just defined its own version of the DVD. It may come to pass that people will notice in the history of time scales that no time scale has been safe from re-definition, that when one is redefined it has often abandoned some of the characteristics it formerly had, that in the cases where such change has caused hardship to some users of the former version of the time scale the response of the Time Lords has effectively been "We needed to change it to suit our purposes. Your purposes were irrelevant. Cope." It may also come to pass that people notice that Tom Van Baak can keep time in his basement better than any national government could when he was born, that throwing some dollars to Symmetricom can put them in the same situation, and that for their corporate purposes it may be better to rely on their own time scale than on any externally defined time scale -- especially if the externally available scales are seen as transitory political conventions rather than fixed representations of physical reality. If there is no implied contract, if there is general recognition that the current definitions are always malleable according to the whim of some other entity, then there is little incentive to respect the standard. -- Steve Allen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>WGS-84 (GPS) UCO/Lick ObservatoryNatural Sciences II, Room 165Lat +36.99858 University of CaliforniaVoice: +1 831 459 3046 Lng -122.06014 Santa Cruz, CA 95064http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/ Hgt +250 m
Re: Equitable estoppel
In message: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> John E Hein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: : Peter Vince wrote at 20:15 + on Dec 18, 2006: : > >For the moment, if leap seconds is to be abbandoned, I would favour the leap : > >minute instead. : > : > Is that not sitting on the fence, and ending up with the worst of : > both worlds? It is neither as precise as leap (micro, milli, or : > whole) seconds, nor as long term as leap hours. It would put off the : > updates for only a few tens of years, by which time experience of : > them would have been lost, and our descendants would end up with Y2K : > type problems. : > : > Peter Vince : : One of the problems described on this list in the past is that of leap : tables in devices designed to operate over 10-20 years without : availability of leap second updates. Being able to rely on a table : that is good for that long makes the job of the designer much easier. As would a schedule for the next 10 years, say something like: Dec 2007 Jun 2009 Jun 2010 Dec 2012 Dec 2013 Jun 2015 Jun 2016 Dec 2018 ... The state of the art is such that we have a high confidence of being able to predict things out at least 18 if not 36 months and still keeping within the 0.9s performance goal. If that were loosened a little, then we could schedule things out 10 years or so. It could even be phased in so that the next two leap second opportunities could be scheduled after the first of the year, and the two following that after June, etc until. While annoying, at least it would be known far in advance and start to feel more like a leap day rather than a total pita. : In this respect, leap minutes would be "better" than leap seconds. Then a leap hour would be 60 times better[*] Of course, a leap minute would happen once or twice a lifetime. A leap hour happens once every 100 generations or so... : Do not mistake this comment as an advocation of leap minutes. Ditto for me... Warner [*] And 3600 times more disruptive and less likely to get right...
Re: Equitable estoppel
From: Peter Vince <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [LEAPSECS] Equitable estoppel Date: Mon, 18 Dec 2006 20:15:50 + Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > >For the moment, if leap seconds is to be abbandoned, I would favour the leap > >minute instead. > > Is that not sitting on the fence, and ending up with the worst of > both worlds? It is neither as precise as leap (micro, milli, or > whole) seconds, nor as long term as leap hours. It would put off the > updates for only a few tens of years, by which time experience of > them would have been lost, and our descendants would end up with Y2K > type problems. Well, to start off with, I beleive that a leap mechanism is needed. Let's now assume that everyone agrees on that (I know that some people want to abandon them altogether). What type of leap mechanism do we want? The leap micro, mili stuff we have already tried, and it was abandoned. This is why leap seconds was introduced. Infact, the original 0.7 second deviation was relaxed to 0.9 seconds after a few years. There is some arguing that leap seconds is hard since they can't be predicted long enought in advance. Frequency offsets and smaller jumps don't work so if a leap mechanism is needed it needs to be for large jumps. Being the sillly humans we are, the units we have left is minute, hour and day. Since I beleive that there is a practical usefullness of keeping a rougth coordination between UT1 and UTC such that UTC/legal time is still relevant for identifying morning, noon and stuff, the day (and larger jumps) is ruled out. That leaves minute and hour. Both these we should be able to plan well in advance considering the rates we have seen so far. The benefit about doing it in minute is that the leap minute would at least occur so often that people actually recalls that they can occur and design for it, plan it and roll it out where as leap hours would occur so rarely (at least in nearby time) that you will have Y2K all over again. Not that any of us would be around by then, but sure as hell they would say how stupid we where. Ah well. This is why I say that if we are to abandon leap seconds, my preference would be leap minute. Abandon the UT1 - UTC regulation alltogether is not a good solution IMHO even if I respect the views that leap seconds is troublesome in systems, and then mainly (as I have gathered) due to their fairly high rate and unpredictabilty. The noise prohibit us from mechanics such as the leap day rules, which would have to be adjusted down the line. So, we seem to require administered leap mechanisms as I see it. Cheers, Magnus
Re: Equitable estoppel
Peter Vince wrote at 20:15 + on Dec 18, 2006: > >For the moment, if leap seconds is to be abbandoned, I would favour the leap > >minute instead. > > Is that not sitting on the fence, and ending up with the worst of > both worlds? It is neither as precise as leap (micro, milli, or > whole) seconds, nor as long term as leap hours. It would put off the > updates for only a few tens of years, by which time experience of > them would have been lost, and our descendants would end up with Y2K > type problems. > > Peter Vince One of the problems described on this list in the past is that of leap tables in devices designed to operate over 10-20 years without availability of leap second updates. Being able to rely on a table that is good for that long makes the job of the designer much easier. In this respect, leap minutes would be "better" than leap seconds. Do not mistake this comment as an advocation of leap minutes.
Re: Equitable estoppel
For the moment, if leap seconds is to be abbandoned, I would favour the leap minute instead. Is that not sitting on the fence, and ending up with the worst of both worlds? It is neither as precise as leap (micro, milli, or whole) seconds, nor as long term as leap hours. It would put off the updates for only a few tens of years, by which time experience of them would have been lost, and our descendants would end up with Y2K type problems. Peter Vince
Re: Equitable estoppel
From: Poul-Henning Kamp <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [LEAPSECS] Equitable estoppel Date: Mon, 18 Dec 2006 06:29:30 + Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > >The BIPM says > >http://www1.bipm.org/jsp/en/ViewCGPMResolution.jsp?CGPM=15&RES=5 > >that UTC gives an indication of mean solar time, which it can only do > >using leap seconds. > > Steve, > > This is rubbish and you know it. > > UTC can give an indication of mean solartime with leap hours, leap > minutes, leap-seconds or leap-microseconds, it's only a matter of > precision. What it should say is that you need some form of phase adjustment mechanism to handle phase and frequency wabbles such as a leap second. For the moment, if leap seconds is to be abbandoned, I would favour the leap minute instead. Cheers, Magnus
Re: Equitable estoppel
>The BIPM says >http://www1.bipm.org/jsp/en/ViewCGPMResolution.jsp?CGPM=15&RES=5 >that UTC gives an indication of mean solar time, which it can only do >using leap seconds. Steve, This is rubbish and you know it. UTC can give an indication of mean solartime with leap hours, leap minutes, leap-seconds or leap-microseconds, it's only a matter of precision. -- 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.
Re: Equitable estoppel
In message: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Steve Allen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: : ITU rules which say their documents must be sold, not given away. All A simple web search shows that at least the UTC/leap second recommendations are readily available in electronic form... Warner
Re: Equitable estoppel
On Sun 2006-12-17T18:48:16 +, Poul-Henning Kamp hath writ: > But you could conceiveably argue the point, that ITU-R only controls > time, as far as it pertains to telecommunication and radio transmission > of time signals, and that each country is free to use another > timescale for civilian time. > > Unfortunately, the Metre-Convention and the Longitude Conference > has nailed your left and right feet to the floor [1], so in practice > ITU-R gets to decide all time. If only it were evidently that simple. ITU-R TF.460 says the IERS announces leap seconds, and the head of the bureau who makes such decisions has indicated a desire to continue to do so, and the IERS http://www.iers.org/MainDisp.csl?pid=36-25787&prodid=16 says "UTC is defined by the CCIR Recommendation 460-4 (1986)" which the ITU-R has already superseded twice with no indication that the IERS intends to heed any updated version. The BIPM says http://www1.bipm.org/jsp/en/ViewCGPMResolution.jsp?CGPM=15&RES=5 that UTC gives an indication of mean solar time, which it can only do using leap seconds. The Metre Convention authorizes the BIPM as one of the three agencies who have a say in these matters. I don't see those feet nailed down. I see a gauzy web of insubstantial constraints being held self-consistent only by the fact that there once was consensus about how everything worked and there is not yet consensus to overturn that. To mix metaphors (and risk adopting Rob's tone), too many cooks spoil the broth, possibly by pissing into it. In this case the cook who is recognized as the holder of UTC does have his feet nailed down by the ITU rules which say their documents must be sold, not given away. All the other agencies contributing to this broth are allowed to work openly and publish freely. -- Steve Allen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>WGS-84 (GPS) UCO/Lick ObservatoryNatural Sciences II, Room 165Lat +36.99858 University of CaliforniaVoice: +1 831 459 3046 Lng -122.06014 Santa Cruz, CA 95064http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/ Hgt +250 m
Re: Equitable estoppel
>If we regard UTC as >a contract between the precision timing community and - well - >everybody else, [...] Regarding an intenational treaty as a contract is not only pointless, it is downright silly. International law is decided by governments, on the rather general assumption that people have the governments they deserve. Contracts on the other hand are bilateral agreements between consensual partners of any kind, with the provisio that both parties must sign of their own free will. Should you doubt this point, let me remind you that the US Congress had no ability to negotiate the contents in for instance the Geneva or Warszawa conventions once they were agreed to internationally, at that stage it is a take it or leave it thing. More to the point, none of the persons to which these two treaties directly applied had any say in their construction, but through their governments representative at the respective drafting sessions. But you could conceiveably argue the point, that ITU-R only controls time, as far as it pertains to telecommunication and radio transmission of time signals, and that each country is free to use another timescale for civilian time. Unfortunately, the Metre-Convention and the Longitude Conference has nailed your left and right feet to the floor [1], so in practice ITU-R gets to decide all time. Poul-Henning [1] Thus making the Warszawa Convention at lot less applicable. -- 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.
