[LEAPSECS] Leap seconds decision deferred until 2015

[Warner Losh]

On Jan 19, 2012, at 10:57 AM, Stephen Colebourne wrote:

> Consider it an opportunity to find consensus.


That is unlikely if people believe it is axiomatic that time is fundamentally "time of day" and not "elapsed time."  These are two fundamentally opposing views of time.  And sadly they both agree to about a minute over the next 100 years, so the difference is small.  This difference will matter less and less if we become a space faring race, but the jury is still out on the viability of that.

I also don't have much hope for things getting better unless people are willing to budge on other issues.  For example, we could not change a thing, but announce things 1 year in advance rather than 6 months in advance.  And if that goes well, we could push that to 2 or more years.

If we relax the DUT1 to 2s or 3s, then things could be announced even further in advance, which would ameliorate one of the operational difficulties of the current system.  History shows that DUT1 of 1s is an arbitrary limit.  Some folks wanted .1s, others .8s, some 2s.  There's nothing magical about DUT1 <= 1s fundamentally, so that axis of the problem should be explored (yes, I know it is a change, but not one so fundamental that it couldn't be phased in with proper studies before).

So I'm not too optimistic since all the focus has been on 'let's just junk them entirely' with little middle ground explored.

Warner