[LEAPSECS] Do lawyers care (know) about leap seconds?

Gerard Ashton ashtongj at comcast.net
Wed Oct 1 08:32:50 EDT 2014


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.



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