[LEAPSECS] Schedule for success

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

In message <4959E26E.8004.FB438CD at dan.tobias.name>, "Daniel R. Tobias" writes:

>On 30 Dec 2008 at 13:26, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:



>The non-geeks ignore them because they're at too fine a level of 

>granularity to matter to people who just care about longer time spans 

>like minutes and hours.  But get rid of them, and the seconds will 

>add up into minutes and hours eventually, and be noticeable even by 

>the mythical little old lady who goes to church once a week and 

>doesn't care what the clock says any other time; she might start 

>complaining that when she started this weekly trip as a little girl 

>it was always light enough outside to walk to church, but now 80 

>years later it's too dark at this time in the winter months and she 

>might trip and hurt herself (I've fallen and I can't get up!) because 

>the accumulated leap seconds have added up to minutes.  The 

>divergence between solar days and atomic days, and the human life 

>span, are both increasing, so this will be an increasing problem.


But the good thing about ITUs proposal is that she can vote for
a government that will move the civil time to fit whatever use
of daylight that country prefers.

With leap seconds, she cannot vote anywhere to prevent random
problems with computers that control her life.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
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