[LEAPSECS] Regarding the ITU's very immodest proposal

[Michael Sokolov]

Poul-Henning Kamp <phk at phk.freebsd.dk> wrote:


> But exactly because I'm totally agnostic on solar time, the obvious

> follow up question is: why leap seconds at all ?


Well, I actually prefer rubber seconds, but I can live with leap seconds
too, I just turn them into rubber seconds myself.  I use continuous
real-number-expressible rubber time on my adamantly non-POSIX UNIX
systems (4.3BSD-Quasijarus).


> People live up to 5 hours away from solar time already today, so

> it cannot be very important to have the sun in south at noon.


I am not one of those people and never will be.  In fact I feel strongly
enough about natural mean solar time that I refuse to obey DST.  In less
than a month everyone around me is going to move their clocks one hour
forward, I will not.  I commit civil disobedience for the greater part
of every year by running my personal life on natural time instead of DST.

Since I already commit civil disobedience by a whole hour for the
greater part of every year, it would only be a little extra difference
(another few seconds) when UTC is eviscerated and I have to start
generating my own rubber time scale anchored to mean solar time.

And yes, it is a religious matter to me.


> We would have to maintain earth rotatation angle as a scientic

> exercise, along with all the other earth rotation parameters.


Good, this information will be very useful to me for generating my civil
disobedience time scale.  And yes, I will make my rebel time scale
available to the rest of the world via an NTP-like protocol on a
different port number.  I hope Hugo Chavez likes it.


> We can leave any necessary adjustments to civil time, if/when night

> turns into day, to the national governments who already are far too

> keen to fiddle timezones for their own economic welfare.


And some of us who do not trust those national governments imposed on us
against our will shall take the matters into our own hands.


> Downside ?  People with thing pointing to extraterrestial objects

> are going to be cross, but they'll get over it.


People with things pointing to ET objects are not the only ones,
spiritual people are the other group.  I don't have any thing pointing
to any object, but I still care.

And no, we (the spiritual group, dunno about the astronomers) will NOT
get over it, we shall commit civil disobedience instead.


> Nothing of any technical nature has any influence on the proposals

> chances of getting ratified in ITU, that's purely a matter of

> politics, most of it under the radar at civil servant level, and

> once the plenum vote approaches, also at ambasador level if USA

> feels badly enough for this.


Somehow I doubt that *every* nation will comply with this edict.
I can just see Venezuela and the Muslim nations saying "no way in hell"
and running on their own mean solar time while USA and other "first
world" nations run on the eviscerated UTC.  Fun times ahead!
Note to self: make friends with Hugo Chavez and convince him to adopt
my rubber time scale.

Goddess Bless,
MS