[LEAPSECS] Meeting with Wayne Whyte

[Rob Seaman]

On Feb 1, 2011, at 4:35 AM, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:


> "UTC is unpredictable" is the core of the problem, and a problem

> that must be solved, either by extending the predictability horizon

> from six months to at least 10 years, or by making UTC predictable.


But Universal Time is *inherently* unpredictable.  (That's its charm :-)

	- Nobody here has objected to your first idea of lengthening the "predictability horizon".  We can proceed to do this with no action whatsoever required by the ITU.  This option is also compatible with all other possibilities for long term evolution of civil timekeeping.

	- Nobody at the ITU appears to have considered such an option.

The real alternative to this obvious suggestion (it must be obvious if we both support it :-) of improving the system we have, is to design a new parallel system ("TI" as specified in Torino in 2003) from scratch.  Then current systems can be gracefully end-of-lifed without artificial deadlines and new systems won't have to deal with cranky old idiosyncrasies (or cranky old temporal kibitzers :-)

Rob