[LEAPSECS] What's the point?

[Daniel R. Tobias]

On 15 Feb 2011 at 11:28, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:


> So everybody using NTP and deriving GMT withut applying DUT are in

> breach of the law ?


Technically they are, if they use such a time for legal purposes (as 
opposed to just privately having it on their wall or PC, where nobody 
can force anybody to have any particular time).  However, for almost 
all purposes, the difference is "de minimis", since fractions of 
seconds rarely matter except in highly specialized fields.  
(Fractions of seconds in absolute time, that is; a somewhat larger 
set of fields care about such time intervals in relative time, such 
as sports events where timing to the tenth or hundredth of a second 
matters, but that's done by stopwatches that don't need any sort of 
synchronization to UTC, GMT, or any other external standard, though 
the seconds they tick off need to be made as close as possible to the 
duration of SI seconds.)

One would have to work hard to contrive an issue where the difference 
actually matters for the purpose of a legal proceeding, like by 
managing to submit some legally mandated thing with a deadline in the 
tiny interval between a specified time in UTC and GMT (construed as 
UT1) and then getting into a court case about it.

Last year, there was a bit of an internal flap within American Mensa 
when one of the candidates for an office within the organization was 
disqualified from the election because his candidacy petition was 
submitted a few minutes past the deadline (according to the local 
time zone where the national office was located), even though that 
candidate's place of residence was in a different time zone to the 
west of it, and it was still before the deadline over there, and the 
sloppily drafted election rules didn't actually explicitly specify 
what time standard was to be used.  No court case resulted, though.
I don't know if even Mensans would split seconds to create 
controversies of this sort, however.

However, if UTC were to be completely unmoored from GMT/UT1, the 
difference would grow, and the likelihood of actual issues arising 
from it would vastly increase.

-- 
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