[LEAPSECS] Conversational caffeine

[Rob Seaman]

On Jan 28, 2011, at 6:32 PM, Steve Allen wrote:


> The results from year 2000 are before the nature and boundaries of the problem were clear to anybody.  It's not really fair to look at results prior to the ITU-R's colloquium in Torino in 2003.

> 

> The strange part is that the US delegates to the ITU-R have been fighting and denying the result of that from the start.

> 

> The result was "Yes, abandon the leap seconds, but when you do that change the name of the time scale."


Well, not quite.  It was more like:

	"We can't reach consensus, but if you distribute a timescale without leap  seconds, call it something other than UTC."

There are whole worlds of possible options that the ITU is ignoring.  They could have gotten out of the leap second business in 2004 if they weren't so fixated on replacing the TLA TAI with UTC.

Rob