[LEAPSECS] Leap smear

[Gerard Ashton]

On 9/20/2011 12:18 PM, Warner Losh wrote:

> On Sep 20, 2011, at 9:51 AM, Gerard Ashton wrote:

>

>> On 9/20/2011 11:24 AM, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:

>>> In message<4E78AA49.5060100 at comcast.net>, Gerard Ashton writes:

>>>> On 9/20/2011 5:53 AM, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:

>>>> Earth orientation is one factor in the time of sunrise and sunset, and

>>>> that is important

>>>> at perhaps minute precision for many purposes, such as avoiding

>>>> violation of laws

>>>> regarding turning on automobile headlights, and the taking of game.

>>> Show one single court-case, where the exact time of sunrise or

>>> sunset has been a crucial factor, with a precision better than three

>>> minutes, and I'll belive you.

>>>

>> I have no way to document the hunters who refrained from taking a deer one minute after

>> what the hunter believed to be the legal hunting hours expired.

> The hunters in the US that I know that deal with sunrise/sunset laws deal with it by going "Yup, I could still see, sun must have been up." or "No, it was starting to get a little dark."  I don't know anybody that's out in the back country with sunrise/sunset tables and a watch that's accurate to more than 5 minutes unless they are using one of these new-fangled GPS receivers.

>

> Then again the laws about hunting in the US that I'm familiar with tend to be dusk/dawn laws not sunrise/sunset laws.  Mostly because sunset is hard to observe in the bottom of a valley with irregular mountains all around, but dusk is easier to know (which likely explains the "heck, it ain't dark, I didn' t need a flashlight to see the deer well enough to shoot it" attitude).

>

> Warner

>

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I think this is another instance of a type of problem that frequently 
comes up in this list;
actual consequences of time standards and rule, in the field, are hard 
to find because
individual instances are seldom important enough to become major news 
stories, and
the cases we would be interested in are typically impossible to search 
for using
search engines. No one has performed the kind of polls that would elicit 
the interesting
cases, or such polls have not turned up in searches. Corporations that 
have experienced
problems might prefer to keep them quiet to protect their reputations 
(or no such cases
occurred; no way to tell the difference). So we have no choice but to 
suppose that
the letter of the law/rule/regulation/standard is important, else why 
bother to establish
the law/rule/regulation/standard in the first place.