[LEAPSECS] Do lawyers care (know) about leap seconds?

[Ian Batten]

On 1 Oct 2014, at 14:33, Stephen Colebourne <scolebourne at joda.org> wrote:

> 
> Abolishing leap seconds is another approach, but it works by putting a
> head in the sand and ignoring the underlying tension with solar days.
> And my big fear is that some more religiously minded countries might
> choose to carry on using leap seconds because of the higher value they
> place on the Sun in timekeeping. Having two countries permanently
> differ in current time by a few seconds would cause engineers far more
> problems than leap seconds do today.

And by a varying few seconds, too.

It's a shame that the representative from the Muslim community didn't manage to
make it to the consultation session I was at.  I suspect that in fact the Muslim
community are less concerned that you might think, because the sighting of the
moon for the purposes of the end of Ramadan is done optically, not by prediction,
and only sets a day, rather than a time, anyway.  I can't think of any 
(country, religion) pairs where the religion has a deep embedding of solar time
and the country is sufficiently in hock to the religion that it would alter its
civil timescale to suit.  If churches want to keep a different time they can,
after all.

ian