[LEAPSECS] Changing the name of UTC

[Ian Batten]

On 17 Oct 2014, at 14:33, Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:

> 
> On Oct 16, 2014, at 11:48 PM, Steve Allen <sla at ucolick.org> wrote:
> 
>> On Thu 2014-10-16T17:07:02 -0700, Warner Losh hath writ:
>>> On Oct 16, 2014, at 3:39 PM, Rob Seaman <seaman at noao.edu> wrote:
>>>> Nothing would be renamed.  Nothing would be redefined.
>>> 
>>> Nothing would change.
>> 
>> I am not understanding the subtleties in that statement.  It seems to
>> me that if the ITU-R were to adopt the conclusion from the 2003 Torino
>> colloquium organized by WP7A, recommend that the radio broadcast time
>> signals no longer include leap seconds, and also that the time scale
>> in the broadcasts be named International Time, that would be a change.
>> Indeed, it would be a change with a character that would be welcomed
>> by the systems which do not handle leap seconds well.
> 
> I’m afraid that if there are two official time scales, both maintained,
> and both propagated due to contract language, then the “new” one
> without leap seconds would be this oddball thing that nobody actually
> implements or that some people implement and others don’t and we’d
> be left with a mess. Perhaps not the same mess we have today, but
> a new, different mess.

How would it differ from the UK, where legal time is UT1, but
the reality is that everyone uses UTC and even the allegedly legal
sources of time are actually UTC (for example, in the 1990s the
project that first exposed me to NTP was forced to use MSF receivers,
rather than GPS, because MSF is "UK legal time", when in fact
MSF receivers tick UTC(NPL), not UT1 --- I've never seen an MSF receiver
that can make use of the 0.1s resolution DUT1).

ian
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