[LEAPSECS] final report of the UK leap seconds dialog

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

--------

I think the "dialog" shows one thing clearly:  The UK's historical
zero offset from UTC has made it very hard for them to generalize
that this is not a law of nature.

It is certainly clear that very few involved realized that UK could
run on a non-zero UTC offset, without any more harm to society than
the rest of the world suffers, and that way, by national political
choice choose any relationship between sun-height and civil day
they might prefer.

I wonder how different the outcome of the "dialog" would have been,
if they had been told that leap seconds would happen at 8 or 9am
on any day of the week, ie: during the busiest hour of traffic,
on roads, rails and in the air ?

That's what a similar "dialog" would warn about, if it were conducted
in China or Japan.


-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.