[LEAPSECS] final report of the UK leap seconds dialog

[Ian Batten]

> On 6 Feb 2015, at 02:18, Tom Van Baak <tvb at leapsecond.com> wrote:
> 
>> Many aspects of "local time" or "civil time" are left to "common 
>> practice" which is not good enough to expect uniform inter-operable 
>> implementations.
> 
> Brooks, can you give some examples?

An obvious example is the UK.  Our legal time is GMT with DST, usually taken to be
UT1 with DST.  Our "de facto" civil time is UTC with DST, and over the years this
has become more and more ingrained (the "Greenwich" pips on the hour on Radio 4
are now UTC, the MSF transmitter is UTC with a 0.1s resolution DUT1 embedded in
the data stream, etc, etc).  Everyone calls it GMT, and government discussions
about leapseconds are often in terms of GMT (yes, obviously a nonsense), and the
law definitely calls it GMT, but here we are: custom and practice makes it UTC.

The good old English fudge which so annoys people used to clear law :-)

ian