[LEAPSECS] final report of the UK leap seconds dialog

[Ian Batten]

> On 5 Feb 2015, at 14:09, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk at phk.freebsd.dk> wrote:
> 
> --------
> 
> 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.

So what?  This was a dialogue about what the UK government should do.
If Japan and China wish to poll their population (both, of course, 
being governments that are highly unlikely to do any such thing) then
they can do so.    

The arguments that are advanced about safety-of-life issues in transportation
are pretty weak, by the way.  How many such systems apply leap seconds, or
indeed maintain UTC to +/- 1s, outside settings where the timescale is
precisely defined to exclude leapseconds anyway (such as GPS)?

At the dialog I was at, there was general incredulity that the ICT community
was asking society at large to change established practice in order to
work around their inability to write software correctly.  It's a not
unreasonable point. 

ian