Unless I'm missing something, it seems to me that this matter has not yet been discussed among time-nuts:
http://futureofutc.org

A conclusive proposal to fundamentally redefine UTC is scheduled for a vote by the Radiocommunications Assembly of the ITU-R in January, 2012. The proposal will halt the contribution of so-called leap seconds to UTC after 2017, and will also terminate the requirement that time services transmit the difference between UT1 and UTC. If approved, UTC would no longer be useful as a type of Universal Time for most technical applications.
Antonio I8IOV

With Bulletin C nr 42, a link to a questionnarie about it is added at
the end (and I think that leap seconds and its convenience or not has
been discussed lots of times in the list :)

From Bulletin C 42:

IMPORTANT: After years of discussions, a proposal to fundamentally redefine
UTC will come to a conclusive vote in January 2012 at the ITU-R in Geneva.

This proposal would halt the intercalary adjustments known as leap seconds
that maintain UTC as a form of Universal Time.

The Earth Orientation Center of the IERS organizes a survey online with the
objective to find out the strength of opinion for maintaining or changing
the present system.

Link to the questionnaire:

http://hpiers.obspm.fr/eop-pc/index.php?index=questionnaire

Your response is appreciated before 30 August 2011

El 15/07/2011 00:51, iovane@inwind.it escribió:

If they will not observe the leap seconds as the earth times calibration,
it would become unusable in some areas of technology, and or earth time in
itself, or I would think. When the first cesium clock was being built, it
was to be calibrated, I guess one could say, by the astronomical second,
which was calculated by the US Naval Observatory at that time. In other
words, they used that astronomical second to determine the frequency of
resonance of cesium. Since the two times don't run paralell due to the
earths rotational differences, as of now, and compared to then, why would
they not want to correct it? I would think it would screw everything up
over years and years of time.

Best,

Will

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********

On 7/15/2011 at 1:06 AM Javier Herrero wrote:

redefine

the

yet been discussed among time-nuts:

vote by the Radiocommunications Assembly of the ITU-R in January, 2012. The
proposal will halt the contribution of so-called leap seconds to UTC after
2017, and will also terminate the requirement that time services transmit
the difference between UT1 and UTC. If approved, UTC would no longer be
useful as a type of Universal Time for most technical applications.

https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts

https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts

signature database 5851 (20110206) __________

At 06:51 PM 7/14/2011, iovane@inwind.it wrote...

It's just sheer stupidity. A bunch of people who chose to use the UTC
timescale when they should have chosen TAI now want to screw up UTC for
those who use it as intended. If they don't want to deal with leap
seconds, they should be using TAI or GPS time, not trying to redefine
UTC to be a THIRD timescale unlinked from the heavens.

And that applies to those who are forced into UTC through legal, or
other requirements - work to get the law or requirements changed
instead of changing the definition of UTC. It already is what it's
supposed to be.

Some vendors gps receivers cannot handle leapseconds properly, so they may be pushing to fix the problem this way ;)

Sent From iPhone

On Jul 14, 2011, at 15:51, "iovane@inwind.it" iovane@inwind.it wrote:

In message 20110715004035.39B88A007D@locke.alientech.net, Mike S writes:

Yes, it is just sheer stupidity to postulate random arguments without
doing proper research first:

Everybody but the time-lords have always been told to stay away from
TAI in the strongest possible terms by said time-lords, who again and
told the world to use UTC.

--
Poul-Henning Kamp      | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk@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.

Le 15/07/2011 07:57, Poul-Henning Kamp a écrit :

The time lords are not completely deaf. For more than 10 years there has
been debate about whether or not to revert to a TAI scale, but consensus
has never been obtained. There are three requirements for time
transmission that the current system supports in recommendation ITU-R
TF.460-6 which the americans are trying to vote out.

1. SI second ticks
2. corrections to UTC for earth rotation , DUT1, so that UT1 can be
   calculated.
3. A civil time scale, UTC which is a descendant of GMT and roughly
   measures the mean solar day. One or  other , if not both,  figure in all
   the legal codes of the planet.
   The definition of 3 ensures that there are  86400  +/-1 ticks per
   mean solar day .  This is quite useful as my watch and just about
   everyone else's measures days in 86400 units .

The proposed change to ITU-R TF.460-6 provides 1 but  removes 2 and 3.
Sheer folly to my mind.

The current recommendation is good for another 2-300 years .

So in my humble opinion,  the proposition for change should be rejected
until consensus be achieved and that ALL three above requirements are met.

Le 15/07/2011 10:33, Poul-Henning Kamp a écrit :

Thanks for your ref.  I am aware of the shortcomings of the present
scheme and am not particularly pro leap second. It seems to me that the
right questions are not being addressed and certainly the proposition
for change as expressed and to be voted on in 2012 is premature. The US
are just wanting leap seconds abolished without proposing alternative
schemes covering all the requirements of time signal users.    Once they
have been defined , recommendations can be considered.  Till then , fix
the bugs.

Well, instead of leap seconds which seem to be the biggest bug bear
for everyone, keep the second as 1/86,400 of the earths current
rotation and adjust the factor used in the calculation of atomic time
on a regular basis. No more leap seconds just leap atomic division
factor. Unless you can try and convince the world that all this hours,
minutes and seconds thing will have to change and some new system for
defining the day with the granularity of some arbitrarily chosen
factor of atomic time (which was in line with the earth's rotation 50
years ago or so) is worked out. The day that the second was defined in
an atomic form has always meant that it bears little relationship to
the idea of a second that was held before it and is used in the real
world of wall clock time now.

Yes, I'm well aware that this causes major impracticalities for
technical and scientific users but the current system of linking
atomic time to wall time obviously has its problems. Maybe that
original linkage decision was a bad idea and the definition of the
wall clock second should go back to the astronomers.

Steve

On 15 July 2011 21:36, cook michael michael.cook@sfr.fr wrote:

--
Steve Rooke - ZL3TUV & G8KVD
The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.

• Einstein

Steve:

The scientific community needs a well defined second, physically

reproducible and stable. Something like the old meter platinum bar. In fact,
look at meter in Wikipedia, very similar issues, with Earth as a basis for
the reference at some point. Current definition is based on length traveled
by light in vacuum in one second. Right there - making the second depend on
Earth rotation, changing it daily, hourly to follow the capricious wobbly
Earth would change the meter length just as often. Basically 'turns back the
clock' hundreds of years in accuracy, stability of the second.

Now the second definition relates to frequency accuracy, there is no

phase information. Nothing like a femtosecond 'ball drop' somewhere that
would define an absolute time.

Once the second became atomic, the Earth variations and slowdown

drift (ultimately it would show the same side to the Sun like the Moon does
to Earth, in a few buzillion years - astro-nuts enlighten me) become an
issue, as we don't want our buzillionth generation descendants seeing
sunrise at 3am (although they would get off work at 2pm!). Once the Earth
day equals the Earth year, what do we do? Let's plan ahead for the UTC at
that point. Nice wall calendars, January First only! And it is a Holiday!

-----Original Message-----
From: time-nuts-bounces@febo.com [mailto:time-nuts-bounces@febo.com] On
Behalf Of Steve Rooke
Sent: Friday, July 15, 2011 3:18 AM
To: Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement
Subject: Re: [time-nuts] The future of UTC

Well, instead of leap seconds which seem to be the biggest bug bear
for everyone, keep the second as 1/86,400 of the earths current
rotation and adjust the factor used in the calculation of atomic time
on a regular basis. No more leap seconds just leap atomic division
factor. Unless you can try and convince the world that all this hours,
minutes and seconds thing will have to change and some new system for
defining the day with the granularity of some arbitrarily chosen
factor of atomic time (which was in line with the earth's rotation 50
years ago or so) is worked out. The day that the second was defined in
an atomic form has always meant that it bears little relationship to
the idea of a second that was held before it and is used in the real
world of wall clock time now.

Yes, I'm well aware that this causes major impracticalities for
technical and scientific users but the current system of linking
atomic time to wall time obviously has its problems. Maybe that
original linkage decision was a bad idea and the definition of the
wall clock second should go back to the astronomers.

Steve

On 15 July 2011 21:36, cook michael michael.cook@sfr.fr wrote:

--
Steve Rooke - ZL3TUV & G8KVD
The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.

• Einstein

time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com
To unsubscribe, go to
https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts
and follow the instructions there.

In message CACTjVNxhfQ79n3FVPRS4XYeN4Ouc6w7Q9ih1u2KisFG9D_fYsg@mail.gmail.com
, Steve Rooke writes:

We tried that in the 1960-ies, and it didn't work for anybody at all.

--
Poul-Henning Kamp      | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk@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.

On 15 July 2011 22:59, Poul-Henning Kamp phk@phk.freebsd.dk wrote:

Well, I really said that tongue in cheek just to stir up a hornets
nest as I know it was not practical. The scientific community (and
some industrial processes) do need a precisely defined, and
reproducible, UNIT of time, that's a given. This does not mean that
this atomic standard is the magic bullet for everything related to
time though. In fact I'd go as far as to say that "atomic time" has
nothing to do with real time and should never have been coupled with
it in the first place. For most of the world, the correct measure of a
second is 1/86,400 or the current rotation of this planet as that is
the only thing that makes sense and keeps correlation over all of
time. The idea of having to add a leap second every month in 2,500
years time, assuming we still exist then, seems quite ludicrous, I
agree with you entirely, but the idea of the day gradually drifting
out of sync with our artificial time is also not workable. I saw a
comment to your article which suggested that we ditch leap seconds and
leave the problem to future generations, seems an anathema to me.

Steve

--
Steve Rooke - ZL3TUV & G8KVD
The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.

• Einstein

Jose,

I couldn't agree with you more and embedded in my post was this
conflict with the need to have a precise, reproducible, standard but
that does not mean that this "standard" fits the need for wall time,
with all its wobbliness and drift. When I look at time clocks they are
divided into 24 hours, 60 minutes and 60 seconds. There is no, well a
minute could be 59 or 60 or 61 seconds in an attempt to impose atomic
time to solar time. This is like trying to impose structure on chaos.

It is a very difficult problem that seems to have no solution so
perhaps we should not try to impose a solution on it and therefore
detach the two. As for turning back the clock hundreds of years, that
is hardly the case as today's astronomers need a more accurate time
than atomic time, which could be off by significant parts of a second
compared to solar time, and they work out their correct time through
published offsets.

So what is the answer to all this, ditch the embarrassment for now and
leave it to our "buzillionth generation descendants" to sort out. What
applications do we need time correct to the femtosecond, certainly not
for most of what goes on in the world, but it is vitally important for
other applications, although it's not H:M:S that are not the case
here, it's a precise period measurement that is required.

Cheers,
Steve

On 15 July 2011 22:54, Jose Camara camaraq1@quantacorp.com wrote:

--
Steve Rooke - ZL3TUV & G8KVD
The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.

• Einstein

Hi Poul-Henning,

Nice article.  One thing stands out to me, though:  How do you
propose knowing 20 years in advance the schedule of leap seconds?

Or, are you proposing that we just collect all seconds that may
occur in 20 years, and dump them into a single correction, one that
may be multi-second?

I notice that this subject seems to make you a little grumpier than
the Poul-Henning I am used to.  I hope I am not treading on ground
you feel already is too well covered.

-Chuck Harris

Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:

On 7/15/11 3:17 AM, Steve Rooke wrote:

why stay with the ridiculous base 60 system inherited from the Babylonians?

Why not decimalize it.  Oh wait, that was tried a few hundred years ago,
but perhaps the time is now right?  If the UK can decimalize pounds,
shillings, and pence, perhaps it is time to bow to the decimal hegemony.

As I write this at Sextidi 26 Messiador an CCXIX a 5:63:49 t.m.P.

In message 4E203B60.6080809@erols.com, Chuck Harris writes:

That is for the geophysical community to figure out.  They still
get to decide when leap seconds happen, only they have to tell
the rest of us 20 years in advance instead of 6 months in advance.

How well they can do this (ie: how small can they keep DUT1)
depends on the quality of their science (and/or coin-flips)

It is very well covered on the leapsecs list, so I sort of think
we should avoid rehashing all the same arguments and facts on
this list also.

--
Poul-Henning Kamp      | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk@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.

Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:

I can see a 20 year prediction being seriously fraught with error.

I tend to think of the machine clock as being something that should
keep ticking along one SI second to the next, keeping count of the
seconds since some epoch.  I am not at all happy with the idea of
having it magically stall, or stutter. That's something for some
library function to keep track of after the fact.

Unfortunately, the leapsecs list never made the threshold of my
free time allocator.  I subscribed for a while, but found it rife
with bickering that seemed intractable.  Everyone of the reasons for,
or against, the leapsecond was valid, and incompatible.

-Chuck Harris

In message 4E2046DB.3040206@erols.com, Chuck Harris writes:

Not really, starting out with just one leap second every 18 months
gets you pretty good first approximation.  DUT1 would probably still
be less than 3 seconds.

That is exactly my point:  With 6 months notice, getting the
libraries updated using regular software update channels is not
feasible.

--
Poul-Henning Kamp      | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk@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.