F-ckin Leap Seconds, how do they work?

Thu Jul 5 10:31:05 UTC 2012

On Wed, Jul 04, 2012 at 06:10:45PM -0400, William Herrin wrote:

> IMO, leap seconds are a really bad idea. Let the vanishingly few
> people who care about a precision match against the solar day keep
> track of the deviation from clock time and let everybody else have a
> *simple* clock year after year. When the deviation increases to an
> hour every what, thousand years? Then you can do a big, well
> publicized correction where everybody is paying attention to making it
> work instead of being caught by surprise.

Notice that already InterplaNet requires a time base not linked to
a particular planetary body. If we're looking at kiloyear
scales, then either nobody will care about celestial dynamics
of a particular planetary body, or nobody will care about
precise time standards any longer.