[time-nuts] GMT vs. UTC

[Jason Rabel]

I would think each country would have a website where they declare their
official measurements for everything (their national standards). When in
doubt label a time with the appropriate format so people could convert it to
whatever they want.

Every country I would think recognizes GMT time, and specifies their time as
certain hour offsets for local time. If you started walking around telling
people UTC/GMT-0 time they would probably just look at you confused
(assuming you lived in another time zone).

>From what I gather, UTC is a precise time standard (based on Cesium) used
for measurements and such since it is a specified constant. However, the
fact that leap seconds are inserted in UTC time (to bring it in sync with
GMT) means to me that GMT is the real global standard (since it's based on
the rotation of the earth, which isn't constant).

> I've now come to wonder what the legal time is within various countries.
Also,
> it has became clear to me that GMT has two or three different meanings
> depending on context, which doesn't really help.