[time-nuts] GMT vs. UTC
Poul-Henning Kamp
phk at phk.freebsd.dk
Tue Nov 21 17:53:10 UTC 2006
In message <20061121.184838.-432831398.cfmd at bredband.net>, Magnus Danielson wri
tes:
>One has to understand the reason for my question, which stems back into the
>legalities of things. Can we state a time event in GMT and relate that back to
>our "non-political timescales" of TAI and UTC (UTC has politics around it for
>sure, but those are on the leapsecond aspect) which we methods for transporting
>and realizing, and then say with certainty that this time is _known_ in a legal
>sense. Especially, can we do this in some other country than GB?
Well, if Sweden defines their time to be GMT+1h and the british parliament
changes GMT, then in a theoretical world, Sweden changes along.
In a practical world, people write GMT when they mean UTC half the time
and therefore Sweden would not follow GB.
Since UTC is a UN controlled standard, it is a much safer reference.
--
Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at 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.
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