[time-nuts] Leap second? Yay or nay?

[Mike S]

On 7/2/2012 1:04 PM, Chuck Harris wrote:
> Clearly when you called me a Luddite you were passing me a
> complement?

I called you no such thing. I asked if you were arguing from that point 
of view, since you were arguing against using technology because of the 
risk. That seems to be characterized fairly as a luddite view. There are 
groups of people who hold luddite views against technology, I don't 
agree with them, but wouldn't disrespect them by implying that a 
comparison to them was an insult.

The question I posed has gone unanswered. All software has bugs, and 
that creates risk. Do you have some formula to determine a universally 
acceptable risk/benefit cutoff?

> For whatever reason, you have taken it upon yourself to behave
> like an ass towards me whenever I post on this group.

Again, your arguments rely on insults, which only shows their value. If 
you feel threatened by arguments against positions you hold, it might be 
better to not mention them in the first place.

> The only group that really needs to have time match the Earth's
> rotation is astronomers.  They can take care of their own needs
> by simply feeding a TAI like timescale to a library function that
> will apply the correction.

As if TAI were the One True God, from which all else must flow. And that 
it's you who gets to decide what all others should need or want.

> there is no need for the time to perfectly match the earth's
> revolution for 99.999999% of the population.

OK, then there is no need for atomic clock precision wall/civil time for 
100% of the population. Where such precision is needed, properly 
designed devices already use TAI or a variant (e.g. GPS, cellular systems).

The artificial definition of the SI second is what created this mess. 
Better that they would have, like the meter before, simply created a new 
unit instead of usurping an existing one with a well understood meaning 
and a long historical record. Why not "1 chron = 1000000000 Cs periods," 
instead of unlinking the second from astronomical time?

Beyond that, as I've said, anyone who doesn't like leap seconds but uses 
UTC anyway has made their own bed. If they've been somehow forced into 
using it, live with it, or appeal to the authority which made that 
choice. Breaking what UTC was specifically meant to be (a close link to 
UTx) by eliminating leap seconds is simply the lazy man's kludge. It's 
very presumptuous to say "we made a bad choice to use this thing with a 
messy characteristic we don't require, so let's change it and break 
things for those who made the choice precisely because they need/want 
that characteristic."