[time-nuts] NIST time services

[Jason Rabel]

> NTP is best used over the Internet. It was designed for unreliable data links.

In the quest for expansion of NTP over the internet, one thing has always nagged me.

You can find lists of servers and they will give a physical location along with other info about them... 

Big whoop... Often these servers tend to be tied to one backbone, so even if they are physically located in the same city as me, the
packets still might have to travel thousands of miles just to switch networks. So what should be a 2ms delay has now become 20-40ms
(or more)... Even if they have multiple backbones, packets coming in are not guaranteed to leave on the same network. The more a
packet has to travel, the more uncertainty you build up... Yes NTP should still get you a reasonable time, but our quest is always
for something better.

If there was some sort of feature in NTP (maybe there already is???), or even a separate program that could "test" a list of NTP
servers to try and pick the lowest latency, I think that could have a positive benefit on better time transfer.