Re: [LEAPSECS] the legacy of ephemeris time

From: <jcowan_at_reutershealth.com>
Date: Mon, 22 Dec 2003 17:22:14 -0500

Seeds, Glen scripsit:
> Hmm... there is certainly a problem when it comes to specifying legal time
> referring to the future: sun time is not predictable into the future with a
> high degree of precision. People wanting that kind of precision in legal
> documents would have two choices:

You're quite right, but I was actually referring to the past, or the present.
Consider a Dutch auction: the price is lowered in a predictable way, and whoever
bids first buys at the current price. In order to handle this in a distributed
environment, we must be able to determine who bid first accurately. Currently,
we treat it as "first bid *received* wins", but that won't work when there isn't
a single-source seller. Instead, people will have to be able to provide LCT
timestamps that are certified, potentially by distinct certifiers.
That requires a high-precision LCT time framework.

(This is a Dutch auction on a single item; Dutch auctions on multiple items,
like shares of stock, are different.)

--
Eric Raymond is the Margaret Mead               John Cowan
of the Open Source movement.                    jcowan_at_reutershealth.com
        --Lloyd A. Conway,                      http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
          amazon.com review                     http://www.reutershealth.com
Received on Mon Dec 22 2003 - 14:52:11 PST

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