US proposal to abolish leap seconds - Not Found

From: Neal McBurnett <neal_at_bcn.boulder.co.us>
Date: Tue, 8 Nov 2005 10:52:21 -0700

Thanks to Steve Allen for his excellent efforts to enable public
discussion of the proposals to abolish leap seconds, difficult though
that task has been, given the official secrecy that has surrounded it.
See e.g. this quote from a Wall Street Journal article in July
 Why the US wants to end link between time and sun
 http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05210/545823.stm

 For now, U.S. officials still regard their proposal as secret,
 despite Dr. Gambis's email and the public comments. The head of
 America's delegation to the ITU's timing committee, D. Wayne Hanson
 of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, declined to
 take calls on the matter. Through a spokeswoman, he said that the
 U.S. proposal is a private matter internal to the ITU and not for
 public discussion.

For a while, the proposal was made public:

On Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 06:33:22AM -0700, Steve Allen wrote:
> The draft US document which is under consideration for submission is
> available for review and still open for comment
>
> http://www.fcc.gov/ib/sand/irb/weritacrnc/review/nc1985wp7a/01.doc
>
> The significant difference from last year seems to be that leap seconds
> would stop not in 2007 but rather five years after the ITU general
> assembly approves the change.

This URL no longer works, but yields this un-encouraging message:

 Not Found
 The requested object does not exist on this server. The link you
 followed is either outdated, inaccurate, or the server has been
 instructed not to let you have it.

[They could at least offer some entertainment under the circumstances :-)
e.g. Marvin the Paranoid Android moans about requests for missing pages:
 http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/humor/marvin-the-server-404.html
]

If anyone knows of a new place to find the latest proposal, please
post it. And does anyone know where to find an archive of the
comments made in response to the proposal?

In the meantime, I highly recommend Steve's excellent web page at

 http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/nc1985wp7a.html

which summarizes the cogent arguments of who disagrees with
the proposal.

Neal McBurnett http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/
Received on Tue Nov 08 2005 - 09:53:37 PST

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