Rob Seaman wrote on 2003-06-05 16:04 UTC:
> Surely we should characterize and fully understand the implications of
> our actions *before* we act. Is that really an unreasonable request?
To quote (not verbatim, but in essence) what several people said on that
at the meeting:
Ron Beard: Several calls of the SRG have not resulted in any substantial
data on what a change would cost or damage.
John Seago: In many environments, even getting an answer to the question
of what it would cost to abandon UTC ~ UT1 would cost substantial
amounts of money.
William Klepczynski: In safety-critical navigation systems, leap seconds
will over time cause catastrophic system failures that will cost many
lives. This long-term risk should justify even considerable one-off
expenses to fix permanently the problem of a commonly used non-uniform
precision timescale.
[... all quotes modulo my rapidly decaying memory of course ...]
Markus
--
Markus Kuhn, Computer Lab, Univ of Cambridge, GB
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ | __oo_O..O_oo__
Received on Thu Jun 05 2003 - 09:46:51 PDT