What governments decide, governments can undecide.
To take contribution to TAI as endorsement of UTC as ineluctable perfection and thus the impossibility of changing it ever is a silly argument to make.
On Tue, Jan 3, 2017 at 3:01 PM, Joe Touch <touch@xxxxxxx> wrote:
You might consider that most governments have already agreed to cooperate - by contributing their national clock info to TAI, accepting the TAI-averaged result, and accepting the ITU's definition of UTC.
I see no good reason to create a new time reference that would still ultimately need translation to TAI and UTC anyway, esp. given the translation would be complex on the smear-day.
Joe
On 1/3/2017 11:46 AM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
On Tue, Jan 3, 2017 at 2:03 PM, Eliot Lear <lear@xxxxxxxxx> wrote
On 1/3/17 7:24 AM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
Umm, my proposal was to ignore the opinion of the ITU in this matter as in everything else.
That doesn't work in all cases because there are often applications that require that the clock time on a device not vary from UTC by some set amount. I think they're fixing for a big UTC leap second shindig in the next few years, anyway.
Eliot
My analysis of the politics of the situation is as follows
* The decision makers are the governments, not the ITU
* The governments will do whatever their banking and broadcast sectors tell them.
* The banking and broadcast sections will do whatever Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc agree on provided that the transition is not going to be more of a problem than the status quo.
* If there is a non ITU proposal on the table that threatens to replace ITU as the place where the decision is taken that stands a chance of being adopted, ITU will prefer to co-opt it rather than lose the appearance of control.
We already have UT0, UT1 and UT2 and several other variants. The mapping from UT1 to UTC can be varied by committee.