
Experts consider consequences of ‘leap second’ elimination - llambda
http://www.itu.int/net/pressoffice/press_releases/2013/Advisory-14.aspx#.Ujtk4BYmyUU
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PeterisP
Finally!

The only consequence would be a very, very slow drift between the "wall clock"
time and the time of sunrise/midday/sunset. Given that people living at +/\-
30 minutes off from the sun-time (borders of current time zones) experience no
problems at all, then we should have ~2000 years before the difference is
significant - and by that time, hopefully, we'll be living on more than one
planet and won't care that much about synchronising everything with the
rotation a single large rock.

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pantalaimon
Couldn't we just redefine the second by a tiny amount so it fits the day?

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modeless
Unfortunately the day fluctuates, and is actually lengthening over time:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluctuations_in_the_length_of_d...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluctuations_in_the_length_of_day)

We need at least one unit of time which is fixed and unchanging in order to do
scientific calculations, and we have chosen the second to be that unit.

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michaelt
We already have several time options without leap seconds, such as
International Atomic Time [1] and GPS Time [2]?

Why can't people who want to avoid leap seconds just use those?

If we switch to leap-minutes or leap-hours they'll be rare enough that
software bugs won't get exposed enough to get fixed - it'll be like Y2K every
time.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_time#Timekeeping](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_time#Timekeeping)

~~~
sillysaurus2
Personally, I prefer xkcd time. [http://xkcd.com/1047/](http://xkcd.com/1047/)

Seconds in a year: 75^4 seconds

Age of the universe = 15^15 seconds

Planck's constant: 1/30^pi^e

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mherdeg
If you're interested in this topic, I recommend you peruse the archives of
LEAPSECS mailing list (
[http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/leapsecs/](http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/leapsecs/)
), where experts have discussed some of the thorny issues over the years.

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jloughry
It's cool to see the ".int" TLD for once---by far the most obscure of the
original seven (.com, .edu, .gov, .int, .mil, .net, .org, [and .arpa, if
you're old]).

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meatwad
Whoa me too, in about 15 years of surfing the web I've never noticed any .int
TLD. Not old enough for .arpa but this is cool. I would have not seen this
without your pointing it out. Thanks for the life experience! ;) With mobile
browsers these days most of the time the URL isn't even shown.. So I hope
everyone can appreciate this

~~~
lokedhs
The European Union web page is europa.eu.int. That's the biggest one I can
think of.

I do admit that one probably don't see that one a lot if you don't live in
Europe.

~~~
SEMW
> The European Union web page is europa.eu.int

You're a little out of date there, I'm afraid. They officially switched from
europa.eu.int to europa.eu in May 2006, after the EU's successful campaign to
get their own .eu TLD in 2005.

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asperous
I don't see the point in this, you can't dumb down the complexities of the
real world just because it'll make some engineers happier.

~~~
saraid216
> you can't dumb down the complexities of the real world just because it'll
> make some engineers happier

Except that everything in science and engineering is about dumbing down the
complexities of the real world so that it makes more sense to us.

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Yaggo
While we are on it, can we also get rid of time zones and switch to 10-based
(kiloseconds etc) time units?

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stox
This will suck for astronomers and anyone doing celestial navigation.

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PeterisP
Can celestial navigation really measure stuff up to 1 second accuracy? Can
astronomers anyway use the "wall-clock" time directly? Unless they're located
in Greenwich, they anyway need to adjust for their exact location since it is
not exactly in the middle of a time zone; after such changes they'd just
automatically sync the relevant clock not to UTC but to some "Astronomical-
UTC" time zone and that's it.

