
How the Government Shutdown Warps Time Itself - psuter
https://typesandtimes.net/2019/01/shutdown-warps-time
======
DKnoll
Why don't they use the Canadian National Research Council bulletin?

[http://time5.nrc.ca/timefreq/bulletin_tf-b.html](http://time5.nrc.ca/timefreq/bulletin_tf-b.html)

In Canada if a budget isn't passed it triggers an election. We don't have
government shutdowns.

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intopieces
I like this idea a lot. I think the US, we like elections to come in certain
cycles to give the incumbents enough time to actually accomplish something,
but I have always admired the parliamentary system where you can call an
election at various points.

I think the US Constitution either explicitly precludes this kind of system or
could be construed to preclude it.

~~~
slededit
It’s been abused a lot to call elections when advantageous for the incumbent.
A decade old law made for more regular term durations but there are still
loopholes for the ruling party to unilaterally declare elections.

Failure to pass a budget is an automatic no confidence vote still which I
think works very well.

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mxuribe
Such an informative post; thanks for sharing this!

Also, and somewhat sad and just plain crazy: some functions of NIST are not
considered essential!?! It seems to me someone in the gov. is not clearly
reporting who and what functions are truly essential to the higher ups in the
gov. Then again, maybe they have, but the higher ups ignore them. _sigh_

Nevertheless, cool post.

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justtopost
*could possibly affect an edge case of utc leap second distribution if Another shutdown happens during a leap second year (this is not one), AND lasts over 6 months. I get that it acks the clickbaity title at the beginning, but that coy bs doesnt help.

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torstenvl
> _Because TAI is not based on the Earth’s rotation, it’s not ever-so-slowly
> changing. It’s the measure of time against which UTC’s watch is occasionally
> correct. That correction is called a leap second: a 61st second that is
> sometimes added to particular minutes in UTC, like the very last minute of
> December 31, 2016. As of January 2019 there have been 27 such leap seconds
> inserted._

This seems backwards. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what the author is trying
to say, and another poster could help clarify?

If UTC is based on the earth's rotation and TAI is based on cesium-atomic
timekeeping, and UTC is slowing down, and TAI is "the measure of time against
which UTC's watch is occasionally corrected," then how can UTC have leap
seconds? Delaying for an additional second on December 31st would only make it
one second _even slower_ , exacerbating the problem.

I don't see how adding a delay to the slower clock is going to put it in sync
with the faster one.

Is it instead that UTC is TAI, plus leap seconds to slow it down to keep it in
sync with the rotation of the Earth?

~~~
rndntr
It's the other way around - UTC is based on TAI plus an integer number of
seconds offset, and this offset is adjusted (by the insertion of leap seconds)
to keep UTC roughly in sync with the Earth's rotation.

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detaro
The license stuff seems weird without further context: even if they can't copy
that file, what's the hold up to just "encode" the information from the
bulletin on their own and putting it into their file?

~~~
Freak_NL
Wouldn't that make it a derivative work, legally speaking?

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microcolonel
> _Wouldn 't that make it a derivative work, legally speaking?_

IANAL, but:

I think not, facts are not under copyright. If you only copy facts (and avoid
copying style), then you are not creating derivative work.

Furthermore, works created by federal employees in the course of their duties
are not eligible for copyright in the U.S. [0] The U.S. does not have an
equivalent of crown copyright. The U.S. government can only own copyrights
transferred to them by private individuals or organizations, or state and
local governments which may or may not hold copyrights on their works.

[0]: [https://www.usa.gov/government-works](https://www.usa.gov/government-
works)

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qrbLPHiKpiux
We still can't migrate to the metric system. Let's work on that first!

~~~
smittywerben
I don't want to be the person with a metric house in a country of imperial
builders.

But I digress it's 80 past 45 and still haven't had breakfast :-)

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bibyte
So if I am reading this right people who use NTP aren't affected. Is that
right or does OpenNTPD depends on tzdata ?

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dvh
Leap seconds are the most stupidest thing ever. It's time to abandon UTC and
start using what professional astronomers use: UT1

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paulie_a
I beg to differ, Dst is the stupidest time related thing ever. From a software
development perspective it is a tremendous pain in the ass and is stupid. From
the non software aspect it is just stupid and annoying.

~~~
tertius
From a non-software perspective it kills people.

Also, if you're a parent, it's not great for sleep training children. It just
messes with everyone.

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reidjs
Can you elaborate on how it kills people??

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evan_
Traffic deaths spike following the DST starting (and to a lesser extent,
ending) date- thought to be due to disrupted sleep schedules.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/11152980/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/11152980/)

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bayesian_horse
In my opinion it's possible the Democrats will cave. The strategic situation
is that Democrats care about the country, and Trump does not. However, not
enough Americans are convinced of the latter fact. Once they are, the only
rational decision is to cave - and then remove him from office as quickly as
possible.

~~~
hakfoo
The logical play is that any wall is a long-running project. They can promise
Trump anything to get him to sign the budget, and then immediately unwind
their efforts once the smoke clears.

I honestly want to see them push a budget with something like "Canadian style
health care plus a wall" to see if he bites.

~~~
bayesian_horse
I don't think they could negotiate something as big as a completely new health
system in time to stop government services from collapsing...

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dooglius
I have to wonder, if something like VLC can exist, which blatantly flies in
the face of copywright law unchallenged, why do so many open-source projects
get ridiculously anal about license issues? The problem here appears to be
that the license (CC-BY 4.0) is only specified in the README file, not in the
timezone data file itself. Like, do they really think that it only applies to
the README, and if they use the data they're going to get sued? I get that
it's important to cover one's ass, but if it gets to the point where software
breaks as a result, it's gone much too far.

I wonder if the right solution here is to have some kind of body provide
insurance against frivolous litigation over licensing issues for open-source
projects, so that this kind of stupidity doesn't arise.

Edit: It appears I was mistaken about the legal status of VLC: it is about
software patent licenses, not software copywright licenses.

~~~
striking
>which blatantly flies in the face of copywright law unchallenged

How do you figure? Patent law isn't copyright law, and doesn't apply equally
around the world.

>why do so many open-source projects get ridiculously anal about license
issues

Because it's their code and people are using it without compensation and in
ways not amenable to them? I think you'd be pretty "anal", too, if someone
took your software that you worked hard on, without wanting to contribute
their improvements and without any other form of compensation.

x264 basically funds VLC. Don't steal other people's code.

~~~
dooglius
Stealing code isn't at issue here, the scenario is that developers are not
incorporating new timezone data because the open-source license for that data
is only printed the README, not in the timezone data file itself. This is the
sort of thing I'm calling anal.

