Paul Koning <paul_koning@Dell.com> writes:
"Remove leap seconds from UTC" is clearly absurd, and I'm baffled that ACM would lend its good name to such a notion. UTC is defined as atomic time plus leap seconds, for good and sufficient reasons. And as was pointed out, TAI already exists for those who want atomic time plain, without leap seconds.
That isn't really what the ACM article says. Insofar as it makes an argument, it's arguing for just never declaring another leap second and letting UTC drift, possibly fixing that with a time zone change at the point at which enough error has accumulated to shift time by an hour. It isn't arguing for undoing any of the leap seconds that we've already been through. The alternative proposal is that leap seconds be declared twenty years in advance so that one can build and distribute a leap second table so that computer time-keeping systems can anticipate and adjust for them in advance. Mostly the article just goes over the whole leap second mess and its implications for monotonic time, the details of which are probably already familiar to most of the people on this list. -- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>