"Greg FitzPatrick" wrote on 2000-02-04 16:53 UTC:
Because otherwise people wont know who to sue!
So what we have to do is to transform the Olson group into something that looks like a sue-able entity, but nevertheless isn't sue-able. There was actually some time ago already a discussion on the tz mailing list to set up something that could be called the International Time Zone Information Centre with a quotable web page, postal address, etc. It would essentially be the old Olson Group, but there would be something like an "Annual Time Zone Newsletter" that will be sent freely to places such as various government ministries, intelligence agencies, news agencies, airline and telecommunications associations (IATA, ITU, etc.), etc. The goal would be to create a point of contact where governments and observers of governments could centrally report time zone changes and also make sure that knowledge of the centre and its current data base content spreads to the right places. The basic idea seemed to have been quite agreeable, but in the end there simply wasn't anyone volunteering to handle the bureaucracy necessary to set up such a small institution. If two or three industrial sponsors would come forward to cover the in the end surely quite marginal running costs of such a small organization, I am sure it would be possible to set up a suitable quotable but not quite sueable body. Publishing a single-page ISO standard that designates the named organization to be the keeper of the ISO 16xyz time zone database would surely sprinkle sufficient official magic around the entire thing to keep even hard-line bureaucrats happy. Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>