"Clive D.W. Feather" wrote:
>
> Steve Allen said:
> > CNN is broadcasting the video form of this story today
> >
> > http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/europe/07/22/time.boulden/index.html
> >
> > I surmise that Mr. Catchpole was not prepared with the figures.
>
> He also seems to be unaware of the legal status of GMT in the UK.
What the article says is:
# But few people officially use GMT anymore. It died in the 1970s, when
# governments adopted Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC.
I think you are being pretty hard on the article as it is correct
that most people don't actually *use* GMT anymore, either officially
or otherwise and whether they realise it or not. The UK government
adopted UTC in the sense that the NPL (paid for by the government)
propogates UTC - even if GMT is still the "default" timescale for
legal documents.
There could be very unusual cases where the difference between UTC
and GMT matters and no timescale has been specified where any UTC or
BST timestamps or whatever should (as the law currently stands) be
converted to GMT for legal purposes but that's rather different from
saying that people actually use GMT.
Ed Davies.
Received on Wed Jul 23 2003 - 05:48:26 PDT