On 7 Jan 2006 at 16:02, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
> Civil time is in the hands of individual governments, and they
> tend to expect their computers to use the same time as the
> rest of their country.
And, in many countries (including the United States), the legally-
defined civil time is the mean solar time at some particular spot, or
a fixed or seasonally-variable offset from it. Any use of UTC-based
time scales for determining civil time in such places is merely an
approximation, currently to within a second, but perhaps varying by
greater amounts if some new timekeeping plan is adopted. Once UTC
stopped being a sufficiently-close approximation to the solar mean
time at the Prime Meridian (with "sufficiently close" possibly being
of differing values depending on the particular purpose), it would be
necessary to either stop using UTC for determining civil time in such
countries, or to change the law to base the civil time on UTC instead
of a solar standard.
--
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Received on Sat Jan 07 2006 - 12:02:01 PST