U.S. Moves to Kill Leap Seconds

blacklite001 writes "Not content with merely extending Daylight Savings Time, the U.S. government now also proposes to eliminate leap seconds, according to a Wall Street Journal story. Their proposal, 'made secretly to a United Nations body,' includes adding 'a "leap hour" every 500 to 600 years.' Hey, anyone remember the last bunch of people to mess with the calendar?"

Unfair to clockophiles!

[shobadobs]

http://leapsecond.com/ [leapsecond.com] -- This guy should complain. They're taking all the fun out of his clock collection!

Birthdays

[Anonymous Coward]

And what about all those people with birthdays on February 29th? Guess they'll only age once every 500 years

Re:Wait a second...

[l33t.g33k]

it's government conspiracy!

Hmm...

[__aaclcg7560]

I don't see anywhere in the U.S. Constitution that the government has been given authority over time. I guess strict constructionism [wikipedia.org] applies only to judges and not the government. Bummer... There's never a Time Lord [bbc.co.uk] when you need one.

Re:Wait a second...

[ArAgost]

Mod parent funny for its subject, please :D

Planet

[dinkster]

I say we adjust the planet's rotation and orbit so we have perfect intervals.

Shall the rest of the world..

[speights_pride!]

...go back to the Imperial system of measures too? Nah, bless you Americans with your lovely paper size known as Letter (and every wierd piece of software that insists on using it).

Here, I'll take care of all the trolling for you

[Anonymous Coward]

1. The Americans want to do X.
2. The Americans are bad.
3. Therefore, X is bad. QED.

Re:Can we say what we will think 500 years from no

[cheesee]

Oh, and the "renaissance" is over-rated. The middle ages were the big days when important things were invented - things like representative democracy that you might just have heard of?

Yeah, I've heard of it. Haven't seen it in action yet.

Re:now correct me if im wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

That's pretty funny, short term thinking by the americans. Because Europe contains so many long range thinkers.

Re:Astronomers will be unhappy

[Anonymous Coward]

The point of a leap second was to compensate for the fact that the Earth changes its rotation rate by very small amounts (due to changes in mass distribution).

Jeez. Whenever anything goes wrong,
fat Americans get the blame.

Unfair, I tell you.

Re:Planet

[shawnce]

I say just blow up the moon, that little bastard is just slowing us down.

500 years?

[Wade Tregaskis]

The irony of course is that if we do let the U.S. do whatever the hell it wants on this, as usual, there won't be an Earth 500 years from now, so it really is a good solution.

Egotistical maniac?

[jrumney]

Once there was a boy, who longed to be as well known as Julius Caesar. First he gathered his legionnaires and started some wars, but he didn't get the respect from the public he wanted. Then he had a brilliant idea. Julius had a calendar named after him, maybe he could get one too. All he had to do was come up with a plan to show those pesky scientists that time was controlled by God, not some mathematical constant, and if God wanted it to jump ahead by an hour every 5 or 6 hundred years, then dammit, that is what is going to happen. He decided to call his invention the Dubyan calendar, because if he called it Georgian, people might give his daddy credit for it, or even worse, some limey king that died last century.

Re:now correct me if im wrong

[jafac]

I think we should just take a hint from the VCR people; fuck measuring time, and let all the clocks flash "12:00" forever.

Re:Birthdays

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

How dare you speak as if my pangalactic 200 million year calendar has no significance.

Re:Can we say what we will think 500 years from no

[ltbarcly]

500 years ago, people weren't reading, they weren't really doing much of anything productive.

Except growing food, raising livestock, getting married, raising children, defending themselves, scheming, talking with neighbors, and saying, "Someday Martha, one of our great great great great great ... great grandchildren will grow up to post something stupid on something called the Internet."

I wonder if there were a huge leap second buildup whether people would just start waking up according to the absolute time rather than the political time.

Time is an arbitrary concept created by man. People get up according to when they have to be at work, and if that isn't sometime in the morning they get up when it is convenient for them. Some people have to be at work at 8, others at 9, some at 6 or 7. Where does politics come into this? All the government does is produce a standard benchmark time so we can communicate about time, and know that we will be understood.

Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.

Did he really? Unless this is Jesus the Hispanic fireman, I don't buy it. Either a magic supernatural man in the clouds helped you, or you are confused about it. Occham's Razor anyone?

To illustrate this point, I encourage people to read this: http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=2800& p=2 [somethingawful.com] (the last post at the bottom). Compare that with what you hear people say about Jesus (the non-fireman one).

Re:now correct me if im wrong

[SnowZero]

Rest of the constants are bogus anyway.

Simply being derived doesn't make them "bogus". Thus I fart in your general direction using an ideal gas. (note: R = 8.3144 x 10^7 erg mol^-1 K^-1)

Re:Planet

[cpghost]

I say just blow up the moon, that little bastard is just slowing us down.

It'll happen soon enough, once we have moonbase alpha [space1999.net] there...

Re:Hmm...

[surprise_audit]

Just so long as NASA isn't going to use software from anywhere else in the world. They had enough trouble landing on Mars when different groups used metres or feet & inches. If Congress fucks around with time, the next Mars mission will probably hit Mercury...