Given the EV1s apparently cost over $100k each, everyone who leased one for a fraction of its value sure should have loved it.

This looks like just another sucky electric car that costs more than a Civic and all the fuel the Civic will ever burn.

Some of my oldest CDs have curly tracks leading from the edge of the disk toward the music tracks, where the metal layer has oxidized. None are unplayable yet, but some won't last much longer.

It's lucky they're mostly 1980s music, when albums only took up half the disk.

Yes, you are. Fart apps don't care about the time. The systems that let you sell your fart app to mobile users do.

Most of the world syncs to GPS, either directly using the time, or by using a frequency output that's synced to GPS. If you don't sync to GPS, you'll be out of sync with most of the world.

1. The code I wrote worked fine. But we have to interoperate with other people's code that doesn't.
2. Any solution requiring programmers to write software properly is doomed to fail.
3. No-one, at the last leap second, thought that Linux servers would crash when they printed out a message indicating that a leap second would soon happen.
4. No-one, at the last leap second, thought their Java server software would go insane after a leap second because the internal timers stopped working.

The world is full of code that will break when a leap second happens.

Yeah, because that'll work.

A tug in orbit can use a much more efficient engine than a satellite launched directly from Earth. The big problem is likely to be damage from passing through the Van Allen Belts if you use ion drive or some other slow but fuel-efficient mechanism.

If I remember correctly, NTP has a leap-second flag which indicates that the time should jump by a second at midnight. It doesn't slew, at least on Linux... otherwise different machines would be reporting different times until they'd all slewed back to what they should be.

Hey, guess what, those guys they outsourced the software development to in the third world... don't. And they know they'll have moved on to a new job by the time the next leap second happens.

The rest of us have to deal with their hardware not doing what it's supposed to when the leap second hits.

Linux (at least the kernel we run) handles a leap second as 23:58, 23:59, 23:59, 00:00. Code that has to do something specific at 23:59 then ends up doing it twice, unless you detect that and deal with it.

It's not the time difference that causes problems per se, it's time going backwards. You presumably missed the fact that many Java servers crashed over the last leap second because of a kernel bug that screwed up their internal timers?

We had problems last time due to faults reported by external hardware when it saw the time jump backwards. I'll be at my desk when it happens this time to deal with any problems that come up this time.

And, given the chaos every leap second causes, hopefully we can finally convince the 'experts' to stop fiddling with time.

Uh, dude, you do realize that Nine Inch Nails have been uploading their new albums to torrent sites, right? Because they figured that exposure through those sites sold more copies of their music than trying to stop piracy?

And that piracy has been the norm since the invention of the cassette tape? What do you think those dual-tape cassette decks my generation grew up with were for?

Can you explain how the FEDERAL Aviation Administration has any Constitutional power to regulate a drone with a range of a couple of hundred feet?

What else do you need to know?

That's why you need a compiler ERROR, like the one the OP was complaining about.

I worked on a system in the 90s that had to have at least a fifty year lifespan because REGULATION, though it was assumed that they'd have to replace the hardware now and again and just retain the files and database. I do sometimes wonder what they did when the optical drives we used became obsolete.