That was a cover of the original song by Gershon Kingsley from 1969

I think they are making a distinction between hearing the actual sound vs hearing a recording of a sound.

Floppy drive sounds or Why copying warez in the 1908s was awesome.

You could move the carriage manually and get the bell to ring twice without intervening sounds. However, even with manual manipulation of the carriage, I doubt you could get the ding-ding cadence.

Sure, fraud, false advertising, slander, and libel are all perfectly legal.

Well, for starters, what hemisphere they're in. However, that isn't the point. To me, the tone of the ancestral post wasn't east vs west, but foreign vs domestic:

Well, some of those "western engineers" weren't from "right here" and weren't part of "we".

Western engineers like Wernher Von Braun and his buddies?

Again with the Astronomers? Astronomers have nothing to do with time zones. Time zones are political, not scientific. So is UTC when it comes down to it. However, it was not designed the way it was on a whim. So we just need to buck up and switch computers to TAI.

Tablets are an alternative to paper, but they are far from a practical alternative. You can't fold them up and put them in your pocket. You have to continually charge them to use them. You can't use them in cold weather. It's prohibitively expensive to give tablets away as promotional material. They don't make good bookmarks.

Addendum: The last minute of the last day of any month can be lengthened or shortened by one second. However, there is a first preference of June or December, and a second preference of March or September.

Predicting earthquakes, land slides, massive storms, icebergs, and other events that alter the rate of rotation of the Earth by looking at the stars is a job for astrologers, not astronomers. Also, by definition, TAI and UTC differ by an integral number of seconds, and they currently differ by 35 seconds - far more than your battle inducing 0.9 second threshold.

There are three important time systems in play here. TAI, UT1 and UTC. TAI is a count of SI seconds based on atomic clocks situated around the world. UT1 is the count of "solar" seconds based on the angle of the Sun to the Prime Meridian. Because it is based on the rotation of the Earth, which can vary for a multitude of reasons (earthquakes, icebergs, etc), UT1 "seconds" are variable in length, However, unlike TAI there will always be exactly 86400 seconds in a day.

UTC is a compromise time scale. It uses SI seconds, like TAI, but there are occasional adjustments made so that it remains synchronized to within one second of UT1. These adjustments come in the form of leap seconds (or skip seconds).

The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) has the responsibility of adjusting UTC. The last minute of the last day of the month can be lengthened or shortened by one second in order to keep UTC and UT1 in step. By agreement, the first preference is to adjust in June or December. The second preference is to adjust in March or September. So far, there has been no need to adjust using a skip second, or to adjust in any month other than June or December.

The protocol allows for a "skip second" as well as a leap second. The clock could legitimately go 23:59:57, 23:59:58, and then 00:00:00.

You cannot redefine the second without rewriting all of science.

Why do that? Why not just fix the code to properly handle leap seconds and skip seconds the way they are defined now. Or, if it so all fired important, use TAI instead of UTC and use PTP instead of NTP.

There are regular intervals at which leap seconds *CAN* be applied (The last day of March, June, September and December may be one second longer or shorter than other days). However, leap seconds and skip seconds are not always applied. They are irregular because the turning of the Earth is irregular.