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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?"
http://leapsecond.com/ -- This guy should complain. They're taking all the fun out of his clock collection!
And what about all those people with birthdays on February 29th? Guess they'll only age once every 500 years
it's government conspiracy!
My sig is permanently on strike.
I don't see anywhere in the U.S. Constitution that the government has been given authority over time. I guess strict constructionism applies only to judges and not the government. Bummer... There's never a Time Lord when you need one.
Mod parent funny for its subject, please :D
I say we adjust the planet's rotation and orbit so we have perfect intervals.
...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).
1. The Americans want to do X.
2. The Americans are bad.
3. Therefore, X is bad. QED.
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.
Got Shadowrun? Awakened Worlds
That's pretty funny, short term thinking by the americans. Because Europe contains so many long range thinkers.
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.
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.
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.
I think we should just take a hint from the VCR people; fuck measuring time, and let all the clocks flash "12:00" forever.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
500 years ago, people weren't reading, they weren't really doing much of anything productive.
... great grandchildren will grow up to post something stupid on something called the Internet."
& p=2 (the last post at the bottom). Compare that with what you hear people say about Jesus (the non-fireman one).
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
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
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)