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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?"
Resetting the clock is not complicated, but the current system means there is a 61st second in a minute, as your quote of TFA mentions. People -- including software developers -- are strongly used to dealing with 60-second minutes, and software sometimes makes that assumption. It just requires attention (sometimes a lot of attention) and extra code (sometimes a lot of extra code) to get it right, but since very few people pay attention when a leap second happens, bugs are easily overlooked.
Since leap seconds are based on changes in the time period of Earth's rotation (the sidereal day), and the decay is both very slow and influenced by hard-to-predict factors, leap seconds are not reliably predictable. They can only be announced when they are necessary -- and so it is easy for the displayed time to drift if a leap second announcement is missed or ignored.
Leap hours, though, are different beasts. Virtually every piece of software in the world that displays time knows how to deal with the hour jumping forward or backward. That transition happens predictably and affects a huge number of users, so errors are easily noted.