UTC is designed so that the sun will always be up during the day and down at night.
There have been 25 leap seconds since 1972. At that rate, it will take around 6000 years for UTC to be even an hour different from TAI.
The long term behavior is a quadratic, so it will speed up; there could easily be multiple leap seconds per year by 2100. Likewise, the difference was about 4 hours only 2000 years ago (and, yes, we do have usable astronomical data going back to about 800 BC).
Take another look at Method D, which was just added in March: "No change to the Radio Regulations as the results of the studies are inconclusive." This is one group of delegations going on official record saying that all the effort expended by the ITU-R over the past 15 years has been worthless for making any decision to change the definition of UTC. That is serious disagreement.
This is a disagreement about future possible standards There is no disagreement about the current standard, which is why software that does not implement the current fracking standard is buggy.
I recently took a private tour of the time and frequency lab at METAS (the Swiss Federal Institute of Metrology) and got to observe their atomic clocks, ask the people there some questions, etc.
The scientist in charge of the lab wishes everyone would use TAI for time distribution. TAI has no leap seconds and differs from GPS time by a constant 19 seconds.
Yes, because the Air Force people setting up GPS time didn't understand why that was a fundamental difference between UTC and TAI (GPS - UTC was zero when the time scale was established).
If the POSIX standards people had bothered to actually follow the existing SI and ITU standards back in 1988 when they were setting up their standard, this would not be an issue.
Ignore it. How much does it impact humanity if the clock noon drifts a tiny bit from solar noon? We're looking at an impact of shifting noon by about a minute over the course of an average human's lifespan. The impact of ignoring it means that people who rely on sundials are left to solve the sync problem on their own, and that's a whole lot less of an impact than NTP.
Other systems that synchronize with natural phenomena, such as automated irrigation systems or automated lighting systems, can be adjusted by their owners.
If some purist insists that we have to fix it, let's agree to fix it once per century, and let the people 100 years from now figure out if it's important enough to them to worry about.
GPS does not ignore it in the slightest. GPS is a big user of UT1 data and predicts, and has driven a lot of work in the Earth rotation field. However, what GPS does not do is use UTC as a very approximate version of UT1.
People doing celestial navigation at sea do typically assume that UTC as a very approximate version of UT1, and that's why there are leap seconds at all (to keep the celestial navigation error to the kilometer level). As the use of celestial navigation declines, so does the need for leap seconds.
Because you have different approaches to it. If the community could agree on how to address the (growing) difference in time as measured by Earthborn measures with solar/Earth/rotation measures, then it would be. But, there are legitimate and valid disagreements with how time should be kept.
Really? UTC is defined by International Telecommunications Union Recommendation (ITU-R TF.460-6), and it includes leap seconds. Do you have an alternative Telecommunications Union you abide by?
A couple of nuke blasts on the moon would let us keep the Earth's rotation in sync with our atomic clocks. It's practice for asteroids, and good entertainment too!
You do know that leap seconds are driven by angular momentum fluctuations in the Earth's liquid outer core? I don't think the Moon has much to do with those.
Oh, and NAN is in the vast majority of cases not a sensible result. It can be fine to report that some variable is NAN (that being an error state or a symptom of the error state), but doing anything with it is crazy IMHO.
Does anyone want their div by zero errors to result in anything other than zero?
It is far better to throw an error than to do something massively stupid.
If your code has anything to do with moving actual physical objects, be it photons or electrons or larger things such as aircraft or spacecraft, your divide by zero errors should be caught and replaced with either an error or if possible with a sensible result. In my experience, with physical things these sensible results are generally not zero, but most commonly plus or minus "infinity" (i.e., something as large as possible). It's also common for a divide by zero to be a symptom of some assumption or approximation failing for the case in question, and completely different code branch may be needed to do the right thing.
Legal hair splitting. If you had read on, you would see
Rather, the premises of diplomatic missions usually remain under the jurisdiction of the host state while being afforded special privileges (such as immunity from most local laws) by the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. Diplomats themselves still retain full diplomatic immunity, and (as an adherent to the Vienna Convention) the host country may not enter the premises of the mission without permission of the represented country, even to put out a fire. International rules designate an attack on an embassy as an attack on the country it represents. The term "extraterritoriality" is often applied to diplomatic missions, but normally only in this broader sense.
So, they can't come in on any pretext, and if they do it's an act of war. Sounds like de facto extraterritoriality to me.
As an example, the Iranian embassy in DC is on Massachusetts Ave, just down from the South African Embassy, and across and down from the UK Embassy. It has been empty since 1979 (I believe the Swiss look after it), but it is still the Iranian Embassy and the US leaves it alone (even after what they did to our embassy).
The decision behind the timing “is chiefly that a number of the crimes Julian Assange is suspected of will be subject to a statute of limitation in August,”
Ecuador, from my understanding, has quite the bureaucracy. They should get back to the Swedes by the New Year or so, no sweat.
He's a fucking idiot. He's spent FIVE YEARS locked up in that embassy. If he'd gone back to Sweden and been sentenced, he'd probably be out of prison by now.
The level of "must extradite" is unusual. There must be some other reason that they didn't interview him before now. They have done this with others, and didn't have an issue with a remote interview. He isn't asking for unusual treatment. He's asking for standard treatment. Sweden won't give it to him. Why?
Because Sweden has been bought off. Any claims for respectability they might have had died with Olaf Palme.
RTFM, this isn't TPP or any of those treaties. This is some other small sacrificial lamb so everyone stops paying attention.
What this would have aloud is for Obama to submit the TPP to congress and all they can do is yeh or nay. No debate, no amendments. Since the TPA did not pass, when it is proposed to congress, it is open to debate, amendment and the public.
How is that Utopia working out for all of you people that keep thinking more Government will solve all our problems?
Are there, in fact, any people making that rather-broad argument, as opposed to, say, arguing that some particular problem might be better handled with more government?
No, but it is common to read people mindlessly repeating these sound bites.
That's sort of how the libertarian viewpoint evolves, I guess. Like Reagan started out as a democrat, presumably because he cared about people and favored social reforms. Then after living through the Communist purges in the McCarthy era, he realized that more government power means more chances for government abuse. Which is why he came to say, "Government is not the solution....government is the problem." As many people like to say, the NSA is a greater threat to US liberty than Al Qaeda.
So, McCarthyism traumatized him so much that, after being FBI informant reporting on people's political beliefs, he then joined the party that fostered McCarthy, and subsequently used similar techniques against student protesters and pot smokers, which was the foundation of his actual political career, as opposed to his sound bites? Sure, whatever you say.
The TTP should be a Treaty, but what it is instead is a secret agreement that Congress would vote on as a regular bill, not a Treaty. The whole point of "fast track" is that it wouldn't be approved even on this basis, so the President needs advance approval on an agreement with terms that are not final and in any case cannot be legally revealed in public. (Congressmen and women have to go to a special room to read them, and can't take notes out.)
Never mind that this "trade agreement" really just represents corporations trying to get things through the back door they could never get through Congress directly, even if it just contained recipes for Apple pie it should be opposed by anyone who cares about our Constitutional system of Government. Treaties, or for that matter normal laws, can be negotiated in private, but they need to be discussed and passed in public.
There is plenty to test - there are new astrophysical tests of gravity, quark matter, etc., almost on a daily basis. (We still have never actually seen a black hole Event Horizon, for example - that should come in the next few years). What there may not be much more of is particle accelerators - if the LHC doesn't find anything beyond the Higgs Boson, I predict it will be very hard to raise money to make a, say, 100 km accelerator ring for another round of accelerator physics.
ISIS is the former Saddam army and bureaucracy. They have extensive experience in running a country and derive income from oil operations and a taxation system.
Bingo. ISIS is most run by Baath members, to the extent I wonder if it isn't really just Baath hiding in plain sight.
They must skip the lessons on communications discipline in the ISIS evil genius training course. Of course, it sounds like Gen. Hawk Carlisle was asleep that day as well.
On the other hand, knowing something of the Middle East, it's probably a triple head-fake of some sort. The selfie was probably taken in front of the house of a local CIA operative whose cover was blown, as an act of combat swatting by ISIS, the 22 hours was the time required for us to get him out of there to safety, and Gen. Carlisle is just spreading disinformation to hide that we figured it out.
Nope, doesn't work that way. For a good (and entertaining) explanation, read the Illustrated Guide to Criminal, particularly the section about Mens Rea: http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=1...
Of course, in the actual world we live in, I would not be surprised in the slightest if the local DA didn't file charges against each one of the five, and alas it would really wouldn't surprise me either to learn that the first three adults all pled out, not wanting to risk a trial.
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UTC is designed so that the sun will always be up during the day and down at night.
There have been 25 leap seconds since 1972. At that rate, it will take around 6000 years for UTC to be even an hour different from TAI.
The long term behavior is a quadratic, so it will speed up; there could easily be multiple leap seconds per year by 2100. Likewise, the difference was about 4 hours only 2000 years ago (and, yes, we do have usable astronomical data going back to about 800 BC).
Take another look at Method D, which was just added in March: "No change to the Radio Regulations as the results of the studies are inconclusive." This is one group of delegations going on official record saying that all the effort expended by the ITU-R over the past 15 years has been worthless for making any decision to change the definition of UTC. That is serious disagreement.
This is a disagreement about future possible standards There is no disagreement about the current standard, which is why software that does not implement the current fracking standard is buggy.
Never.
I recently took a private tour of the time and frequency lab at METAS (the Swiss Federal Institute of Metrology) and got to observe their atomic clocks, ask the people there some questions, etc.
The scientist in charge of the lab wishes everyone would use TAI for time distribution. TAI has no leap seconds and differs from GPS time by a constant 19 seconds.
Yes, because the Air Force people setting up GPS time didn't understand why that was a fundamental difference between UTC and TAI (GPS - UTC was zero when the time scale was established).
If the POSIX standards people had bothered to actually follow the existing SI and ITU standards back in 1988 when they were setting up their standard, this would not be an issue.
Ignore it. How much does it impact humanity if the clock noon drifts a tiny bit from solar noon? We're looking at an impact of shifting noon by about a minute over the course of an average human's lifespan. The impact of ignoring it means that people who rely on sundials are left to solve the sync problem on their own, and that's a whole lot less of an impact than NTP.
Other systems that synchronize with natural phenomena, such as automated irrigation systems or automated lighting systems, can be adjusted by their owners.
If some purist insists that we have to fix it, let's agree to fix it once per century, and let the people 100 years from now figure out if it's important enough to them to worry about.
GPS does not ignore it in the slightest. GPS is a big user of UT1 data and predicts, and has driven a lot of work in the Earth rotation field. However, what GPS does not do is use UTC as a very approximate version of UT1.
People doing celestial navigation at sea do typically assume that UTC as a very approximate version of UT1, and that's why there are leap seconds at all (to keep the celestial navigation error to the kilometer level). As the use of celestial navigation declines, so does the need for leap seconds.
That's not the problem.
Leap seconds are inserted by pretending that there's a 61st second in a minute.
Pretend, nothing. Those minutes do have a 61st second.
But...it's not.
Because you have different approaches to it. If the community could agree on how to address the (growing) difference in time as measured by Earthborn measures with solar/Earth/rotation measures, then it would be. But, there are legitimate and valid disagreements with how time should be kept.
Really? UTC is defined by International Telecommunications Union Recommendation (ITU-R TF.460-6), and it includes leap seconds. Do you have an alternative Telecommunications Union you abide by?
A couple of nuke blasts on the moon would let us keep the Earth's rotation in sync with our atomic clocks. It's practice for asteroids, and good entertainment too!
You do know that leap seconds are driven by angular momentum fluctuations in the Earth's liquid outer core? I don't think the Moon has much to do with those.
There is exactly one correct way to do this.
2015-06-30T23:59:59
2015-06-30T23:59:60
2015-07-01T00:00:00
David Mills approach is not correct, but will generally work and limits the pain to 1 second.
Anything else is just stupid. We've only been doing this since 1972. You would think people would get with the program by now.
Oh, and NAN is in the vast majority of cases not a sensible result. It can be fine to report that some variable is NAN (that being an error state or a symptom of the error state), but doing anything with it is crazy IMHO.
It is far better to throw an error than to do something massively stupid.
If your code has anything to do with moving actual physical objects, be it photons or electrons or larger things such as aircraft or spacecraft, your divide by zero errors should be caught and replaced with either an error or if possible with a sensible result. In my experience, with physical things these sensible results are generally not zero, but most commonly plus or minus "infinity" (i.e., something as large as possible). It's also common for a divide by zero to be a symptom of some assumption or approximation failing for the case in question, and completely different code branch may be needed to do the right thing.
Embassies are not sovereign territory.
Legal hair splitting. If you had read on, you would see
So, they can't come in on any pretext, and if they do it's an act of war. Sounds like de facto extraterritoriality to me.
As an example, the Iranian embassy in DC is on Massachusetts Ave, just down from the South African Embassy, and across and down from the UK Embassy. It has been empty since 1979 (I believe the Swiss look after it), but it is still the Iranian Embassy and the US leaves it alone (even after what they did to our embassy).
Ecuador, from my understanding, has quite the bureaucracy. They should get back to the Swedes by the New Year or so, no sweat.
He's a fucking idiot. He's spent FIVE YEARS locked up in that embassy. If he'd gone back to Sweden and been sentenced, he'd probably be out of prison by now.
Doesn't mean he'd be free.
No, the crime exists everywhere. Sexual fraud is a lie for sexual gain, which is a subset of "fraud".
Not in sensible countries.
The level of "must extradite" is unusual. There must be some other reason that they didn't interview him before now. They have done this with others, and didn't have an issue with a remote interview. He isn't asking for unusual treatment. He's asking for standard treatment. Sweden won't give it to him. Why?
Because Sweden has been bought off. Any claims for respectability they might have had died with Olaf Palme.
RTFM, this isn't TPP or any of those treaties. This is some other small sacrificial lamb so everyone stops paying attention.
What this would have aloud is for Obama to submit the TPP to congress and all they can do is yeh or nay. No debate, no amendments. Since the TPA did not pass, when it is proposed to congress, it is open to debate, amendment and the public.
Which means it will have no chance of passing.
How is that Utopia working out for all of you people that keep thinking more Government will solve all our problems?
Are there, in fact, any people making that rather-broad argument, as opposed to, say, arguing that some particular problem might be better handled with more government?
No, but it is common to read people mindlessly repeating these sound bites.
That's sort of how the libertarian viewpoint evolves, I guess. Like Reagan started out as a democrat, presumably because he cared about people and favored social reforms. Then after living through the Communist purges in the McCarthy era, he realized that more government power means more chances for government abuse. Which is why he came to say, "Government is not the solution....government is the problem." As many people like to say, the NSA is a greater threat to US liberty than Al Qaeda.
So, McCarthyism traumatized him so much that, after being FBI informant reporting on people's political beliefs, he then joined the party that fostered McCarthy, and subsequently used similar techniques against student protesters and pot smokers, which was the foundation of his actual political career, as opposed to his sound bites? Sure, whatever you say.
The TTP should be a Treaty, but what it is instead is a secret agreement that Congress would vote on as a regular bill, not a Treaty. The whole point of "fast track" is that it wouldn't be approved even on this basis, so the President needs advance approval on an agreement with terms that are not final and in any case cannot be legally revealed in public. (Congressmen and women have to go to a special room to read them, and can't take notes out.)
Never mind that this "trade agreement" really just represents corporations trying to get things through the back door they could never get through Congress directly, even if it just contained recipes for Apple pie it should be opposed by anyone who cares about our Constitutional system of Government. Treaties, or for that matter normal laws, can be negotiated in private, but they need to be discussed and passed in public.
There is plenty to test - there are new astrophysical tests of gravity, quark matter, etc., almost on a daily basis. (We still have never actually seen a black hole Event Horizon, for example - that should come in the next few years). What there may not be much more of is particle accelerators - if the LHC doesn't find anything beyond the Higgs Boson, I predict it will be very hard to raise money to make a, say, 100 km accelerator ring for another round of accelerator physics.
ISIS is the former Saddam army and bureaucracy. They have extensive experience in running a country and derive income from oil operations and a taxation system.
Bingo. ISIS is most run by Baath members, to the extent I wonder if it isn't really just Baath hiding in plain sight.
They must skip the lessons on communications discipline in the ISIS evil genius training course. Of course, it sounds like Gen. Hawk Carlisle was asleep that day as well.
On the other hand, knowing something of the Middle East, it's probably a triple head-fake of some sort. The selfie was probably taken in front of the house of a local CIA operative whose cover was blown, as an act of combat swatting by ISIS, the 22 hours was the time required for us to get him out of there to safety, and Gen. Carlisle is just spreading disinformation to hide that we figured it out.
Nope, doesn't work that way. For a good (and entertaining) explanation, read the Illustrated Guide to Criminal, particularly the section about Mens Rea: http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=1...
Of course, in the actual world we live in, I would not be surprised in the slightest if the local DA didn't file charges against each one of the five, and alas it would really wouldn't surprise me either to learn that the first three adults all pled out, not wanting to risk a trial.