On Wed, Jul 04, 2012 at 06:10:45PM -0400, William Herrin wrote:
IMO, leap seconds are a really bad idea. Let the vanishingly few people who care about a precision match against the solar day keep track of the deviation from clock time and let everybody else have a *simple* clock year after year. When the deviation increases to an hour every what, thousand years? Then you can do a big, well publicized correction where everybody is paying attention to making it work instead of being caught by surprise.
Notice that already InterplaNet requires a time base not linked to a particular planetary body. If we're looking at kiloyear scales, then either nobody will care about celestial dynamics of a particular planetary body, or nobody will care about precise time standards any longer.