Next Chapter In the Leap Second Story

at10u8 writes "The ITU-R and BIPM are holding a joint workshop on the Future of the International Time Scale. This is the next of many steps toward the possibility that radio broadcasts of time signals might abandon leap seconds. All of the presentations are online and the press release for the workshop indicates there will be video interviews afterwards."

articles by the workshop participants

[at10u8]

The ITU has also put up an issue of ITU News with in depth articles [itu.int].

Re:Double time

[aardvarkjoe]

So... err... how will it go now? Instead of posting a 60th second they will make the 59th second twice as long, and have everyone think their clocks are fast, accept that out of sync clocks are a fact of life, and just synchronize?

They'll simply stop trying to correct UTC to match the rotation angle of the earth. "Correcting" UTC that way is mostly helpful to astronomers, and for everyone else has no benefit and some significant drawbacks.

Re:Double time

[msauve]

Civil time has always been based on the sun. For anyone who doesn't like dealing with leap seconds, there are well established alternate timescales available which don't use them, such as GPS and TAI. There is no good reason to eliminate leap seconds from UTC, which was very specifically developed to closely track the earth's rotation, like its other UTx siblings [wikipedia.org]. The people who want to eliminate leap seconds from UTC are the ones who chose their timescale poorly, and now want those who use it properly to suffer for their mistakes.

There's good coverage here.