From The Register:
Time Lords set for three-week battle over leap seconds
An upcoming International Telecommunication Union (ITU) conference is about to become an international battleground over whether or not to retain the leap second – the periodic adjustment of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) so it stays in agreement with atomic clocks.
A bit more:
In spite of frequent predictions of a leap second apocalypse, the last leap second passed pretty much without incident. Still, factions in the world of international standards keep the issue ticking over.
That wasn't the case in 2012, when Australian airlines Qantas and Virgin Australia both staggered when the Amadeus booking system crashed, and servers run by Mozilla, Reddit, Yelp, and FourSquare struggled. By contrast, 2015 was so unremarkable that some people argue we've worked out how to deal with leap seconds, so we may as well keep them.
In the blue corner there are the traditionalists, who point out that if we don't adjust clocks to keep them in synch with Earth's gently-slowing rotation, midday at Greenwich will be half an hour off – by the year 2700.
I am all in favor of keeping things precice. If a system cannot handle something as simple as a leap second, how is it going to handle January 19th, 2038?
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