Well, and it's exactly the same (only the sign is changed) like software engineers complaining about leap seconds.

Do a better job and the systems will not suffer from leap seconds. Of course, astronomers and farmers will be more inclined to agree with this statement; software engineers, not so much. :)

We all complain when we are inconvenienced. When other people are inconvenienced, bah, it's a trifle.

Also, we "suffer" from leap seconds not because we did a bad job designing the system, but because the Earth's rotation is slowing due to tidal forces from the moon, so an earth day today is already a tiny fraction of a second longer than it was when we defined a day to be 24 hours. So we have a couple of choices: change the length of an hour (and minute, and second...) to match the Earth's changing rotational speed; let solar time and clock time gradually drift apart; or add leap seconds to keep them roughly in sync. The first option is clearly insane, since having our measure of time vary over time would be a huge inconvenience. Out of the 2nd and 3rd, options, we have chosen the 3rd. A lot of people are arguing that the 2nd is really a better option. In the (very very) long term, it almost certainly is. Once the Earth's day becomes 25 hours, we'd be adding a leap hour every day!

This is my understanding of the situation, anyway. Anyone with more experience here, feel free to correct me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second#Proposal_to_abolis...

I wish they had a call for public comments.

Just gah.

UK: please realize you are a medium-sized EU country, not a global super power. :)

Sincerely, the rest of Europe

It will take thousands of years for the drift to even amount to one hour.

If people care about it then, ... they can switch timezones (e.g. like DST causes twice a year in most places) to compensate for it.

Anyway, the UK is realistically still a global great power (the US being the only acknowledged super power):

  6th by GDP (nominal)
  8-10th by GDP (PPP)
  Permanent member of UN Security Council
  Declared nuclear weapon state
  6th by military expenditure
  3rd biggest European country by populace (excluding Russia)
  4th biggest importer and exporter in the world 
  7th biggest R&D spending

    Most pervasive cyber-surveillance state
    Most self-righteous has-been in denial. 
    Most politically jaded western democracy
    Most disturbingly enthralled celebrity culture.
    Worlds smallest media attention-span.
    Worlds best dogging hotspots.

You sure that's not the French?

I never understood this argument. The whole point of having a 24-hour clock is so that 12:00 is midday and 00:00 is midnight.

If you break that link then there seems little point in even having time zones, but it is useful to understand that "09:00" is in the morning, in whatever arbitrary location that time is observed.

The instant failure of "Swatch internet time" showed that the current system is still working.

Tell you what: i'll allow a switch to European time if we move the start of the working day to 11:00. Deal?

imagine splitting time not exactly in seasons begin/end (what was the last time you synched your clocks with a solstice?). no leap seconds. no 28-31 months. no 365+-1 years. even daylight saving time benefits can be worked in the system if we don't sync 100% with the solar day but skew it just enough that you get the drift to align things on daylight saving benefits and still can tell the time by simply looking at the sun.

it's not hard. just nobody has the balls to even suggest this seriously out of math circles.

There are a fractional number of days in a year. You can't have a year with an integral number of days (without varying the number of days in a year, i.e. leap years).

The proposal to abandon leap seconds is appealing but as short-sighted as two-digit years. You'll have to dynamically adjust times eventually because the rate of the earth's rotation changes. We can either do it right, incrementally, and programmers can manage to implement a standard that's been around for over forty years, or we can ignore it and pass the problem along. I suppose I can guess what will happen there.

Let's face it: decimal time was really only intended for people doing lots of math work involving time. If the argument for base 10 is that calculations and representations are "easier" than base 12 (mainly because all modern human civilizations use base 10), why not make the argument that base 2 should be used, since computers virtually think for us at this point?

The real reason our representation of time is still so fucked up is that it has to be used by all humans, and all humans don't want to deal with lots of digits, fractions, floating point, etc. Sexadecimal is just simpler, even if we do have to occasionally jump through some hoops to keep this piece of crap timekeeping system in order. One second every couple years? Converting to decimal just to deal with little problems like that seems like a completely unreasonable suggestion to most people.

I never could get around the 1/4 day problem, and still had to account for leap years with a sixth non-month day every four years. It was a fun thought experiment as a teenager interested in math and science though.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar

60 is probably best, tho.

edit: And I just realized I had a typo up there; I wrote "13 months" when I meant "12 months". D'oh.

Your idea has definitely never been tried or abolished. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time