191–200 of 259 posts
Hear me out. We can just mount jet engines along the equator and rotate them 180 to gain or lose time. And then connect them to my snooze button.
Wouldn't it just be easier to have Superman fly around the planet a bunch of times really fast to do the same thing? Then you wouldn't have to worry about having to deal with all of that engine maintenance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't it just be easier to have Superman fly around the planet a bunch of times really fast to do the same thing? Then you wouldn't have to worry about having to deal with all of that engine maintenance.
Superman is best used elsewhere. https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-07-13
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's understood by constituents that a vote for a Sinn Féin representative is a protest vote that results in specifically nobody going to Westminster to represent you. I cannot imagine that any significant number of people vote for them and are then astonished when this has the effect everybody else expects. On the other hand, Binface has not, as I understand it, ever said he would not serve if elected. He's made it…
Likewise, nobody will be all that surprised, or disappointed, if Binface never takes his seat. It's much more of a protest vote than voting Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland, and voters will have achieved their aim of Farage not getting in. Actually, I'd take issue with describing Sinn Féin as a protest vote at all. They've historically been the only choice that even claim to represent constituents in many areas. And the…
The key aspect is that they consider the English government to be a foreign government and so they avoid involving it in the work that they do in Ireland for their Irish constituency. Statements about the illegitimacy of their government historically come from conservative English sources. But the fact is those SF debates in their "protest government" formed the foundation of the modern Irish state. They are a protest vote in the same way that the US Constitutional Convention was.
By the same token, they consider legislating on affairs that pertain to the English, Welsh, and Scots to be none of their business. To take up seats in a foreign parliament would be to meddle in the affairs of a foreign, sovereign nation. And that would be hypocrisy!
What causes the unpredictability in this? I would have guessed we have earth's rotation and orbit down to many decimals. Does geological activity, weather, or something else cause rotation speed differences that we just can't predict?
What causes the unpredictability in this? I would have guessed we have earth's rotation and orbit down to many decimals. Does geological activity, weather, or something else cause rotation speed differences that we just can't predict?
In short, yes, the weather, geology, and signicantly, human movement of water via aquifer draining and dam building, as well as glaicial and ice melts, all contribute to unpredictable changes in the earths rotational period, as well as the axis of rotation. The models for this are IIRC trigonometric polynomials of fairly low order, so even if we could model the unpredictability perfectly, truncation error would limit…
What are the satellites doing with the models? They're not deciding leap seconds on their own, I hope. So I don't see why the leap second decision would be locked to low accuracy.
Also I would expect doubling the precision to give you a 3-4x slowdown on the math or adding orders to have less effect, and the amount of available computation spent on those models to be like a tenth of a percent at most, so the extra cycles wouldn't be an issue. What am I missing here?
To me it seems like unpredictability is the only real issue.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It also means that if you subtract two timestamps, you might not get the actual time between them. Though this is also true of most ways of representing time (TAI being a notable exception).
The really annoying part is that "leap smearing" (where people decided to just mush the leap second across about day) has made CLOCK_MONOTONIC unclear in this regard, since some leap smearing approaches affect that as well. Which destroyed any assumption a developer could make about CLOCK_MONOTONIC, since you won't know if leap smearing is in use :(. (And depending on the leap smearing implementation, it also smears…
But it is just a basic system clock. Being the wrong speed by 15 parts per million shouldn't throw off your data collection. Lots of clocks are more inaccurate by accident.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
2035 is the agreed drop dead date. Everybody agreed that "Leap seconds" are a sufficiently bad idea that they should be replaced by 2035. Nobody has agreed how to fix it, and "Just turn them off" isn't technically legal. However, "What if there were Leap hours instead?" is technically legal and of course those hours would happen in the very distant future (likely after our civilisation is gone) so it's functionally i…
So, it's solving a real problem, why are we dropping it? I mean, why does everybody agree it's a bad solution?
If the world weren't entirely reliant on software to the extent it is today (like when leap seconds were introduced in the 70s), it wouldn't matter as much.
looks like tons of service will crash at the new year eve
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think for the stretch of time where a leap second is smeared, the epoch second would drift by a tiny fraction for each second or etc? So you'd have some chunk of UTC time where each second lasts something like 1.0005 epoch seconds, maybe? This would make converting from unix time to UTC need extra arbitrary handling for display, at least.
> I think for the stretch of time where a leap second is smeared, the epoch second would drift by a tiny fraction for each second or etc? So you'd have some chunk of UTC time where each second lasts something like 1.0005 epoch seconds, maybe? Yes, 1.0000116s (or 0.9999884s), and to be clear it was never intended like that. It got started after a bunch of bugs in leap second handling caused issues & some people though…
> 11.6µs is very measurable on a modern system.
11.6µs is very measurable.
Clock skew of 11.6 PPM is much more subtle.