The future of UTC?

An acquaintance of mine published http://futureofutc.org/ on their Facebook page today.

This is interesting. An excerpt from their front page:

A conclusive proposal to fundamentally redefine UTC is scheduled for a vote by the Radiocommunication Assembly of the ITU-R in January, 2012. The proposal will halt the contribution of so-called leap seconds to UTC after 2017, and will also terminate the requirement that time services transmit the difference between UT1 and UTC. If approved, UTC would no longer be useful as a type of Universal Time for most technical applications.

Many software and hardware systems needing to know how the Earth is oriented with respect to the sky rely on UTC for this purpose. Should UTC be redefined, significant consequences may be anticipated for applications and infrastructures across various fields. Applications that do not apply so-called Earth Orientation Parameters and/or DUT1 corrections to UTC would be most affected.

Sessions will cover diverse topics of pragmatic timekeeping in a possibly changing world.

It's obvious to anyone working within the IT Sector alone that changes to the way UTC is handled will have far-reaching affects. This may be something that we all need to keep an eye on; all sorts of technology makes use of accurate timekeeping and the flow on effects of a change such as the one proposed may be significant.

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