NavList:

A comment on the 'fairly stupid position' of the Royal Institute of Navigation and UK Government in wanting to keep leap seconds.  We simply see no reason to disconnect the time we all use (UTC) from solar time.  The web can cope with leap seconds (by slewing oscillators unnoticeably over 24 hrs), all GNSS constellations can cope and even Big Ben can (by placing an old penny on the pendulum for 24 hrs).  The people that are really agitating to drop the leap second are those involved in high frequency trading (HFT), engaged in the very suspect activity of automatic computer-to-computer financial trading, requiring time-stamping to milliseconds; there has been much fraud involved and there are moves to have it banned.  So I firmly believe that we should pass-on the legacy of time being linked to the Sun for future generations - there is absolutely no technical reason why we should not do so.  I am very surprised to hear someone purporting to come from 'A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Position-Finding' becoming a bedmate of the HFT community.  David Broughton, RIN.