Time marches on, but Earth is falling behind. The solution again this year is to add a "leap second" as 2005 ticks away, so Earth can catch up with the atomic clocks that have defined time since their unerring accuracy trumped the heavens three decades ago.

This will be the first leap second in seven years, and its arrival will be closely watched by physicists and astronomers enmeshed in a prolonged debate over the future of time in a world increasingly dominated by technology.

Some experts think the leap second should be abolished because the periodic, but random, adjustment of time imposes unreasonable and perhaps dangerous disruptions on precision software applications including cell phones, air traffic control and power grids.

Here's a better article on some of the problems.

I suspect that an honest debate is not possible, being that the
proposal itself was made secretly, and that any frank discussion
of why the Naval Research Laboratory thinks it should be done
will be constricted by "national security" concerns.