XPost: rec.arts.sf.written, rec.arts.books   
   From: throopw@sheol.org   
      
   : Doc O'Leary    
   : "As a consequence, ZIP code "areas" can overlap, be subsets of each   
   : other, or be artificial constructs with no geographic area (such as   
   : 095 for mail to the Navy, which is not geographically fixed).  In   
   : similar fashion, in areas without regular postal routes (rural route   
   : areas) or no mail delivery (undeveloped areas), ZIP codes are not   
   : assigned or are based on sparse delivery routes, and hence the   
   : boundary between ZIP code areas is undefined."   
      
   : A ZIP code is essentially the USPS exposing the hashes of its internal   
   : routing table.   
      
   To use the term "essentially" to account for a feww corner and/or very   
   exceptional cases is somewhat perverse.  If I see a ZIP starting in 1, I can   
   be quite certain it's on the east coast.  With a 9, the west.  Perhaps not   
   totally certain, and yes you'd need a computer to look up every corder case.    
   But that doesn't make it    
   "essenbtially a hash"  It makes it a geographical number code with a few   
   exceptions.   
      
   They *can* be overlapped, subsetted, or unrelated to geography.   
   But it's not their essence.   
      
   : Sadly, other shipping companies have followed suit.  From a science   
   : fiction perspective, that minimizes future shock but hinders progress.   
      
   Yes.  Doubly unfortunate that they also borrow the USPSs "official   
   addresses we deliver to" as a validation that a shipment is going to   
   a real address, whether or not they are using USPS to get it there.   
   And they don't try very hard to keep it up to date.  For quite some   
   time after moving into a new (as in newly *built*) house, whether a   
   given vendor would deign to deliver to me was a matter of a coinflip.   
   Untill enough time (more than a year as it turned out) for everybody to   
   have bothered to update.   
      
   For that matter, there were some reigons where the USPS didn't bother to   
   distribute and install its own updates, and the *mail* wouldn't deliver   
   to me from there.  You'd think they'd send it to where the zip saysthe   
   post office managing the zup, and let them worry about it, but they   
   often didn't.   
      
   And the USPS was the entity that *assigned* the house that address.   
   Yeeeeesh.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)