XPost: rec.arts.sf.written, rec.arts.books   
   From: droleary@4usenet2013.subsume.com   
      
   In article ,   
    ted@loft.tnolan.com (Ted Nolan ) wrote:   
      
   > >Not minding the big/little mixup, anyone who reads the full Wikipedia   
   > >entry will see that you are grossly mistaken.  To the extent that it can   
   > >be idealized as geographically big endian, it also exhibits a *lot* of   
   > >special cases that make it useless as a location designation:   
   >   
   > "imperfect" & "useless" are two different things.  For instance, advertisers   
   > target zipcodes based on location all the time.   
      
   My mistake.  They're not "useless" in the sense that you *can't* use   
   them to refer to a location/area.  What I meant to mean is that, in   
   order to use them, you must be able to access the USPS database to know   
   what location/area a ZIP code exactly refers to.  I contrast it to   
   things like GPS, which use a predictable, open notation to reference a   
   location. For the purposes of science fiction, postal codes don't really   
   make much sense very far into the future, never mind when it comes to   
   people living on space stations, the Moon, or other planets.   
      
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