XPost: rec.arts.sf.written, rec.arts.books   
   From: ted@loft.tnolan.com   
      
   In article ,   
   Doc O'Leary   wrote:   
   >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.   
   >   
      
   OK, sure.  Agreed: Zipcodes have no intrinsic meaning.   
      
   Of course that's true of a lot of things we use to describe location.   
      
   For that matter, lat/lon are based on "datums" and what your current   
   lat/lon position is depends in part on what datum you choose.  (Last time   
   I [somewhat!] cared about this, it seemed that WGS84 was the most popular   
   datum, unless I'm misremembering the whole issue..)   
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