At 10:27 AM 9/16/98 -0400, John Charles Broomfield wrote:
Hi Richard, I agree that the current system is less than perfect, but how would YOU select what is or not a country.
Based on historical facts, not what some company in Europe (ISO) thinks for revisionist politial reasonings. Tibet *used* to be a country, I have Tibetan stamps and all, but China says it's not a country any more. Tough. Tibet is still a country to the Tibetans and to most of the rest of the world
Even further, are you sure it's a good idea to actually have a body responsible for technical matters draw a list of what is or not a country?
Yes.
I feel that the creation of such a list is a HIGHLY political affair (Is Palestine a country or not?)
Ask the people who were born there.
Say you don't like the name of your street, and you don't like the fact that your postman brings mail addressed to your street-name. Do you bash your postman or the post-office? It's not the post-office that decides names for streets, and to be honest it's not their business either. You take up the issue of street names with whoever is in charge of naming them (say your local town-hall for example). You don't start a national campaign complaining about the way that the postal service designates streets (basically because it's NOT the PS designating them).
You're right, I didn't start a national campaign. Here's what I did: My current address is Box 2, RR #1 Eldorado, Ontario, K0K 1Y0, CANADA It would he hard to think of a more ugly address for a charming 200 year old hotel that is now my residence. Moreso, Eldorado is 10km south of here. Bannockburn actually does exist. We have a big government installed sign, and everything. You can see it here, if you want: http://hastings-county.vrx.net/centre/bannockburn/rd05.jpg So, looking back through the history books I noticed this place used to be called "The Maitland Hotel, Bannockburn, Ontario" So, I simply use the address Maitland House Bannockburn, Ontario, K0K 1Y0, CANADA and that works just fine. I didn't even have to tell Lois, the mail lady. She's bright enough to figure it out. I've never had a problem with people saying "your snail mail bounced". Now, UPS and Fed-Ex can't deliver to *either* of those two addresses. They get all FAW with rural addresses, so, for them our address is 17245 Hiway #62 Ontario, Canada. Include the postal code and it messes them up, all they go by is the 911 emergency markers on the road.
IANA doesn't choose to consider Tuvalu a country and not Scotland. IANA does however choose to use the ISO-3166 country code list. Do you have any other suggestion of a list which has the countries that you personally consider countries with a nice list of two-letter codes (or whatever) that could be used instead? Didn't think so.
Was there a list of .com/net/org/mil/gov/intarpa/edu ? Didn't think so. They were simply created, and the same canbe done for rational country codes. This whole discussion is .moot anyway, because as soon as there is a procedure in place to create new tlds, people will simply deploy three letter country codes as "generic" TLDs (I suppose toretaliate for the "psuedo-generic" two letter contry codes like .to and .nu) which toa great extent is already happening: .pol, .bul, .usa, .aus already exist, and there is nothing that can prevent .tbt or .tibet, .sct or .scotland and so forth. The ISO2 codes are capricous and arbitrary and in a few years will seem as antiquated as .com; both falling into disuse as an obscure relic and a perfect exsmple of state-of-the-art 1986 ISO Internet taxonomoy. -- "I think it is important to understand that distribution of authority is better than dictatorship, and that the governance of TLDs and domains in general should be distributed rather than centralized." - Paul Mockapetris -------- Logged at Thu Sep 17 12:50:19 MET DST 1998 ---------