[SpamCop-List] Re: spam is NOT 10 days old to me - got it this a.m.

[Mike Easter]

Norman Miller wrote:
>  Mike Easter wrote:
>
>> The decimal system is big endian.  The ISO time expressing system is
>> big endian.  To me, it is 'illogical' for a time expressing system
>> to not be consistently big endian.
>
> Some places are "big endian" WRT to addresses, as well. City,
> province, street, building. That sort of thing.

The way the USPS handles the 'jumble' which is the 'traditional' way US
people handle their address writing is to 're-address' the postal piece
with a human /and/ machine readable zip+9 and a machinereadable
'postnet' encoding, which resembles a bar code and can contain
either/any of the options of the five digit ZIP Code (32 bars), a nine
digit ZIP + 4 code (52 bars) or an eleven digit Delivery Point code (62
bars) down on the bottom edge of the postalpiece.

That 'improved' and bigendian addressing system is machine printed and
machine readable by the automated machines encountered along the way
after the human who addressed the item has sent it.  Naturally things
which are bulkrated have to play by stricter rules than those which
aren't.

I think that if the postal office's optical reading gizmos don't work
properly, the item is shunted over for a real actual human eyeball/brain
to interpret and stamp the machine code onto.  Naturally with the
'overload' at Xmas time, such a manual handling would significantly slow
down an item.

> OTOH, when people are comfortable with doing things a specific way,
> inertia sets in, and change can be anywhere from difficult to
> impossible.

There have been various studies which have figured out the best way to
metricate countries.  Guess what;  gradually doesn't get it.

> Me, I am flexible.

The problem is when flexibility collides with ambiguity.  That's how we
started here, in this particular subthread.

-- 
Mike Easter
kibitzer, not SC admin