Åland

John.Cowan jcowan at reutershealth.com
Wed Nov 2 15:45:30 CET 2005


Marion Gunn scripsit:

> That is only due to a misleading bug in ISO 3166 (part two of which is
> currently under review), which equates GB ('Great Britain') to a
> higher-level territory (UK) of which it is only a part ('The United
> Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland') and which ignores the
> fact that the e-mail territorial address identifier for the entire
> territory is actually .UK (as in www.bbc.co.uk, smo.uhi.ac,uk,
> www.qub.ac.uk, www.cadw.wales.gov.uk, etc., etc.).

    A cocky novice once said to Stallman: "I can guess why the editor
    is called Emacs, but why is the justifier called Bolio?". Stallman
    replied forcefully, "Names are but names.  'Emack & Bolio's' is the
    name of a popular ice cream shop in Boston-town. Neither of these
    men had anything to do with the software."

    His question answered, yet unanswered, the novice turned to go, but
    Stallman called to him, "Neither Emack or Bolio had anything to do
    with the ice cream shop, either."

    (This is known as the ice-cream koan.)

Nobody is going to change GB to UK (there is even a principled reason:
words common to many countries, like "United" and "Kingdom" are avoided
where practical -- in "US" it's not practical), and nobody is going to use
.gb instead of .uk in domain names.  Speculating about such things is
a waste of time for those who do it and a source of error for those
who read them.

> Hope this helps,

On the contrary.

-- 
Dream projects long deferred            John Cowan <jcowan at reutershealth.com>
usually bite the wax tadpole.            http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
        --James Lileks                  http://www.reutershealth.com


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