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"Taiwan, Province of China" is the official name used by the United Nations: http://www.unece.org/cefact/locode/service/location.html

Other companies also use this same name, such as ebay.

"...do you really believe that the rate of reforestation is significant compared to deforestation"

In many places, yes. Example: "Forests cover 44 percent of Europe’s land area and they continue to expand." Example: "North American forest stock...have risen by 3% from 1992 to 2006".

Others have already replied in support of my other point: that many types of forest do, in fact, require periodic fires as part of their lifecycle. This is ought to be well-known - if you don't believe it, go do some research. One of the reasons forest fires get out of control, especially in "virgin forests" is precisely because they have not been allowed to burn periodically, and massive amounts of fuel have accumulated. One valid forest management policy is to initiate controlled burns; this helps keep forests healthy for the long-term, and prevents uncontrolled forest fires.

I object to a "tool" that does not acknowledge either of the above facts. The green extremists have convince most people that forests are disappearing. In fact, in first-world countries they are making a steady comeback. Further, the meme "all forest fires are evil" is simply wrong. Why does pointing this out qualify me as a "raving lunatic"?

You seem to be right, based on a random assortment of numbers from this site.

Interestingly, the numbers killed seem to be higher in rural areas in spite of this, which is more in line with my guess based on news reports over the years.

I like the UN/LOCODE system as it lists not only country but the location within the country as well. Of course you might still need the site numbering if you have multiple sites in the same city.

Yes, that's a great source. According to it, there are apparently absolutely no convictions in the US either, or less that 167 at least.

How about this link:

http://www.unece.org/stats/trends/#ch13

Please take a look at 13.3. According to it the US has gone from a homicide rate of 9.4/100K to 5.5/100K from 1990 to 2000. While many of the countries that have more favorable rates have actually increased. Denmark went from .8/100K to 4.0/100K. I was actually surprised Holland and Sweden ranked as high as they are.

According to: http://www.boston.com/news/world/latinamerica/articles/2006/09/25/brazil_murder_rate_similar_to_war_zone_data_shows/

Brazil had 55,000 homicides in 2006 compared to a population of 184,184,000 http://population-of.com/en/Brazil/

Frankly I don't have a lot of faith in statistics like these. The US is a country of immigrants, all with different beliefs and backgrounds. I'm surprised we get along at all, let alone as well as we do. How do you take that into account in these figures? And even if you don't, those numbers don't tell me that I live in a nation of murderous heathens and the EU is some kind of Utopian paradise because they have better gun control laws. Something else that rarely gets mentioned; What is reported as a murder? How many countries with dictatorships are there that report very low murder rates, but sanction the killing of their citizens? How do you quantify that?

Prison population
In 2000, more than 2.8 million persons were in prison in the ECE region, with approximately 1.3 million in the United States and 700 thousand in the Russian Federation. In general, there were more prisoners in relation to the population size in central and eastern Europe, the CIS countries and North America than in western Europe. The highest rate in 2000 was found in Belarus and Kazakhstan with 550 and 546 prisoners per 100 000 population respectively. The rates were also high in the United States and the Russian Federation with 468 and 460 prisoners respectively (Table 13.7).

US's tourism accounts for 0.9% of GDP... that's nothing compared to china (5.4%), New Zealand (10%), Italy (12%), even Canada (2.5%) ... get the point? It is insignificant to the US, but critical to many other areas of the world ...

From 1996 to 2000, the Nasdaq went from 600 to 5,000! Dot-com companies run by people who were barely in their 30's, were going public and raising hundreds of millions of dollars of capital. These companies didn't even have much of a business plan, and certainly didn't have any earnings, either! For example, Pets.com had no earnings yet came public and raised billions of dollars. Dot-coms wasted millions of dollars per night on frivolous parties. Hard work was never part of the picture for dot-commers. There are many stories of dot-com employees walking around barefoot in the office and playing foosball all day. At one point, a new millionaire was created every 60 seconds! Many of these instant millionaires thought that they were so brilliant, that all they had to do was play to make money. Never mistake a bull market for brains.

. ... By early 2000, reality started to sink in. Investors soon realized that the dot-com dream was really a bubble. Within months, the Nasdaq crashed from 5,000 to 2,000. Hundreds of stocks such as Pet.com, which were each worth billions, were off the map as quickly as they appeared. Panic selling ensued as investors lost trillions of dollars. The stock market kept crashing down to 800 in 2002. One high flier, Microstrategy, slid from $3500 per share to $4! Numerous accounting scandals came to light, showing how many companies artificially inflated earnings. Shareholders were crippled. In 2001, the economy entered a recession as the Fed repeatedly cut rates, trying to stop the bleeding. Millions of workers were now jobless and had lost their life savings.

Needless to say, the New Economy was a farce, and traditional economic principles still hold. What is sadly interesting is how bubbles will continue to occur in the future. When they do occur, foolish investors will say, "This time is different!"

I think UN control of anything technological will fail. They take far too long to make up their minds, so any technological standards that need to be implemented will be agreed upon when they are obsolete

This isn't true. Take the example of high-tech automobile headlamps. The UN body responsible for global headlamp regulations (GRE) is very close to finishing rules that will allow for LED headlamps. NHTSA, which does the same thing in the US has completely given up on making _any_ LED regulations for the forseable future because it's so hard to get safety related stuff through congress. In this case the UN is far ahead of the US in technical rule-making and you can see evidence of this in the relative technology contents of a typical American vehicle and a typical European vehicle.

-Pinkoir

They do have a "stable" 10 percent unemployment rate, If the US measured unemployment using the same method that Germany and France uses, the US unemployment would be about 9-11% right now. US does not count people for whom unemployment benefits have expired.

france, and most of the eu measures unemployment like the us- those actively looking for a job. but perhaps you'd like to use total employment rates instead? total employment in the us is about 74%, versus 64% in europe. france is right in line with most of the eu.
http://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/portal/en/index/intern ational/laenderportraets/france/blank/kennzahlen.h tml
http://www.unece.org/press/execsec/2003/bs031203.h tm

Knowing what to search for brings up these relevant links:
EDIFACT
X12
How Radio Frequency Identification Affects EDI
Integration for Logistics: RFID, EDI, XML, and Beyond

If you are using an off-the-shelf inventory/billing system they you should probably consider letting someone else handle the integration and format-translation.

I have implemented an EDI system from scratch at my previous company. It was based on EDIFACT and email, and had extensive tracking&tracing, status feedback, error handling. The major challenge in implementing and EDI system is the integration with your EDI partners. It took 3 months from start of testing to the first real EDI message getting through, and almost a year before the workflow was right. Another challenge is that touches on legal responsibility - who said what, why, when.

I believe that ROI was good. No more manually entering 5 batches of 100 items every day. And the deadlines were improved so the final information set could be imported half an hour before work was initiated.

As far as I know the system is still chugging along 5 years after I left the company.

Well, if the UN can manage CEB, CTBTO, ECA, ECE, ECLAC, ESCAP, ESCWA, FAO, UNCTAD, HLCM, MA HREF="http://ceb.unsystem.org/hlcp/default.htm">HL CP, IACSD, IANWGE, IAPSO, and about 5 times as many more, I think they can handle one more. :)

UN's record isn't that great IMHO

Oh really? Of the organizations I listed (in alphabetical order), how many are bloated and overbudget? How many have involved scandal of any kind? How many have been largely ineffective? Etc?

Honestly, I think that this is just going to turn into a big OFF-bashing thread.

"There are now some 21,000 "service robots" in use, carrying out tasks such as milking cows, handling toxic waste, ferrying medicine around hospitals and assisting surgeons. The number is set to reach a total of 75,000 by 2007, the study says."

Apart from the digging man, who is a member of CEFACT?

If you even glance at UN/CEFACT's Mandate, it reads like a mission statement for GNU/Linux. Words like "inclusive", "help", and "free" (as in trade) won't inspire confidence up in Redmond.

UN/CEFACT works on standards for business documents. There's something called EDI (Electronic Document Interchange) which has 2 major forks - in North America a group called DISA has an X-12 committee to create and maintain the standards. Everywhere else in the world uses EDIFACT standards, which are made and maintained by UN/CEFACT.

So when you go to Wal-Mart or JC Penney or even Dell and buy something, the whole business process behind that revolves around electronic documents. An electronic Purchase Order is created by Company X, which sends it to it's supplier, Company Y. Company Y acknowledges it and eventually sends back Ship Notification and an Invoice electronically. Saving both companies money.

ebXML was a proposed format to replace a lot of the old standards by using their own flavor of XML and their own comms stuff.

But let me ask you one question: why does the U.S. have much higher murder and aggravated assault offences than any other Western (ie North American, Western European) nation?

All I can offer is an opinion, based on being an American, and a former criminal defense investigator. First, the US is no longer the murder capital of the world. Our crime rates compared to the rest of the world are not as high as myth has it, but I can accept that it is higher than many.

The vast majority of crime in the US is non violent (simple theft or burglary). The majority of these crimes are "crimes of opportunity", ie: You see an unlocked car with a package in it, so you open the door and steal the package. There is more chances to steal here than in Somalia, for instance, but similiar to Western Europe, so that would explain higher theft in the Western world in general, but not compared to Europe.

Reporting of crime and prosecution is actually high here in the US compared to many places. In all places, some crime goes unreported, but I can see the US having at least a slightly lower unreported crime rate. This is conjecture, but its based on the fact that the higher the likelyhood that reporting a crime will get your stuff back, the more likely you are to report it. Crime here is highly reported and public record, by law. You can access most data on most crimes here by simply looking and asking at the Courthouse.

Culturally, there is a difference as well. Some of the most popular TV shows here in the US would be "America's Most Wanted" and "Cops", and historically, Adam 12, Dragnet, etc. In these shows, the cops get the bad guys, and I DO believe there is a certain amount of conditioning that if you report a crime, they will get them. This ties in with the above, since it would make you more likely to report a crime, even if minor (stolen lawn mower, for instance)

There are other cultural influences that are not necessarily positive, but here not the less. Many people simply want something for nothing, and the higher availability of "stuff" can lead to more crimes of opportunity. We DO take things much more for granted than many other countries. In America, the average person that qualifies as legally "poor" will have two TVs, VCR or DVD, Playstation, at least one car, phone services, air conditioning and heat, and 3 meals a day. Yes, there are some homeless people, most of which are self inflicted by drugs or alcohol. But American's EXPECT to have stuff, as if its a RIGHT. This does lead to lots of petty theft, and was much of what I dealt with as an investigator: poor people stealing from their neighbor.

This is sure to piss off a few readers, but before they reply, keep in mind that theft is least common where everyone is in the same economic class, ie: poor. You won't have as much theft (the most common crime there is) where everyone is in the same situation, having little. If you compare England and the US, for instance, you find that similar results in crime statistics for both, which have similar cultural systems, although quite different political systems.

In a nutshell, my opinion is it is mainly cultural due to wanting something for nothing by people who still have a decent amount to begin with, and the fact that we are a more violent culture in many other ways. And higher reporting of crime, also because of cultural influences. To paraphrase Jack Nicholson: "Only in America, if you suck a tit in a movie, its rated R, but if you shoot it off with a shotgun is rated PG". Our history started with a bloody revolution and we have always had a fairly high tolorance for it.

Found an interesting linkhere.

Well, this sounds amazing...

But have't this been around for ages. And that without webservices?

otherwise i do not understand why there would be a standard like this, for example look up INVOIC..

I strongly recommend that you investigate the UN Locode standard at www.unece.org/locode/.

This standard uses ISO standard two letter codes for countries and three letter codes for cities/provinces. Using these locodes can help remove some of the ambiguity of place abbreviations that you might make yourself. It also helps if you have to name systems deployed internationally because individuals usually aren't familiar with locations in too many countries.