Slashdot Mirror
The USPS-Selling Zip Codes or Public Information?
An Anonymous Coward asks: "What is the definition of public information? Would you think that the official names of cities and their Zip Codes would be public? In a way it is, because the USPS will allow you to do a lookup against their online database. The tricky part is trying to get the entire list, then the USPS wants you to pay. They could very easily provide the information in any database or comma delimited format on their website but they choose not to. Why? They are making a lot of money reselling this information to companies who repackage it and then sell it to the public. " Hmm...good point. But are zipcodes really public information?
As one coming from Europe, this country is strange: everyone is trying to make the most money out of anyone else: your neighbour, brother... makes no difference.
.sig send $2 at ...
How long it will take until the map will be something private?
I just saw a couple of weeks ago a big sign in the continuation of a big street saying that from that point on, the traffic is no longer public.
But looking up and down the street, I can not see any difference...
ZIP codes are not the property of USPS... It's just a mean to slice the country in easy pieces.
I don't own my house address... I just happen to use it. I can not sell it to you.
But I cannot stop thinking that one day some wise guy will buy from the government all the rights to the name of my street and I will have to pay him royalties for using it on my mails.
It's just crazy.
If you want to see my
Yeah I noticed this last time i was looking up my zip+4. The way I figure is, its okay to sell public information as long as you don't claim ownership and control of that information. Basically, you to have the privilge (along with everyone else) of selling that information.
If this is true, would it be possible for someone to buy the zip codes and then post them to a web site? Its public info right?
Famous Last Words:
What an interesting question! I am not a lawyer, but this seems like it might fall under the Freedom of Information act.
For a bit of background, I quote from one of the government's own web sites on the Act.The right of the public to obtain information held by the Federal Government is summarized in a report published by the U.S. House of Representatives, entitled "A Citizens Guide on Using the Freedom of Information Act and the Privacy Act of 1974 to Request Government Records" (H.Rpt. 102-146), as follows:
[ The emphasis is my own. ]Can't you get a basically free listing in the World Almanac? I mean, I guess it is not searchable, being on paper, but it is there, all you would need to do is either (1) get a lot of people to each copy a column into the comptuer and send it somewhere or (2) scan it in and use (very good probably to the point of non-existant) software to translate bitmap to text. I don't know what USPS sells it for, but it seems that it could be worth it to "open source" the data this way. (Oh and I understand that the World Almanac is not free, but the zip code part of it is like .5% of the total, so...)
Maybe the World Almanac is not complete? I dunno.
Hi,
The same quesiton could be asked for Canada. You can buy a book with the postal codes and type it in and it is legitimate. You can also pay for it of course (CanadaPost.ca - To order a Postal Code directory)
In the case of geographic data, I first turned to both mapblast and mapquest and after a few telephones, it turned out they would charge as much as 1$ per city for lattitude/longitude data.
Spent some more time on the phone and after 15 minutes, I got a government agency that would sell me the whole QC province information in any format I wished (access, DB, SQL dump, etc) for ~ 20$. How do you explain that?
Global greed warming.
--
Notepad specialist & FAT administrator, group training available Fabian Rodriguez
Notepad specialist & FAT administrator, group training available
Here in Japan, you can walk into virtually any post office in the country and pick up a book of zip codes for the entire country for a nominal fee. I believe they even supply them free to comapnies.
And believe me, since the switch to seven-figure zip codes a couple of years ago, they're pretty precise. My zip code covers an area of about one square kilometer.
"I have a good idea why it's hard to verify programs. They're usually wrong." --Manuel Blum, FOCS 94
one could argue (and i'm sure the USPS would!) that while the information itself is free, you are paying for their having "compiled" it for you, when you buy the whole lot.
well, that and they know a lot of businesses *need* that information, and as they have an effective monopoly on it, that they can get away with it...
to draw a parallel, when you pay your $29.95 for a linux distribution on cd, you're obviously not only paying for the cost of producing the package, but in addition the effort the company has put in to throw the whole lot together.
the implication of this actually endorses the USPS' actions - you can get the information free of charge as you need it (one would equate to downloading linux online... fine for one or two packages, inconvenient for a whole distro), but you pay for the convenience - and that's the key, here, of getting the whole lot done for you.
Fross
Makes me want to go back and re-read my Pynchon. We need some W.A.S.T.E. around here...
------
WWhhaatt ddooeess dduupplleexx mmeeaann??
This sig intentionally left justified.
You can find databases of City/State to ZIP databases easily. What's actually valuable are more detailed databases.
For those not in the US, our postal codes (called ZIP codes) are 5 digits long. Every city has at least one, and some have many many more. In the early 90's, the post office added 4 digits to it, to narrow down to at least the street level, making computer sorting possible.
For me to translate '60618' to being 'Chicago, IL' is something that's pretty easy. I believe that old BSD distro's even came with a text file with all the zip codes. To translate my address to '60618-1481' is much more difficult. Even being able to tell which chicago zipcode my address belongs in (60618 is one of many), requires a full address database.
It's not really plausable to put a database this size up on the net. Several companies also pay the USPS a licensing fee to sell the database. Many also do 'value-added' additions, such as time zones, and the such. The last time I checked, a compressed database for the entire US to give street level zip lookups was around 4 CD's worth. I don't believe the USPS can justify the bandwidth costs in letting people download it, especially when a database of this size has to be difficult to maintain. (It's somewhere around 40 million records)
This company sells a pretty comprehensive set of CD's. It's not too expensive considering what you get. Especially if you send large amounts of mail, being able to verify the address/zipcode before you pay the 33 cents is nice.
Basically, Downloading a database this size isn't plausable for them, so they pretty much have to sell it on physical media... Now, if their raw data (not data that OEM's have added) is copyrightable, who knows. Perhaps one person can buy the raw data and put it on their ftp server? Who knows.
I thought it was illegal for government agencies to apply for copyrights... or was it patents? (I know there's the loophole for patents that an outside company can apply for the patent, then transfer it to the government)
Kevin
After the whole 'net censorship debacle, it's nice to see that us down under in australia can still avoid some brainless decisions.
here AusPost publish every postcode in the back of the freely delivered White Pages phonebook, and you can still visit the austpost web site and download the entire list in CSV....
<? include ('signature.inc'); ?>
It's pretty obvious that the zip codes are public, since that's how the public sends mail to a particular place. If the zipcode were "private" it would be practically impossible to do business by mail. Or to use it for any other purpose for that matter.
There is a way to look up any Zip Code on line, you can do it at the USPS's Zip code lookups page
That said, the only people who have a use for a large database of zipcodes are mass marketers, and IMHO they OUGHT to pay for having it. I don't want it to be any easier than it needs to be for those morons to send me dead trees.
Zip codes are public information. As are street addresses, with the associated occupant name. However, the issue here is not of access to the information (the Freedom of Information Act guarrantees you can get it), but the ease with which you can get it.
The FOIA says nothing about the format, or relative accessibility of the information that you request. The government is not obligated to give it to you in the format or way you want it. They just have to give it to you. People who've done research into alot of old events can atest to this: rather than get a nicely indexed and annotated set of transcripts, they get a huge stack of unlabeled and unsorted documents. Digging through them is the effort.
Honestly, I don't have a problem with it this way. The government shouldn't be in the business of neatly packaging everything for anyone who asks. Deliberately hiding the truth is one thing, but they've got alot better things than being able to give any Tom, Dick, or Harry a complete, nicely pressed and indexed book of any random information they request.
That's the value-add that those companies selling the Zip-codes have. They get the info from the govn't (which might have done some pre-sorting it for their convenience, and rightly charges for it), and then package it up for you to use in a slick format. You can get the information from any Post Office you ask, but I'm sure it's not going to be in a nice electronic format. After all, you're getting it for free.
Honestly, people, we're getting really lazy these days.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
Fuck this shit. FREEdom of information.
http://sharedlib.org/zips.zip
Enjoy.
What this means is that for some things it costs money or at least more money for the government to get that information to you.
Think about it. Yes the information that identifies a position in the US via a ZIP code as public inbformation. You could very easily just get a collection of all of these and just publish them in an open source book or something.
What really takes it in the government's rear is trying to pay or distrubute everything to everyone cost effectively or conviently. Do they tend to want to favor more money to fund their activities? Yes. Will they prevent you from obtaining that information? No.
Their search interface probably gets more hits per day than you might realize. Since they can only afford so much to pay for maintaince and upgrading the server for content then they need a way to offset that cost so they have the entire thing to sell in a printed version.
For something similar take a look at http://thomas.loc.gov and look at the congressional reccord. This reccords every single thing that is done or said in the house and the sente for the day. Now you can get the entire thing off their web site for free but if you want something more convient you have to talk to the government printing office http://www.gpo.gov. Since everyone wants budget cuts and lower taxes this is what we get.
As for your concern about street names this is not likely. If you want to have someone use you address you can just sell your house. Just similarly how say 234.34.123.34 is an address to someplace on the internet and is owned by a computer as a physical address in a geographical locality the same can be said for a house address. If someone were to but names of things you would have Cleavlend in Minnesota or LA in New York State. This cannot happen.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
I believe you'll find that the licensing issue comes from the costs in distributing the data. The full database is fairly large large and there's apparently a bit of cleanup involved as well (Also IIRC, the data was developed for internal usage; as is often the case it needs a little packaging before being sent outside). If you look at the costs, it's around a $900 to get a copy on CD-ROM according to the price guide on page 113 of the USPS's product doc. I think once you factor in the production costs (which aren't amortized over a huge distribution base) this is probably not that unreasonable. Unless I'm mis-remembering, government agencies are allowed to charge fees to cover production costs on information, even if they're required to give it to you. Even though the USPS has a somewhat unusual position compared to more traditional government agencies, this probably still applies.
Honestly, I don't have a problem with it this way. The government shouldn't be in the business of neatly packaging everything for anyone who asks. Deliberately hiding the truth is one thing, but they've got alot better things than being able to give any Tom, Dick, or Harry a complete, nicely pressed and indexed book of any random information they request.
I disagree. The whole point of government is to serve the people. I think this is something that has been forgotten over the years and has almost become expected that politicians be self-serving while putting on a little song and dance for "the little people". This apathy allows things such as this to happen.
If I want every zip code in America in a nice neat little package on CD-ROM, should I have to pay for it? Yes, about the price of producing the CD. Why shouldn't I pay more? Because not only is this public information, but it's information that's freely available. If the information were public but held by a company, I would understand them wanting to turn a profit for their time and devolpment. The goverment I expect to do what I (not particuarly *ME* but the majority) to do because that is why they hold a public office.
P.S.
People are not lazy because they ask for free information to be released in a useable format, they're merely asking the government to do their job. What we tell them to.
--Aaron
"...we dont care about the economics; we just want to be able to hack great stuff."
For a while last year I was working on a massive demographic database for research purposes. At least, it was to be massive, eventually.
The core of the database was to be (is?) data from the 1990 US Census. There's a whole lot more than population counts in there, folks... The entire Census is distributed on around 60 CD-ROMs.
This information is "free," in the sense that you can find it at any official government document repository. You're "free" to lug in a wheelbarrow full of floppy disks, and copy the CD-ROMs onto them, one disk at a time. If you actually want your own copy on CDs, though, the price tag is well into the four figure range. (And let me tell you, getting a hold of the discs is only the beginning of the fun...)
I suspect that this, and the similar situation with ZIP codes, is just another example of the $17,000 toilet seat phenomenon. Presumably, $100 per CD-R is considered a reasonable "duplication fee" in the beaurau... buerau... (good god, I need to go to bed...) bureaucratic world.
MSK
...how hard it is to provide universal postal delivery.
First off, the US Postal Service delivers more mail than virtually ALL PRIVATE COMPANIES COMBINED. Last I looked, they were planning on moving somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 BILLION pieces of mail, packages, etc. for the 1999 Christmas Season (that's late Nov -> late Dec). UPS and FedEx might be lucky to do a half-billion each in the same time frame. Thier job is an order of magnitude more difficult than private industry.
Moving mail is an inordinately complex and complicated job. Express Delivery is actually MUCH EASIER than standard 1st-class mail. Granted, 3rd-class (bulk) and packaging (along with Priority and ExpressMail) are the same complexity as UPS and FedEx deal with, but there are several other things you forget:
The $0.33 for a stamp gets that piece of mail anywhere in the US. The great thing about universal postage is that you (the consumer) don't have to think about it; no matter where it goes, it's the same cost. I seriously doubt that a private company could manage to maintain this, with competetive forces. You'd end up with pricing structure like: $.10 for cross-town, $.15 for the next city, $.25 for the next state ( or was that $.15, since the next state is 10 miles away.. Whoops!). At the bare minimum, you'd end up with a regional cost structure - look at how UPS charges for where you send a package. And to put a more fine point on it, the USPS is cheaper than either FedEx or UPS at the same thing. Looked at book-rate shipping? Or how about comparing the cost of a overnight package?
Also, the USPS give UNIVERSAL SERVICE. Yeah, right, if you privatize things, you think anyone is going to get mail out in West Nowheresville? It's not "profitable". How many places do FedEx and UPS not deliver to that the USPS does?
Yes, perhaps the P.O. clerk isn't alot more skilled than a 7-eleven guy. But that doesn't have any affect on the reasoning behind the USPS. Some things are far better done by a government monopoly - mail service is a shining example of one. It's very efficient (for a large organization), cheap (no one in the world beats it for price/features), and dependable (UPS and FedEx lose stuff too, remember? And at not really any different frequency.).
Bottom line, the USPS works, works well, and works far better than some "privitized" system would.
-Erik
Think before you spew...
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
This is simply a case of an entity charging a service fee for packaging free data. HELLO this is what RedHat and all the other linux distros do. You want it on a CD? You (or somebody) pays (at the very least) shipping and handling (cover our costs) charges. In some cases you pay big bucks for value added services such as support. This is no different than what the post office is doing.
You want the entire list for free? Go to the post office and you may freely molest the paper zip code directory chained to the counter. You can even hand copy or photograph each page if you so desire. Its when you need the data in your hot little hands that money starts to be an issue. Sure the zip code information is politically free but what about the people who sit around all day assigning zones and keeping the central database updated? What about the people that typeset that enormous tome chained to the post office counter? That's going to cost you money! This is a no brainer. The post office is in the right!
Here's an idea: How about some nice resourceful individuals get off of their bitch-against-corporate-america asses and start an open information project like the one for road maps of the USA (I forget the name/address) and compile a list of zip codes and their associated information into a nice manageable database and give it out free?
~GoRK
By the way, folks, in an effort to reduce your tax bill (hah!) the US has spun the USPS off into a "public" company. That means that the USPS is expected to be run "for profit", even though congress ultimately controlls the USPS. (Think of the USPS as a corporation with our congresscritters on the board of directors.)
Amongst other things, that means the USPS is expected to charge for "free" information in order to cover the cost of duplication, packaging, and having a secretary drop it in the mail to you. And if they can figure out a way to make a profit, they will.
It's either that, or paying an extra penny or two in USPS subsidies.
Too late; been there, done that. In fact, the USPS has already been privatized--while they still answer to the US Congress under Title 39, they are ran "for profit" with it's own CEO and board of trustees.
G
Read more here at http://www.usps.gov/history/history/his3.htm#REOR
And that's why we pay $0.33 for a first-class mail stamp, boys and girls--because that's about what it costs on average to deliver that piece of mail to anywhere in the United States, including all those pesky little territories and to the US millitary men serving abroad. Last I checked, FedEx will also provide delivery of your letters--but for about one and a half orders of magnitude more.
I got it from here.
-A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I work at the USPS and with the SOME of the databases used to drive teh beast. I'm NOT going to log in and risk being harrassed. The database should be available but the real issues are more about the accuracy and embarrassment we would have should the information get out. Plus 4? HA! Doesn't even work from a centralized database. Most of them are 9998 which means 'Postmaster', i.e., "We don't know a real plus 4". Additionally the USPS isn't really centrally governed/managed. The country is divided up into 85 'Districts' which have their own head honchos. It's more like a Kingdom and Baronies than anything. The reason you get your mail is because the people are really GOOD at delivering it. If you addressed it to "Momma Dialy" in Pokemon, MN and just through it to the winds the human equivalent of DNS would get it there. Someone would send it to MN, they would route it to Pokemon, and more than likely someone would know just who the hell "Momma Dialy" is and get your mail there. Really. What DOES the zip do? Saves processing time and money. I've heard it only costs three cents to *process* a zip coded letter - but have no data on what the unzip coded one costs :(. I'd love to hook an open sourced program like GRASS up with USPS ZIPCODE data. 1. The commercial version USPS sells to vendors for sending JUNK(uh, we call it 'bulk') MAIL is wrong. They shouldn't be able to do it without my permission if they link it to my name. 2. If it was open sourced it would possibly be MORE ACCURATE!! What you really should be worrying about is this LARGEST CORPORATION trying to automate and eventually map your name to a specific address in the worlds largest advertising database. They are very proud of the fact that they have more face-to-face contact with the customer than anyone else, and have almost no clue as to privacy other than the mandates of congress (all personal data must be encrypted when sent over LAN/WAN lines) and are trying to be profitable and more corporate like. And we all know once a corporation has our data what they are going to do with it - whatever they damn well please. They wouldn't? You mean because they are regulated? Like the perhaps the DNS records are really regulated by the government and no corporation could stand against that right? Pah!
There ya go.
Besides, you US people shouldn't bitch about the Post Office for any reason: when was the last time they went on strike for weeks on end and nobody got any mail?
Exactly.
Unlike Canada, where I live, where the Post Office strikes every couple of years, the rates go up, and service gets worse. Oy.
I lived in the States for 7 years and was always amazed at the service, esp. SATURDAY delivery. Ah, I miss it. At least in my new neighbourhood I get the mail before 10:30 am.
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Actually, you are wrong, the USPS is only a quasi-governmental agency. Legally they are allowed and encouraged to make a profit. Its just that the profit goes to their 'owner', the for-loss US gov't.
I think the proof that ZIP codes are public is that they're created by a government agency. The government represents the people, and anything they do (with the exceptions of national secrets) are public information. ZIP codes are not national secrets, last time I checked at least. However, convincing the government to "repackage" the database in a downloadable format may be denied on the basis of how much it would cost them to do (millions of dollars of course ;-) and how much money they're making "for" the public (the government) by doing it this way. You people do of course realise that there isn't some dichotomy between the government and the public, right? You -own- the government by virtue of being a voter. Please, feel free to tell them how you feel, politely.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Thanks, Bruce. This is pretty damn amazing, especially posting it to /. - I figure that your ftp site is going to be SWAMPED for the next few days.
Folks, this is the real solution to the problem - instead of whining about somebody not having some piece of information availible, find a way to make it availible, then let everybody know where to get it.
InThane
However, I was quite amazed when some students on vacation wrote an e-mail address on a postcard and had it correctly delivered to our university department! This was around 1992, when "Internet" and "e-mail" weren't yet household words...
The whole point of government is to serve the people.
I agree inprinciple, but i disagree with your particular point. Government should serve "the people" (ie EVERYBODY - the whole group - not individuals) what they cannot provide for themselves (an army, the EPA, ambassadors, etc.) "The people" cannot generate a list of all zip codes, since only the Post Office has the information. It is reasonable to expect the government to provide us with a list of zip codes. On the other hand, given a list of zip codes, "the people" are quite capable of alphabetizing and sorting them on their own.
I would agree that if the government created a new computer system to maintain ZIP codes for governmental use, that system should either be a for the post office, then the information generated by the system should be available electronically. The marginal costs for doing this would be much lower than providing the same information on dead trees. The people who want to ftp it should get it for nearly nothing. the people who want the dead trees should pay for the printout.
I think the Government Printing Office should shrink, and some BIG ftp servers should take over some of its functions.
Actually, it's not quite the same as what Red Hat and other distros do. Rather, it might be what they *do* but differently funded.
Because it is an enforced monopoly, any work done by the USPS belongs to the taxpayers who funded it. True, it's not funded out of the general funds, but the end result for anyone who sends 1st class mail in the US is that you pay a tax because you're forced to subsidize the USPS' competition with FedEx, Avery, etc. In 1997 (according to a newspaper column I read, so the figure is somewhere between 'straight out of my butt' and 'the revealed knowlege of an omniscient God'), they cleared 50 million in profit on 1st class mail.
So I don't buy the argument that a subsidized government agency is *not* obligated to share the data it collects unless there is a good reason. So revealing *personal* information is not good, but geographic I think ought to be revealed unless there is compelling reason why not.
Otherwise, the USPS reveals its nature as (and as I think it really is!) a mercantilist rather than capitalist institution.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I worked for a digital mapping company. Our clients were primarily Utility companies. We used the USPS's CODE-1 software (which we had to purchase from them) in order to populate each address that fell under the utilities area with a correct Zip+4 value. The CODE-1 software/database contained the zip code and zip+4 of every home in the US. The company (which has projects in over 40 US states) used this databse for actual work.
The utility company (in this case a Natural Gas company) was then employing the program we built (a GIS system) to 1) give to their customer service reps for isolating and tracking problems and 2) to the field repair and install teams for accurate pipe placement and tracking.
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
Well, ought not the government and quasi-government bodies you subsidize have their information in "nice electronic form," so we don't have to subsidize them more than we already do? (That is, by saving the work of mangling messy, difficult-to-understand data as collected into forms easily used by the folks at the Post Office
And laziness is an important human virtue -- at least if it is phrased as "the urge to avoid unnecessary work" rather than as "laziness."
It seems like the avoid-unnecessary-toil part of "laziness" ought to be integrated into the system, rather than only being the *delay* form of laziness. The people who would like to be able to read public information electronically / easily to me seem like the ones more in the right than the post office refusing to make their processes straightforwardly understandable.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Well, ought not the government and quasi-government bodies you subsidize have their information in "nice electronic form," so we don't have to subsidize them more than we already do?
One way or another, someone is going to pay for it.
If you have to pay a fee to get it in a convenient format, it is pretty obvious how you pay for it. If you get it in that convenient format for "free", your taxes will pay for it.
The difference is that in the latter, my taxes are also paying for it, and I might not be interested in subsidizing your use of the database.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I'd have to say that in Either case, this is wrong.
Let's look at both cases.
1) Zip codes & associated cities/neighborhoods ARE public information.
- This information should be freely available to the public, not sold at high price to others to sell commercially. Citizens should demand this.
2) They are *NOT* public information, but internal to the post office.
- Well, it could be argued that the ZIP code is only the post office's way of internally routing packages, so it's really up to them what they do with it. If this is the case, they are free to sell it as they wish.
- If you view the USPS as part of a 'public trust', and that this information is private and for internal use only, it should not be sold OR given out.
No, I am not kidding. I find that UPS frequently is cheaper than USPS for packages. I don't see why they couldn't be able to do the same for first class mail as well.
USPS is not losing money. They may not be making much either, but take away the bureaucratic layer and they could be quite lucrative as a company. Hell, keep them on as a government agency, just don't deny other companies from entering the mail business. It is utter hypocrisy for the US government to bring Microsoft to court on monopoly charges only to turn around and forbid UPS and FedEx to compete against it's own ventures.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
It's true that for any given chunk of work, someone is going to pay for it.
However, given that the post office spends / will spend a bunch of time and money gathering information on our/your tab, is it fair that you're not allowed to see the fruit?
Sort of like if town funds were used to purchase and house some fine outdoor sculpture inside an old Quonset hut that belonged to a minicipality whose taxes were used to fund the purchase. For sensible completion of transaction those tax dollars were already used to begin, the town should open up the quonset hut so that the people who paid for it can benefit from the use of their money.
It wouldn't make sense for a town to build *most* of a bridge, would it?
And as far as TANSTAAFL, well, I'm all for the Post Office drying up and blowing away, or at least being opened to full and fair competition, but the government seems to enjoy maintaining a monopoly on first-class mail just fine, thanks very much. We could buy an awful lot of Bistro Meals by eliminating the coercive USPS altogether. The Constitution only says that the Feds are to *establish* post offices, right?
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I used to live on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation in South Dakota.
Back there, there are only PO Boxes. Try to order any thing UPS or FedEx with a PO Box Number. They won't do it. It's gotten even worse in the last 15 years since things went computerized at catalog retailers. Now the UPS man has to drive in from Mobridge SD...90 miles away and he knows how to get to my house.
So you have to give the people on the phone directions to your house, and even this takes some doing, because they will only deliver to street addresses.
Of course once it makes it to UPS in Mobridge, the UPs dude knows exactly where to take it.
Now the USPS...you never have a problem with them.
Here is how they describe the information:
As part of the Tiger Mapping Service, we provide a 1990 Census gazetteer of counties, places and zipcodes in the United States, so you can find a place by name without having to know the LAT/LON coordinates. This is done using a simple text database condensed from Census data files. We are making this file available to the public. Note: The vintage of the geography in these files (Places, MCDs etc.) is 1990 to match the 1990 Census data available from the Census Bureau.
Some thing else that is interesting is a perl script that calculates the distance between two locations given the long/lat in the form of the previous db's with a relatively low margin of error, on the order of a couple tenth's of a percent. For more information, the website can be reached here.
This stuff is pretty interesting and I think I might even have a use for it. Please post any more insights.
IIRC, nothing has passed yet.
Back at the end of July, RMS wrote up some details about the pending legislation (a good read on the matter).
If I'm wrong, then something on this page at eff.org will probably make it plain.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes