At 5:25 PM EST on March 12 Knute sent off: > On Tue, 12 Mar 2002, Rob Reid wrote: > > Anyway, if I didn't know that today is March 12, 2002, I'd be tempted to > > read 020312 as an American zip code, > > American zip codes are either 5 or 9 digits, not 6! :)
Oh? 90210...yep. Anyway, as a nonamerican I'm allowed to get confused, especially since Canadian postal codes do have 6 characters. Just to bring this somewhat away from snail mail and closer to email, my point is that as much as I support Sven's various public education campaigns*, I'm against 6 digit dates as a communication standard because they're easy to misinterpret. Modified Julian Dates are completely numeric and therefore suitable for all Earthlings (not just astronomers) but unfortunately my /bin/date, from Red Hat's sh-utils-2.0-11 RPM, doesn't support them. It really should. As far as including email addresses in the attribution, not everyone wants their address (re)posted, because of spammers. (I suspect Sven is against being scared of spammers.) Conceivably a mailing list could strip the original sender's address anyway. * Although I prefer to lobby all MTA distributors to enable CORRECT_DAVIDS_QUOTING by default since there're fewer of them than Netscape/LookOut users, and David himself seems to enjoy the attention. If his PGP sig gets broken, fine. -- "Let's just sit here a moment and savor the impending terror." - Calvin Robert I. Reid <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://astro.utoronto.ca/~reid/ PGP Key: http://astro.utoronto.ca/~reid/pgp.html
