"Recliner" wrote in news:CP6dnR-
:

I'm still forced to use Middlesex as part of my address by Web forms
that have a mandatory 'County' field.

I use Middlesex rather than London.

Mind you, every time I get a 65 home from Kingston, Surrey I pass a sign
that says "County of Middlesex".

On Sun, 19 Jul 2009 01:14:19 -0700 (PDT), MIG
wrote:

On 19 July, 04:57, Charles Ellson wrote:
On Sat, 18 Jul 2009 11:15:31 -0700 (PDT), MIG

wrote:
On 18 July, 18:55, David Hansen
wrote:
On Sat, 18 Jul 2009 15:05:11 +0100 someone who may be "Basil Jet"
wrote this:-

Middlesex exists, it just isn't recognised by the national government.

There is still a cricket club with that name, a university and the
post office know where it is.

This where someone usually pops up saying that the current boundaries
are just "administrative boundaries", implying that past
administrative boundaries somehow delimit real places in a different
way.

They are all administrative boundaries. *I tend to think that current
boundaries and authorities are the only ones worth worrying about,
because they are current.

Don't get a job dealing with land or associated legal documentation
where many of the related entities have not been "current" for many
years.-

Any relevant powers will have been delegated elsewhere though, surely.

No, the relevant "powers" are those of ownership of land. The land is
defined in the terms current at the time of registration so someone
still has to worry about the information.

Many legal documents will have been signed by people who are dead, but
it's no good asking dead people for authority to do anything.

The authority lives on.

As for place names, down my way a lot of stuff is named after St
John. Does this prove that he still exists?

philosophy mode on
Can you prove he does not ?
philosophy mode off

Martin Edwards wrote in news:kgz8m.17902$m%4.11960
@newsfe25.ams2:

Right. Yet people still give it as a postal address, even though you
are not supposed to give either district or county. Another favourite
is Kingston, Surrey. Oh no it isn't.

You seem to be under the misapprehension that a place can be located in
only one county.

On Sun, 19 Jul 2009 03:01:54 -0700 (PDT), Mizter T
wrote:


On Jul 19, 7:52*am, Martin Edwards wrote:

David Hansen wrote:
On Sat, 18 Jul 2009 15:05:11 +0100 someone who may be "Basil Jet"
wrote this:-

Middlesex exists, it just isn't recognised by the national government.

There is still a cricket club with that name, a university and the
post office know where it is.

The post office know where it is because they have to. *You are not
supposed to put /any/ counties, never mind defunct ones, but people
simply do not pay attention.

*Total nonsense* - postal counties are not required any more, but
nowhere do the Royal Mail state that they should not appear as part of
an address. The Royal Mail is happy for information that is "postally
not required" (their phrase) to appear in an address, just so long as
the required information is given clearly - that is house number or
name and street, and also post town and postcode. (Of course even if
one omits the post town then it'll get through, especially if one is
posting from within that post town - e.g. London.)

Not prohibiting certain information tends to allow an element of
redundancy which is of no help to most mail handling but a great help
in a small number of cases. Reducing redundancy to zero would leave
most addresses devoid of a street name but that would greatly increase
the amount of time dealing with the proportion of mail which is
misaddressed.
Distinct from the use of "obsolete" address information, the real
pests are businesses which make up imaginary postal districts (e.g.
"Royal Deesside") which can hinder the proper (human or machine)
interpretation of an address.

"Tim Roll-Pickering" wrote in
:

James Farrar wrote:

There is a huge variation around the country in the local authorities'
requirements for minicabs. I have a friend who use to run a minicab
business in Aylesbury, but now runs a similar business in Middlesex.

Time traveller, is he?

(for m.t.u-t'ers, Middlesex hasn't existed for 44 years)

It exists. The Local Government Act abolished only its council.

So where is the Lord Lieutenant of Middlesex?

What's a Lord Lieutenant?

On Sun, 19 Jul 2009, Recliner wrote:

"Mizter T" wrote in message


To an extent, Middlesex exists as a place in the sense that people
think it exists - in that sense it's much like any other place name.
There's all those many things named after Middlesex of course - there's
Middlesex County Cricket Club for example, and there's also North
Middlesex and West Middlesex hospitals (and there was (Central)
Middlesex Hospital, now merged with UCH). Middlesex also continued to
exist as a postal county up until the Royal Mail abandoned the notion
of postal counties, so properly addressed letters included Middlesex on
the last line (this issue is somewhat complicated as a good chunk of
metropolitan Middlesex was already in the London postal district).

I'm still forced to use Middlesex as part of my address by Web forms
that have a mandatory 'County' field.

I usually put 'Londonshire'. Stands to reason.

tom

--
Next issue - Nigel and the slavegirls ... or, why capitalism can never
work!

On Sun, 19 Jul 2009, Recliner wrote:

"John B" wrote in message

On Jul 19, 10:54 am, "Recliner" wrote:
I'm still forced to use Middlesex as part of my address by Web forms
that have a mandatory 'County' field.

As in, they give you a drop-box that contains 'Middlesex' but not
'Greater London'? That's pretty ****poor of them, if so.

But nevertheless very common.

I have never seen such a thing in all my born days, and i buy things
online on average once every 6.2 minutes. Could you direct me to some
examples of such forms?

tom

--
Next issue - Nigel and the slavegirls ... or, why capitalism can never
work!

On Sun, 19 Jul 2009, Roland Perry wrote:

In message
, at
04:00:47 on Sun, 19 Jul 2009, John B remarked:
Are BT phone numbers even still /supposed/ to be geographical?

If they are traditional landlines, then each exchange has a specific
area it covers. But it's been possible for a generation to get "out of
area" numbers if you paid enough.

Haha, so there's no technical reason for having area codes any more,

There *is* an underlying technical issue, in that out-of-area codes don't
scale, because they involve running wires from one exchange to the other.

My understanding is that there are already wires running from one exchange
to the other. That's how the phone calls get around, d'you see.

Out-of-area numbers don't involve special wires. It's done with software,
in the routing layer. But it's not done terribly well, so there is still a
cost - cheaper than special wires, but more than zero.

Clive Feather gave a good explanation of this some time ago on this group.
From what i remember, everyone agrees that there's a sensible way to do
number porting that wouldn't require exchange Q to be involved in a call
from A to B just because B's number was once at Q, but that's not how
things work at the moment, and getting it changed is going to be a painful
process.

tom

--
Next issue - Nigel and the slavegirls ... or, why capitalism can never
work!

In article
,
(Mizter T) wrote:

As I said, I do write and speak the codes properly myself, which can
throw people somewhat. But I also use 8-digit numbers from my
landline, so it all makes sense to me! (Less so I suppose to those who
only use mobiles.)

It would be instructive to know what proportion of within-London calls are
dialled from London landlines as 11 digits. Rather a lot, I fear.

--
Colin Rosenstiel

On Sun, 19 Jul 2009, Roland Perry wrote:

In message , at 19:10:15 on
Sun, 19 Jul 2009, DW downunder remarked:
I utterly hate American-designed websites which
insist on you putting a county in the address field...

The one I encountered this morning is very likely to be UK-designed
website. We have ignorant developers here too

I've never enountered a US site demanding "County". City, State (from
drop-down list) and ZIP is the usual form.

Some US sites have been internationalised, and make an attempt at
collecting addresses in other formats when you tell it what country you
are from.

I did that once - when you pick a country from a drop-down list, it
reloads the page in a version with the right address form for your country
(i think we put the country-specific form in an internal frame, and just
reloaded that, rather than the whole page). It was a bit of a demo, so we
only covered the UK, US, France and Japan. It wasn't that hard in the end,
but we spent half a day reading up on Japanese address formats and
becoming increasingly mindboggled.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_addressing_system

The Universal Postal Union has a standard called S42 which is a gigantic
compendium of address formats for all countries, including which bits are
okay to leave out etc, and which goes into mind-numbing detail. Someone
should really sit down with it and produce some sort of open source
address format library, which web developers (or ideally, web development
framework vendors like Microsoft, Sun, the PHP Group, etc) could plug into
their sites to get properly-done internationalised address formats right
away.

tom

--
Next issue - Nigel and the slavegirls ... or, why capitalism can never
work!