1) Every place is in a country.
2) The precise location of country borders is globally agreed and does not vary from country to country.
2) The list of countries is globally agreed and does not vary from country to country.
4) Every nation has some defined set of borders. (The Yemen-Saudi Arabia border was only recently agreed, and was previously left deliberately ambiguous.)
5) Countries do not overlap. (Counterexample: France and Spain agree they both own Pheasant Island in the Pyrenees. The administration cycles every six months.)
6) Borders are at fixed coordinates. (Except for some borders defined by a river, which change when the river shifts its course. Some subnational borders are certainly like this.)
7) A nation's borders can be drawn with a single stroke of the pen. (Counterexample: South Africa takes two, one for the outside and one for its enclave Lesotho.)
Postal addresses correspond to political boundaries.
(Postal addresses are closer to delivery routes; a ZIP code can cover multiple, distinct, non-adjoining towns in a non-compact area; the 'town' in the postal address can be different from the town in which the address is located; ZIP codes can change if the delivery routes are changed.)
- when countries appear or disappear there's some sort of logical predecessor/successor country
- internet address suffixes correspond to a single country
- a country has only one internet address suffix
- you can tell what country someone is in by their IP address
- people don't move from one country to another
- well, at least companies don't move from one country to another
- a country has a single language
- a country has a single currency
- a currency is used in a single country
- the currency used in a country doesn't change over time
- a country has a single legal system
- a country has a single tax system
...
The UK doesn't.
Really? Do people actually believe this?
Some "common" counties off the top of my head:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Switzerland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Belgium http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Canada
Let me also add: the only languages spoken in a country are the official languages of that country
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continent#Separation_of_contine...
Are you sure you're not mixing them up? I'm asking because I've seen people mix them up so frequently, in some cases you can even find notices in geoography books making this clear.
There's another one, too, over which I've had internet arguments before. In that one, the USA and Canada are "America", while the rest of the continent is "South America".
The given reason was: it is not called "United States of North America", it's just "America". The rest of the countries are south from there, so all that region is "South America". I don't know how extended this vision is, though (nor I know where it fits Mexico).
Apologies for bringing in hotly disputed territories of the world, but that's basically what this thread is about. I'm not making a political argument for or against any of those places, just saying that there is disagreement.
That said, I would (and do) use ISO two letter codes to identify territories in my code.
I also recall receiving a sad email from my colleges in Yugoslavia describing how the country was splitting up and how we where to adjust our routing tables.