[somewhat OT] simple machine forums software update

[Oleg Goldshmidt]

"Nadav Har'El" <nyh at math.technion.ac.il> writes:

> Definitely not. They probably just took a country list that someone else
> compiled. E.g., perhaps they took a list from the United Nations:
>
> 	http://unstats.un.org/unsd/methods/m49/m49alpha.htm
>
> Or perhaps they took the official list of "country names" from ISO, the
> International Organization for Standardization?
>
> 	http://www.iso.org/iso/english_country_names_and_code_elements
>
> As you can see, both lists officially list the "Occupied Palestenian
> Territory".

To this I'd add that technically such lists always refer to
"countries, dependencies, and territories" or some such. So inclusion
of the Palestinian Territories does not mean that someone allocated a
status of a country to them. I would not expect pedantic legalese to
be used in all cases by FOSS developers or community sites, and a
"Country" header does not sound unreasonable.

If you look at the lists (another relevant list is that of "country
code TLDs" that is quite similar to the ISO list) you will see that
there are weirder cases than PS.

-- 
Oleg Goldshmidt | pub at goldshmidt.org