I'd doubt limiting land space would be very helpful -- given that the each character encodes 33 possibilities (alphabet + digits, without O, I, or L for clarity

I'd doubt limiting land space would be very helpful -- given that the each character encodes 33 possibilities (alphabet + digits, without O, I, or L for clarity), you'd need to reduce the space by a factor of 33 (~97%) to remove a single character. Huffman coding would be interesting, but the tradeoff would be that since locations are no longer standardized to 10 characters, you'd lose the validation aspect of it (not to mention you'd have to change the name =). Edit: Apparently S and Z are also missing, so 31 possibilities.