AO, I don't think that follows from your analogy. Let me restate the true logical extension of your argument: "If you have a problem with people saying that they are sleep, then you should also have a problem with people saying that they are fish or hunt." Well, AO, I would think that most people WOULD have a problem with saying "they are fish or hunt". On trhe other hand, people would not have a problem with "they are fishing...", but that's analogous to people saying "they are sleeping", also OK by all, not "they are sleep".

Oh, and, yes, some sources say that acronyms are pronounced as one word, not a string of letters, but many sources and dictionaries do not have this restriction.

dt, If you want to get technical, initialism is a subset of acronym, i.e., all initialisms are acronyms, but not all acronyms are initialisms. Also, There is some controversy about the exact definition of initialism. Initialisms include only the first letter of each word. Some sources say pronunciation is irrelevant. BBC is an initialism. Some sources say NASA and laser are initialisms, others don't. Radar is not an initialism (RA = RAdar, one word). ALL of them are acronyms.

Carol, I'm not sure I can do this without actually being heard aurally, but I'll try. Does this allow it to make sense?

"It remains true for all that, that THAT "that", that that "that" refers to is not the same "that", that THAT "that" refers to."

Or, in a little more detail:

"It remains true for all that [idiom], that THAT [particular] "that" [noun], that that "that" refers to is not the same "that" that THAT "that" refers to."

Also, if drum tracks is always plural, i.e., you always record two or more, that doesn't matter. It still is singular. Someone who rotates your tires is a tire rotator. The act is tire rotation, not tires rotation. It's impossible to rotate just one tire, but still it's singular. Of course, I'm referring to the act of switching the locations of the tires on your car, not just spinning them around in place.

In Drum Track Recording Service, "drum track" is an adjectival phrase. When nouns are used as adjectives, alone or in a phrase, it is normal for them to be singular, not plural. A doctor for horses is a horse doctor, not a horses doctor. You trim your hedges with a hedge trimmer, not a hedges trimmer. A service that assembles printed circuit boards is a printed circuit board assembly service, not a printed circuit boards assembly service. It doesn't matter how many horses, hedges, or ciruit boards are in question.

Jan, re: S Lanka, I am merely conjecturing as to a possible explanation, not a justification. That being said, is such usage really so objectionable? Let's pretend there's an island in the South Pacific called "Mister Paradise". If a headline referred to it as "Mr. Paradise" would you really think that was inappropriate because it's an island, not a person? Really? OK, maybe that's a bad example since "Mister" is less ambiguous. Let's say a town full of punsters named their town "Honorable Mention". If a newspaper article called it "Hon. Mention", would you really think the author, perhaps just as much a punster, didn't realize that it was a town, not a judge? Would such an act be so thoroughly indefensible?

Yes, if you look at it, the base of the r is the same distance from the period as the I is. If I had used a letter wider than l, my point would have been even more obvious.

Has anyone noticed that on this very website, the absence of doublespacing is occasionally quite jarring? Depending on the exact combination of letters, it sometimes appears as if there's no space at all after the period, especially with tall and straight, or bottom-heavy letters. For example, Y's and T's look ok, but S's, I's, or H's almost seem like they're as close the the letter preceding the period as they are to the 2nd following letter, as if there's no space at all after the period. I don't know if this will work, but look at, say, ...car. Illogic... It almost seems like the I is the same distance from the r as it is from the second l, as if it's all one word separated by a period.

The defining difference is that a committee is part of a larger organization. A commission is an independent group. E.g., The U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation was formed by the Senate as a sub-group of the Senate. By comparison, the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) is an independent agency of the government.