Slashdot Mirror
UK Issues High-tech Stamps
bgood writes: "According to this story on Excite@Home, the UK's Royal Mail has released a series of "interactive" stamps. Included in the series: A scratch-and-sniff stamp, a stamp with a hologram, and another that shows an electrically-charged particle when warmed by finger heat. The stamps commemorate 100 years of the Nobel Prize and Britain's achievements. The Royal Mail describes the stamps here."
Theres been a bit of a hoo-ha about the fact that the accompanying booklet has stuff about telepathy in it.
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http://www.observer.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,
I can guarantee that among the stamps for british achievements, there will not be one for Orthodontics. :)
Mike
Of course, theres no better way to honor 100 years of the Nobel prize and all that genius scientific research then with a scratch and sniff stamp. What's next, fruit scented markers commemorating Picasso?
daed si luap
woof.
Hey - don't forget you get to lick it too.
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
<rant>That's Queen Elizabeth the First of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, aka Queen Elizabeth the Second of England and Wales. If you're going to crown James VI of Scotland as James I of the United Kingdom of England, Wales and Scotland, we'll damn well apply that to her Royal Highnessnessess as well.</rant>
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Don't lick the Turing stamp, it has a strange apple/Cyanide flavour to it.
No, it's not a waste of money, just like having nice colourful Christmas stamps is not a waste of money, and paying good contemporary artists to design new stamps is not a waste of money. It's something that makes the world nicer and more interesting. I don't want all my stamps to be identical monochrome squares.
Now, what IS is a massive waste of money is rebranding the post office's holding company as 'Consignia' instead of 'post office counters ltd'. That was fucking stupid.
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From my limited knowledge of Royal Mail, these stamps, while valid for postage, wont be widely distributed.
Most people buy their stamps here in little books of between 4 and 10 stamps - these are almost always your standard orange/blue first/second class stamps.
I'll pop 'round to my local Post Office in a few minutes and specifically request some of these special issue stamps, and, with a fair degree of luck, they may have some in stock.
All countries produce special stamps that primarily intended for collection. Indeed, I believe some small pacific island states use stamps as a major source of revenue.
More interesting than Royal Mail producing some funky stamps is the claims that they're about to lay off up to 15,000 workers.
...j
My coworker has a framed wallmount of very expensive and specialized stamps commemorating NASA - some are round, some have holograms, embedded photographs, etc. Some of them are over $30 dollars. This a big money maker for the USPS because those are stamps that no one will ever use.