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How The Postman Almost Owned E-Mail
Thrawn writes "'Imagine that the U.S. Postal Service was in charge of e-mail. Sound absurd? It does to most people until they realize that it almost happened.' " I think the chance of it actually happening are massively overstated in this article, but it's still an interesting "What If". But about as likely, as say, The Confederacy ? winning the US Civil War ? .
Great, just what I wanted, a disgrunteled postal worker handling all my E-Mail
Too many zeros, not enough ones
I'd get printouts in my mail slot, and pay $.35 for them. Groovy.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
I've seen this already, and personally, I think it's a lot of crap. What is he suggesting? That any other systems of E-mail aside from ones controlled by the USPS would be *illegal*? Frankly, I think if the USPS had their own E-mail service, things wouldn't be so different, because there's no way any court would ever hold up an order to prevent other people from running other E-mail services. Sensationalism sucks.
would keep my inbox spam free if they charged 37 cents per email
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
Oh you think you're baddass, but the south shall rise again!!!!
(what is the point of karma if it's "good" "excellent" whatever. I'm a computer guy, I want numbers. What's the url to that ass-wide-open guy?)
So does this mean we wouldn't get e-mail if it snowed?
Doh.
From this information, the post office never even came close to "owning" email. They considered offering it as a service.
A much better analogy is:
"What if the Postman owned the first hotmail"
Tons of variations which are closer to reality exist, but hotmail sums it all up in a sentence everyone would understand.
The word "owned" is very misleading, and not supported in the article. They almost owned email as much as they own package delivery today. (Think UPS and FedEx)
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
I agree that the Post Office has no buisness becoming involved in "Terminal to Terminal" communication.
However, it does raise an interesting point. How soon until the goverment deems various telecomunication services "essential" and assumes control of those services?
As below, so above and beyond, I imagine drawn beyond the lines of reason. Push the envelope. Watch it bend.
government somehow implements the $.05/email they have been trying to pass for years.
very little spam: cost = $.50 a day
if the service could guarantee it, it might be worth it.
obviously this would be an AOL type deal where everyone has to use the goverments mail servers, and nothing would be stopping anyone else from setting up their own mail servers... but it is a pretty good 'what if' in that sense
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
It also seems that the USPS wasn't trying to control eMail, but add a service to their physical handling of mail to speed up delivery.
Slighty offtopic I know, but just imagine if BT owned HyperLinks? Even scarier I think... especially considering their love of technology (esp. DSL lines).
Just my $0.02 (or £, but to get the sterling sign means going into character map... boy do I love US keyboards ;-) )
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
...we call it the "War of Northern Aggression."
Sorry, I find it highly unlikely that Costner could have "owned" anything
as say, The Confederacy winning the US Civil War.
Yeah, that would have been awful. If it'd happened, slavery and racism would have continued to exist until well into the 1900s, and even now, blacks would suffer bad treatment at the hands of whites.
Thank God they lost and that all blacks were equal to whites in every way from 1870 onwards. Oh, hang on...
mogorific carpentry experiments
...that in many other countries outside of the US, the government postal services do indeed, if only indirectly, run the email systems. In many countries, the phone system is run by the postal service.
So the idea isn't really all that far-fetched. I would consider it a narrow miss. Things could have be even worse than they are now.
Concealed Handgun License Courses in Plano, Texas
... kept our Smith Coronas and waited for our friendly postal carrier to knock on the door and announce, "You've got mail.".
I dont know why exactly, but if Mr or Misses postperson came up to me and said that, I would want to shoot them.
The article talks about an electronic service where you could transmit electronic messages between roughly 25 post offices. The messages would be printed out and then hand delivered like normal mail.
Honestly I don't see how this is anything like email, which is 100% electronic.
- Why I like email? Because there's no mail man for my dog to bite.
Hello Jerry. Hello Newman..
"I always get the feeling that when lesbians are looking at me they're thinking 'That's why I'm not a heterosexual'." - George Costanza
I'm not sure if the USPS does anything like this, but Canada Post runs epost.ca, which is like their version of Hotmail. It's free, and the upshot is that you can configure your account so that the various companies that you interact with, such as the phone company, the cable company, your bank, etc, send emails via epost.ca rather than printed bills or notices.
I guess it works because in some sense email from epost.ca is "official", since it's run by the Post Office. Sort of a neat concept, I guess.
Speaking of alternate history and the confederacy, anyone interested in such things should check out Harry Turtledove's excellent alternate history series.
And since I can anticipate the off-topic discussion, as an educated southerner, I feel I should say that, yes while the South was fighting to preserve slavery, (it was, after all, the basis of their economy) the North was *not* fighting to abolish it(*). And if you read the constitution literally, the south had the right to secession. Having said that, it would have really sucked if the nation had been split in two, and I'm certainly glad President Lincoln was able to later use the war as an excuse to abolish slavery.
(*) in fact, two full regiments of union soldiers disbanded in protest after the emancipation proclimation, refusing to fight a war for slaves.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
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There's no way anyone could control email now adays. Some company could easily setup a server on the internet that allowed email. They would probably call it something else like the Virtual Note Sending System, something that didn't sound like "mail". People would send messages through it just like email now. What could the post office do about it? If you can getting putting swings past the government patent office, you can bs a business like this past the government postal service.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
is The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon.
We Await Silent Tristero's Empire
He may not own e-mail...
...but 1 0wn j00! Mwahahahahahahahaha!
maybe they would have done a better job than worldcomm
First, more or less on-topic, and to clear up a common misconception: yes, the USPS has a monopoly on first-class mail. No, we shouldn't consider allowing competition. What most people don't know is that the USPS is mandated (by the same government that gave it the monopoly in the first place) to pick and and deliver at every address in the country every day. Think of the mind-boggling logistics behind that statement. Then realize that FedEx and UPS sometimes give their own deliveries to the USPS because they can't be bothered to go Smallville.
Second, on the Civil War remark, check out Harry Turtledove's The Guns of the South , which is based on just that premise: how could the South win the Civil War, and what would happen afterwords? Very nicely done.
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
Process..
Email addresses are in the form
Name@Address@Town@State@Country
Printers are "conveniently located" throughout the country. Postal service works include email delivery as part of their standard round.
Could be worse though, they could have had accountants run it. Then we'd all be told how the value of the network was huge as millions of dollars of Nigerian money was being offered on a daily basis.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
"She typed upon it....
Return to sender, domain unknown
No such IP number, No such Demiliterized zone"
=o)
It would be rather plausible, if some friendly white supremacists used their time machine to give the post office ak-47s when the union only had black powder rifles.
I think a better title would've been How I and my Smith Corona Saved The World From USPS.mail.
Trust me. This is an inactive account. Regardless of what the
Naturally, free and independent email services would operate alongside it, but imagine if, for a reasonable fee, you could have a postal service mail account in which all e-mails it sends or recieves have all the same protections and legal bearing of snail mail. I think this service would be invaluable for businesses or independent professionals. Many things can not be done over e-mail because the messages do not bear the same legal weight as snail mail. Consider how many times the postal service's datestamp has been used as evidence in court.
This tells how the postman almost offered a service that had similarities with modern day e-mail.
"The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
Given the volatility of the ISP market, a national email infrastructure would have been a wonderful thing. You could maintain a permanent email with the US Post Office and not have to worry about what might happen to your address if your service provider should change.
Imagine not having to worry about @mediaone.com suddenly not working for you. Just about every major provider has undergone a substantial shift in how they process emails, resulting in everything from new domain names to new mail accounts. I can't tell you how many people I can no longer find @compuserve.com.
Eric Sarjeant
eric[@]sarjeant.com
It does to most people until they realize that it almost happened.
:)
Almost First Post
The USPS delivers junk mail to my house every day because corporations pay the USPS to deliver it. My mail carrier hides my real mail in the newspaper-like junk mail so I have to flip through it to avoid throwing out real mail. He does this because the postal service makes a large chunk of its revenue this way, yet it still loses money regularly.
Spam would be easier to filter out
The fact that it would no longer be free would cut down on the volume of spam and the variation, making it much easier to detect and filter out.
Email would be more closely monitored
for subversive/threatening content, copyrighted content, etc. And unlike traditional mail, anonymity would be impossible because the mail would be sent from an account connected directly to your name, home address and social security number.
It would cost us money per email
Right now we can send all the emails we want (more or less) without fear of a huge bill. But if the USPS controlled email, you'd probably have the option of buying "stamps" on a per-email basis or having your account billed monthly. You would pay perhaps 3 cents for up to 100k, 5 cents for 200k and so on.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
1) Large behemouth companies controlling the MTAs,
restricting home users from running their own.
2) Large companies pushing proprietary protocols for
communications, and pushing these protocols into
e-mail messages, and suing anyone who attempts to
reverse engineer them.
3) Large companies adding macro execution code to
e-mail readers, so that a virus suddenly becomes
world-wide in a matter of an hour.
I say, let the government have e-mail service. Let
them compete with companies. I'd like to see a
U.S. Postal add claiming "Virus Free Plain Text
Messaging from the USPS. $5.00/month, 25MB accounts.
Log on today."
Further, I'd like US Postal inspectors to have some
authority over scams and unsolicited e-mails. It's
gotten so that 30% of my monthy bill (judged by
bandwith usage on the backbones, roughly) goes to fund
the 300 or so companies that run mass e-mail
advertising. I'd LOVE for the USPS to have regulatory
authority over commercial unsolicited advts, just like
they have over printed materials.
Who is it at Technology Review that keeps churning out these historically-illiterate might-have-been stories? Last time it was somebody arguing that we could have had cell phones in the 1930s if it hadn't been for the KGB, or something equally absurd.
Guns of the South, is a pure fiction novel. Neo-racists use a time machine to supply the Confederates with AK-47's. Not a very reasonable premise of how they could have won.
A MUCH more realistic portrayal of how the Confederacy could have won the war, is in the pre-history to his book How Few Remain, which is a novel of the Second War Between the States, set approximately 20 years after Lincoln was forced to sign a peace treaty with the Confederacy.
The basic premise, is that early on, the South was spanking the North pretty badly. This was prior to the Emancipation Proclamation. At the time, the other countries of the world, would have viewed Lincoln issuing it, as coming from a position of weakness. And the goal would have been thought to be insurrection. In 1862, a Confedearte courier was killed and the troop deployment information he carried fell into the hands of the Union. Using this information, the Union won a solid victory at last, at Antietam. Now Lincoln could issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Once the emancipation proclamation was issued, there was a moral difference between the 2 parts of the US, and the European powers could in no way support the Confederacy.
In Turtledoves world, the couriers information was never captured by the Union. The Confederates continued to hold strong positions. Because neither of the parties in the battle was morally different, France and England then force Lincoln to negotiate a peace treaty, rather than having them join forces with the Confederates, in "punishing" the Union, and reducing the power of a growing competitor.
The book How Few Remain is actually set 20 years later, when a Second Civil War flares up. This time France and England are full allies of the CSA, and join in the party. The Union gets soundly smacked around a second time. And in an interesting twist, by the end the Union starts forging ties to the Austro-Hungarian empire. 3 years later, the "Great War" series of his kicks in. WW-I has broken out in Europe, and the Confederates, and the Union try going at each other a third time, this time, without the assistance of the Europeans who are busy with their own fight. And you have Tank, and trench warfare raging across the middle of North America.
Turtledove has built a VERY rich world. Populated by lots of names that are recognizable. All in all his fiction is VERY highly regarded.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
I've seen this already, and personally, I think it's a lot of crap. What is he suggesting? That any other systems of E-mail aside from ones controlled by the USPS would be *illegal*?
Exactly.
The USPS has a long history of using federal law to stamp out competing mail services.
The usual excuse is that it undermines fixed-rate universal service by "cherry-picking" the inespensive job of delivering mail in and between cities or their business-office cores, which subsidizes the mail in rural areas. Federal law gives them a monopoly on first class mail and its equivalents (sealed point-to-point message) and they have enforced it jealously in the past.
- Against many private competing mail carriers.
- Against bicycle couriers. (Sometimes they'd let them carry and deliver IF you also bought a stamp.)
- Against (shutting down) a pneumatic-tube package-deleivery system in Manhattan.
and so on.
I think they tried against Fax but the Bell system slapped them down. (They're a regulated monopoly.) Fedex initially got away with it because they promise overnight delivery (not available from USPS at the time) for a much HIGHER price than first-class mail.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Hey, I know it is a moot point now, but there was a real possiblity of the south winning the civil war at the time. General Lee actualy had several chances to end it in the souths favor, most notible right after the battle of bull run he could have contiuned straight into washington and force the north to conced at gun point (the army had already been routed so there was no one to stop him). The south had the generals, the north had the supplies. They could not win a long drawn out war, but had they capatlized on a couple of key opertunities they where presented, they could have ended it very quickly in their favor. Buty hey, it turned our right in the end. And yes, I know I am over analizing but how many posts would there realy be on /. if people only posted well thought out intelegent on the topic things?
"Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform." -- Mark Twain
Seriously. Have you ever dealt with the postal service in another country? For the most part, it sucks. All too often, packages disapear. If something does arrive, it took bloody forever.
I stopped complaining about the USPS after having extensive dealings with European postal services.
-- Will program for bandwidth
This one is porbably going to get way moded down, but has anytone stopped to consider what the benefits of a federally owned and operated internet/email system might be? We always gripe about how are rights online are rapidly vanishing, but stop to consider that since the Internet is (at least in the US) owned by private institutions, you really have no rights. Think of it this way; your ISP's EULA generally lets them disconnect you for just about any reason under the sun, which allows them to exercise whatever "discretion" they wish in removing you for doing something that they consider bad. What one isp allows, another forbids. One of the chief benefits of a government internet is that such a system would necessitate granting the user clearly documented rights and restrictions. The wonderful world of "due process" might even be within our grasp.
As it stands, unless you do something that violates some law, anything relating specifically to Internet and ISPs is a civil matter. Think about it; what part of the EULA says that the sysadmin won't decide to read your email? Who says that they won't be watching your traffic?
The difference between the real world and the net is that in the real world, there is a buffer between the common citizen and exploitation by corporations. It is sad that that buffer thins every day, it really is, but the Internet is a world where industry dominates. This has allowed it to grow extremely fast, and also unchecked.
Consider the negatives of a Federal Internet, and I don't think you'll find they would require anything of you that law doesn't allow them to do now.
Frightening as it may be, federalizing the Internet may be the first step to securing our rights online. Then again, the beauty of voting for Nader knowing that he is not going to win is that you don't have to consider that he might not be the best person for the job.
Was there ever an article on "How the USPS almost owned a government-enforced monopoly on first class mail"? Oh, wait, they do!
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Ok, I know this is slightly offtopic, but i'll say it anyway. I have read all the various news stories about how email is/will kill conventional means of post. But, i feel the internet has created a huge increase in shipping. Why? because, before the net, not many people catalog shopped, however, since the net, so many more people are ordering online, and guess what, what they order gets shipped to them. Also, dont forget eBay, lots of sellers dont accept electronic payments, so how do you get the money to them, regular snail mail.
Also, in the past, how many people actually sent letters to people, I remember the last time i mailed a letter, i was in grade school and writing to my assigned penpal.
I don't like to accuse people of out hand, but the Confederacy winning the Civil War was a fairly likely thing for the first few years. Most Union generals (McClellan, Banks, Burnside) measured up very poorly against their Confederate counterparts (Lee, Jackson, Johnston).
Had the south won the Battle of Antietam in 1862, as it almost did, the war would have likely ended. Even as late as 1864 Lincoln was in serious electoral trouble until Grant finally delivered. Had McClellan won, he would have pursued peace.
I can excuse spelling mistakes, but as a historian I am appalled at the ignorance of the editors.
~Chazzf
No statement is true, not even this one.
The post office is nothing but another example of failed socialism, and should be phased out and replaced with market solutions which offer an incentive to deliver (pardon the pun ;). The answer is to allow the market to supply the demand by voluntary means, instead of by coercion (the tool of government).
Didn't you read the article a few months ago? The Lonegunmen are dead. There is no more hope. ;^)
All the trees in all the world would be gone. We would all get about 50 letters a day from x-rated web sites. THen another 20 for credit cards. And about 30 more for making my penis larger. My point is that the world is like a sea of oysters. You never know where you'll find a pearl!
Really, I'd rather have a small amount of my tax dollars put towards a e-mail account that I know will be there for the rest of my life. (As opposed to getting a "free" account with a .com that might not be there tomorrow.) Not only that, but since it's paid for by taxes, you won't have to worry about the gov't selling your e-mail for extra $$$ (In an ideal world anyway.)
I'm not saying that the USPS should be the only one providing e-mail, but I don't think it would be the horrible thing that everyone is making it out to be.
Look, the United States Postal Service does a damn good job for the money. Bitch if you want about the thirty-seven cents, but why don't you try hiring a cab to hand-deliver your envelope door-to-door and maybe that'll give some idea what the service is really worth. The USPS has been getting a bum rap for decades now for doing nothing less than a fantastic job with shit for a budget.
The USPS is also a serious proponent of Linux, having deployed more than 5400 Linux boxes internally to do address scanning and recognition. Google for "Linux USPS", it's the first unsponsored link.
I'm trying real hard here to think how the USPS could fuck up the Internet any worse than Adelphia or Qwest, and if there is something more nefarious that they could've done, it escapes me.
As others have pointed out, the USPS could not just come in and 'own' e-mail, they could provide an e-mail service, that people would use only if it provided enough value to justify the cost.
Most likely, the main users would have been business customers, who were willing to pay for the services.
Having a central, semi-trusted authority, employing sound technologies, could have taken e-mail much farther than it is today. Features like:
- Useful encrypted e-mail (i.e. a central certificate authority, with a strong registration process).
- Based on a modern protocol with some assurances of identity. SMTP is trivial to spoof, but is so widespread it's impossible to replace. It would take an organization with some clout to promote a new open standard.
- SPAM control
When people hear of the USPS doing e-mail, they think of their local mail carriers and laugh. Obviously it would not be run by those people, it would be a group of trained specialists designing and implementing it.
Of course, I still would not trust them with my e-mail, or pay them for the service. But, I bet my employer would. And, I bet I would use the GNU version of their open standards and strong security on my Linux box.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Gettysburg just got more publicity. This is from someone who lives *very close* to Antietam and is an avid amateur Civil and WWII-phile. I do believe that as the 'winners' of the war, we don't take into consideration that our generals weren't always that brilliant.
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.
First, you submitted mail by emulating an IBM remote-job entry system and submitting a batch job. Error messages came back the next day, by paper mail. Really.
You had to send a minimum number of mail pieces per batch, the minimum being 100 or so. And they all had to have the same first 2 digits of the zip code, because the whole batch was printed at the same place, in some regional mail-handling facility. The switching was per-job, not per-message. (Some third party company tried to set up a switching system to take individual messages and accumulate them, but it didn't catch on.)
Finally, it cost about the same as first class mail. More for long messages, based on pages printed.
Even bulk mailers didn't like it. The biggest objection was that you couldn't include a return envelope, so it was useless for bills.
Not that private enterprise did much better. FedEx tried something called ZapMail, where you faxed your message to a receiver in a FedEx truck, which then drove to the destination and delivered the message. Two-hour delivery. Killed by cheap fax machines.
The whole damned thing could have been won after 1st manassis. nothern generals before Grant became eastern theatre commander were fairly lame. However, the south didn't make the move. If they had followed the nothern army on the retreat, they would have been able to take DC on the first day of the war. That would more than likely be called 'winning' -- capturing the enemy capitol in record time. yup.
It can be fun to speculate about what might have happened if things had happened diferently, but all that can come out of it is merely speculation. You cannot make good predictions of "what might have happened" when simply a million other things could have taken place. The fact of the matter, is that History has played out in specific, unique, and particular ways that have shaped the present. There is no changing the past. Thus, value judgements of events in the past based on speculation of what might have been if events had happened differently are utterly worthless. Speculation is fun, but it isn't real.
...and IN SOVIET RUSSIA, beowulf clusters imagine 1, 2, 3 profit!!!! jokes made out of YOU!!!
I was completely bowled over by email and used it a lot. To my dismay, however, in something like 1979 or so they renamed the program, which had been called "mail," because of concerns that the US Postal Service owned the name. The program was renamed "note" and most of us geeks thought the decision was hilariously stupid.
It's fascinating to read this article and realize that what must have been going on was an effort by the USPS to protect its "brand name" for mail. I can just imagine IBM getting a lawyer letter from the Postal Service threatening legal action if they didn't stop using the word mail.
If the federal system gave everyone a free connection, it could also be used to support automatic verification of software licenses. In other words, users could be REQUIRED to be connected by software manufacturers. With a free connection, it wouldn't be a serious hassle to most legal users.
After installing XP and reading the EULA this doesn't seem too far fetched. MS might have a strong financial reason to back such a system.
I don't think I'd want all those aliens in the post-office twiddling with my bits...
Are you suggesting that Hemos would DRAMATIZE a news article? Burn heretic!
FedEX/UPS/UHL/Airborne Express don't stop regularly
Neither does my postman!
"Da ist ein Technölüst in mein Unterpanten!"
This is a very cool thread. Usually we non-merkins have to listen to these kinds of little barbs thrown our way. Does a body good to see this kind of self-referential abuse going on once in a while too...
Maybe we should let the south seperate? I mean, all the conservatives could have their backwards, broken, primitive nation full of fundi christians, and all the liberals could have their progressive, broken, but modern nation full of, well, liberals. We could just break the states down by geographic area into a gradient of government types.. the far north could be the extremely liberal, tree hugging libertarians, the mid-america region could be your moderates, and florida could be filled with george bush fsck-the-constitution supporters. :)
The USPS has been at the leading edge of technology in many cases. As another poster mentioned, do a Google for Linux USPS and see what you find. I speak from first-hand experience: I have worked on USPS' Linux systems. They have over 5000 dual-CPU boxes running Linux, sorting mail at real-time speeds (which is 13 pieces per second, mind you). The USPS handles 40% of the world's postal mail. They process over 500 million pieces of mail each and every working day.
The USPS also has a huge network of SGI boxen deployed, again reading and sorting addresses (but this time those that were missed by the Linux boxes).
With the current mess at ICANN, NSI, etc. do you think the USPS could have done any worse?
And BTW: before you take potshots at the $0.37 FC postage rates, check the rates at other countries in Europe, f'rinstance.
I have personally seen farmers deliver chicken hatchlings, ducks, etc. to the USPS for delivery, I kid you not. Live cargo! Lets see FedEx/UPS do anything even close.
I'm really disappointed that nobody has yet pointed out that the Internet, SMTP, and all that were built on projects funded by the US Government. The DOD's ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), to be precise. I was using it back in the 70's, and I was quite aware of where the funding came from.
And the actual constructions was done almost entirely by universities. The few "private" companies involved (such as BB&N) were living almost entirely off government grants and contracts.
The corporate enterprise ideologists are trying hard to invent their own history so that they can claim some of the credit. But this is all historic revisionism. The real credit belongs to the evil old government, in collusion with a lot of academic hackers.
It may be true that forms of email were developed by a number of computer vendors. But they were all proprietary (even UUCP and DECnet), didn't interoperate worth a damn, and mostly couldn't be licensed for a finite cost.
It's kinda too bad. I've always thought that UUCP mail was better than SMTP. But if was freed by AT&T a bit too late, and SMTP already had the territory. Note that SMTP is defined by a set of US government standards.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I'm a rural mail carrier in Texas. We don't get snow, we get 2 inch thick sheets of glass-smooth ice about every other year, so it's always a kind of new experience. That's way slicker than snow, for you public school graduates. After a day of delivering mail to BFE with that going on, when I go to bed I can still feel my rear end sliding to and fro, inches from a five foot ditch, from which I will walk miles to the nearest phone to call for help if I fall in, which will not come because no other fools are going to get out in that kind of weather. I didn't make any of that up.
My blog can kick your blog's ass
That is a stock response by any liberal to any conservative who invokes cato or limbaugh. So where do all of you get that standardized reaction?
My blog can kick your blog's ass
For a moment, I thought the article was going to focus on the law that states that things of a non-urgent nature must be delivered by USPS, and things like that. Interesting to find out they were looking into official electronic mail in the 70s, and interesting that the solution that finally popped up was distributed and came out of defense research.
By the way, if anyone has any information about the history of letter delivery, and especially things like the Ed Baker Memorial Postal Conspiracy or other postal conspiracies, I'd be interested in hearing from you. Unusually, lots of information is not readily available from a Google search.
Tweet, tweet.
I disagree. They would have been first to market with a technology on a massive roll-out.
Anyone competing would have to have a competing technology, unless USPS licensed it to them.
In effect, competition would fragment the market, and with the head-start the USPS had, it is very likely it would have won.
I think had the USPS actually gone ahead with the plan, we might all have very different email addresses right now (either because we would be using a fragmented service, akin to the old AOL/Prodigy/Compuserve days, or because we all use USPS addresses.)
Sounds like Stuart N. Brotman is diggin; for a little pat on theback.
So we would have had mass propogation of email earlier, and a internet or the internet type of services would have happened sooner. Bar the internet would not have had its libertarian nature if the post office ran it.
But we might have had more interactive high bandwidth services sooner if the plan had gone forward.
"The act required the Postal Service to âoepromote modern and efficient operations and [avoid] any practiceâ¦which restricts the user of new equipment or devices which may reduce the cost or improve the quality of postal services...â"
What I love about this is that I know someone who works for the USPS and came up with US Patent 5,339,734. It is a small hand bar code stamper. Simple idea that would save tens of MILLIONS of dollars, if the USPS would promote the use of it.
The address (ZIP code) on the front of an envelope is read by some OCR machines. If the OCR thinks it has a pretty good match (which it usually does) then it sends the letter on its way. This is very little problem for the majority of machine printed addresses and ZIP codes. Hand written addresses however cause more problems for OCR, which is why there is a secondary step of humans sitting in front of computer screens checking the addresses of the mail that the OCR machines did not like. The people watching the screens are doing the high speed assembly line equivalent of hand sorting mail.
None of this comes into play, however, if the ZIP (or ZIP+4) is BAR CODED onto the envelope. Check out some bulk mail for the bar code on the envelope. That step eliminates the OCR and human mail sorter from the equation. Since the machines look for the bar code anyway, less steps = less money.
The hand held bar coder would cost less than a few stamps if produced in bulk, but the USPS is unwilling to even consider the idea, because it would put hundreds of USPS employees out of work.
Ummm, Jon, aren't you supposed to be dead...? - Otter(3800)
Only it isn't going to happen because the government doesn't like encryption and the post office is (probably) too clueless to actually set up the necessary servers and keep them secure enough for it all to work.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The article makes it sound as if the USPS wanted a "private express" type monopoly in email. I have a long memory of these things, and very seriously doubt it! Remember, email as we know it began over the ARPAnet in 1972; single-computer email goes back farther. Lots of people (myself included) were on the ARPAnet in the late '70s, using email galore. There was no thought of shutting us down. In the 1980s, there was also a lot of uucp mail, fido, DECnet, BITnet, and other types of email besides the venerable SMTP. These just could not be banned or shut down.
And don't forget X.400, the 1980s idiot bastard child of the ITU itself, an email protocol so baroque that only a Lotus Notes developer could love it. X.400 was a bad implementation of a good idea, that being to have a multivendor standard. They just ignored SMTP's existence, even as millions used it. Right into the early 1990s there were people arguing that X.400's supposedly greater capabilities were necessary.
Various worldwide postal agencies did build something called IntElPost (sp?) in the late '70s and early '80s; basically, it was international Group IV fax service between post offices. The USPS was not allowed to participate; it still operates in some countries.
Somebody else has noted how the USPS introduced a truly awful RJE-printer papermail service, ECOM, which flopped big time. I note that MCI Mail, a 1981-ish consumer/business email service, had a paper-output option too; I occasionally used it to send paper mail.
The USPS could potentially play a role in a future e-post system; that might be one way to cut spam. I'd be happy to pay, oh, a penny or so per email, provided that spammers did too. More likely, it would have to be some kind of micropayment scheme wherein my inbox would block something without an e-stamp, which would cost too much for a spammer. Of course that doesn't need the USPS, but they could be a player if they got their act together.
Before widespread DNS and the MX tag, email addresses looked like...
myneighbor!herfriend!uunet!yahoo!slew
No kidding, email addresses used to be the other way with rmail/uucp! (and for a small time when internet email was just starting to be popular it was both ways with % signs, not to mention other nasty hpmail/vaxmail/x.400/x.500 hybrids)
You had to source route your email explicitly although uunet was pretty good about knowing about big sites and was pretty reasonable about relaying a small amount of email for a small fee. Setting up email w/o DNS (and root servers) might be like gnutella without much bandwidth. Think of DNS root server as the virtual site that can automatically tell you where to find out how to route everything.
The only reason email is as popular as it is today is that interoperability is pretty common (except for the spam-sources). Imagine if say 1/2 the email addresses uses a proprietary postoffice maintained "dns-like" service... It would sort of be like if the post office didn't license zip-codes to be used by their competitors (sort of how they don't let fedex/ups send to p.o.boxes)... You could set up a separate internet email, but there would be no interop...
Just food for thought...
I was chatting with a former coworker about this article today, when he related the following story to me and kindly allowed me to post it here on /. I was going to post it as an AC for him, but heck, he gave me permission and stuff.
(cut and pasted from chat)
--
When I send my bills or letters to my congresscritters through the USPS, there's a pretty darn good chance they will arrive at their destination if not the very next day, then the day after. That's pretty darn impressive service in my book.
That being said, I have a friend in Ontario, Canada who lives way out in the boonies and doesn't have a phone (by choice, no less). And so I communicate with her via regular old postal mail. She had told me once that Canada Post (the Canadian postal service) was "spotty," (her term) but at the time I thought "how bad could it be?"
When I didn't hear back from her after sending 4 letters, I got worried, and since I was on the east coast for business anyhow, I flew up there to see her and to make sure she was ok. It turns out that she was fine, and just explained again that postal service in her area is quite horrid, as she simply didn't receive ANY of those 4 letters I had sent. From that I learned really quick to send out several copies of each letter so that she will actually get them.
It's a bit of a pain having to send out four identical copies of my letters to her, but at least now she typically receives at least one of them, if not two.
If the USPS handled email, I'd think they'd do just as good a job as they do with snail mail. Also, perhaps that would make spammers actually have to pay per spam, just like regular mail. I can just imagine what it would be like if Canada Post handled email. Ugh.
~ JRay
--
not_anne
My comments here are my own; I do not speak for my employer.
n/m
i would be more than happy to pay 1 cent for each email i send throgh a usps email account. think about it if its a usps account its protected buy us laws ie. postal fraud (NO MORE SPAM) i think more and more people would sign up for this type of account knowing that there would be no/ or very little spam mail we could all still keep are regu. email but a spam free regulated email account would suit me just fine what about you?
I believe it was the USPS that instituted the pneumatic-tube system in Manhattan. I seem to remember that it was discontinued because it was not efficient.
http://future.newsday.com/1/fbak0115.htm
Pneumatic tubes connected main post offices to a network of substations in New York and at least four other American cities, beginning in Philadelphia in 1893. By 1916, there were more than 112 miles in place, according to a brochure published by the company with contracts to operate the system in Boston (13.6 miles), Chicago (19.8 miles), New York (55 miles), St. Louis (3.9 miles) and Philadelphia (20 miles).
Get the story straight. It was shut down due to cost constraints.
As far as the other points you make, please substantiate them. Or did postal hisotry revisionists destroy that in a Vanal-esque period of American history we are unaware of?
Like $0 Web hosting. For less than $20 year in DNS registration fees, you can have you@youraddr.com and give nine friends an address@youraddr.com as well, not to mention Web hosting.
I'd much rather get to choose my own domain than have to be @usps.com.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
In the UK it was illegal for electronic communications to be done except through the GPO (Post Office, which at one stage also owned the phone company). When I as at Cambridge university in the 1970s there was a legal problem with email. Email (communication between people) within one building was OK, but between different (university) sites was not. The undersity legal dons found a way round it (someone interacted with a computer, which happened to interact with someone else), but AFIR it was never tested - the GPO did not know.
A decade later: Unix and UUCP (remember that). We built a dialup network through high speed modems 300 (baud). It mostly carried news & mail. There was a legal problem - we weren't allowed to communicate electronically with anyone, so we joined a club the UKUUG (UK Unix User Group), we were thus a closed community and so it was OK (the exact legal mumbo jumbo escapes me). Because of this UKUUG membership grew rapidly.
Things have moved on & it doesn't appear to be necessary anymore, but I don't know how the law has changed -- I don't care as long as I can do it.
but if the US hadn't become a world power then the world would have been better off. It is the USA which promotes the concept of white "values" throughout the world through the brainwashing medium of television.
Case in point in Fiji there suddenly appeared many cases of anorexia whilst women in Fiju used to be slightly overweight (but not unhealtily so). The transmission of the series Ally McBeal changed all that.
So many cultures have been destroyed by white meddling. So how can you say that America being a "world power" is a good thing?
The world would have been a much better place if say Africa would have been the dominant continent. Africans show much more compassion than white men who really have to oppress others out of a feeling of insecurity. Current genetic research has shown that black people are genetically superior to whites in every respect. So it's no wonder that whites felt an inate urge to pull the blacks down to the levels of animals.
In a world without white dominance there would be no slavery, no oppression, no hate and no killings.
I am white but I would never dream of getting children because I consider it a hate crime to transfer white genes to a new generation. I wish I was black, but I have to live with the tremendous guilt of all the awful things which my ancestors have done.
There is not one thing of worth ever done by a member of the so-called "white race" except making the concious decision not to procreate.
Ok an USPS-administered email system established in the early 70's would probably handle a _large_ part of US citicens and buisnesses mail. Hotmail prob. would exist at all. Having one adress for life sure sounds tempting, but think about it.
-Would it be free [as in free of charge, not the RMS way..]? Prob. not. They _charge_ for postal services. You could argument about the fact that it doesnt cost extra if you send one mail trought the "high-tech" 1980 centrally-administered national email service, but thry would have started bragging about the cost of the (here it come) infrastructure (the word of the 90`) and, of course, building services for the future (aka: -We need more money to get this shit working)
Ok people singning up and everyone is happy, until: 11/9... The terrorist living their lives in USA learning to fly and acting completly normal also have USPS-administered email...
They crash into Twin Towers.
What would have happend then to the _centrally_-administered national email servic?
Oh yeah, you now and I know. Surveilance.
Its being done today trought a system called Echelon and probably other systems. Search slashdot or google and see. But todays system with a lot of different ISP and mail services are very difficault to track and "get the full picture".
Ok im not an US citizen so maybe it is different.
But changing the wiew on the email service and this system, witch have served us all well in many years (apart from the spam), because off some dotcoms/telecoms going bust and rather wanting a central mailserver is just insane.
And by the way: From an USPS goverment employe: -You want to use PGP on this USPS-administered email? Are you terrorist?
(Sorry my baaad english)
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
Well, the Deutsche Post AG (the German counterpart of the USPS) does offer a free(!) email service called "ePost" just like Hotmail, Yahoo, web.de, GMX and many others. However, they don't seem to have a lot of users; one does rarely see an ePost email address (*@epost.de).
Claus
We would probably now have somthing like this:
Claus
Germany was already going down before the Americans got involved. Their home front was collapsing due to lack of food thanks to the British blockade of their ports and they weren't going to last the distance.
Hemos is a damnyankee =)
Nobody in Canada, I assure you! :)
What nonsense ! I know americans think they are the centre of the universe but having their post office controlling email for the world .... hahahahahaha.
Believe it or not I suspect USPS sponsors cycling for the same reasons FedEx or UPS would sponsor sports, advertising. Many of the USPS services compete with private companies such as Express Mail, and Parcel Post.
Happy Fun Ball is for external use only.
... we're just re-arming and waiting for the right opportunity.
...
If at first you don't secede
In spite of the trolling title, nothing in the article even implies that the USPS even considered "owning" or controlling the email delivery infrastructure. It says that there was a point where it could have bought much of the telegraph infrastructure (but it didn't), and there was a point where it could have offered email services, but decided it was out of their mandate.
If, in 1982 they decieded to offer electronic mail services, they would have found UUCP
and BITNet already there, connecting colleges, government agencies, and some companies with electronic mail and other services. Businessmen and power users with money were already sending electronic mail through services like Compuserve and The Source.
I don't see anything the USPS could have done to stop the rise of FidoNet in 1984. FidoNet allowed anybody to call up a local BBS system (which was often free), and send an email that could get routed internationally, or to any of the other email networks.
The bottom line is, there is no way short of draconian legislation that would have allowed the USPS to "own" email. The most that could have happened is for them to offer email to customers; customers who have other options that the post office must compete with. Kind of like package delivery: the USPS offers package delivery service, but as any employee of FedEx, UPS or DHL will tell you, they by no means own the service.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
Hmm, I always thought it was a war for Southern Independence, the CSA never tried to take over the union from what I know...
~ now you know
Damn, I said I wasn't going to get drawn into this... sigh, but it's difficult for me to tolerate these "moral indignation" and "self-righteousness" attitudes.
What was the North's source of "cheap labor" at the time? Immigrants that worked in slave-like settings? Children? I don't condone slavery in any of its forms. Those were vastly different times... I don't know that any of us (historians included) can understand exactly all of the dynamics that led to that war or how things would have worked out had it not occurred.
I'd also argue that the worst racially motivated riots in the last 40+ years occurred not in the south, rather in California (take your pick) and Boston.
But the very worst of it all, IMHO, is that "we" have really won. Our national government is dominated by "states rights" Republicans that favor today's version of plantation owners, NASCAR (gag) has taken over the country, and "country" music (not to be confused with REAL rural music) is every-frickin'-where.
So yeah, the North won the battle (War Between the States), but I'm afraid the worst part of our southern culture has been victorious in the end.
"Hey Poindexter, bring me the flame retardant suit!"
In the late '80s there were several meetings/discussions between the various email providers and the USPS regarding X.500 Directory Services (including X.509 digital certificates) where the USPS tried to take ownership of the U.S. domain for all electronic directory entries. The ones I sat in on were pretty sad. The postal service folks were clueless about that they were going after or how they would actually offer and manage the systems so it died by common consent in a NIST/CCITT sub-committee. It was scary the first time we discussed the long term concequences though.
Didn't know it was 'the Germans'...
Portsmouth N.H. has a Tug named after the Postmaster General from Philly (John Wanamaker.)
The Tug is actually a floating resturant called Dunphy's.... Nice place to throw back a few.
Mommy. What's a karma whore?
From the article:
Check out the online services that they offer. One simply uploads a document in a particular digital format (Word, Wordperfect,...), and USPS will print and deliver the item(s) to one or many addresses. Just browse USPS.com and see all the services they offer online. (Isn't it interesting they push usps.com as their URL.)
I'll stand corrected. I had that word of mouth.
As far as the other points you make, please substantiate them. Or did postal hisotry revisionists destroy that in a Vanal-esque period of American history we are unaware of?
Other posters have pointed out the the feud between the USPS and western union. (Composing a web search for the similar issue with fax is difficult, since there's so much stuff mentioning faxing and mailing filings for suits. B-) And I don't have time to hit a hardcopy library. So if you want to assert that the fight over the telegraph established precedents on wire transmission that headed off a fight on faximile I won't argue.)
On my main point: If you don't want to hit a physical library do a search for "Lysander Spooner" just for starters. here's a sample (edited to somewhat less colorfull language. When history - especially anarchist history - gets onto the web it's often posted by people with axes to grind. B-) ):
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The USPS already does have an Electronic Postmark service.
Lesson: You don't have to be white to be evil.
There's lots of genocide among blacks in Africa, whites in Europe, and Asians in Asia. Whitey ISN'T to blame for ALL the atrocities. The indigenous people do a good job by themselves.
I find this interesting, because a few years back, part of Clinton's plan to bridge the digital divide was to have the US Postal Service provide free web based e-mail to everyone in the country. Each person would recive an email address MailAddress@90210.gov or something similar, which they could access at the local public library. Maybe the fact that hotmail and yahoo mail were in place negated the need, but I still know a large number of people who have heard of neither.
The Spanish Correos y Telégrafos has a partnership with Yahoo.
You could get a Yahoo Mail address through the Correos website. I don't know what Correos got out from the deal.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
The United States was once an organization of peer states.
Until the Southern States found out that once you join the club, you'll be killed if you disagree or try to quit the club.
The "United States" has a real talent for creating it's own enemies, foreign and domestic.
"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate."
The world would have been an idyllic place weren't it for the white people. Just look at how e.g the Maja's in Mexico. They had civilisation without the associated brutalities which white people brought upon them.