Slashdot Mirror
E-mail and Snail Mail United
bahree writes "The BBC has an interesting story about how some people living in some of the most inaccessible areas of India are enjoying an improved postal service - thanks to the combining of e-mail with traditional 'snail mail'."
Does that mean they will get all those interesting offers for generic viagra and such by snail mail there?
Email and online bill paying must some day put them out of business. I know they had financial difficulties for a while. I bet they will have to adapt in the coming years or die off.
Now every one can enjoy spam...even rural India.
Hello, this is Linus Torvalds, and I pronounce Linux as Linux!
Now we'll really need that virus scan ;)
got sig?
A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers (Pigeon) .
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
I live in Spain, but do a lot of business in the UK. Important snail mail that arrives to our UK offices is scanned and emailed to me.
Hmmm, so I isolated parts of india they have access to (relatively expensive) computers and internet but can't get the postal service running ok?
Post offices in the northern state of Himachal Pradesh will take a customer's handwritten letter and computer scan it. Then the letter can be e-mailed to remote, high-altitude post-offices in this Himalayan region.
From there, the e-mails are printed out and then taken by hand to their destinations - many of which are located in almost inaccessible mountain areas such as the Lahaul, Spiti, Kinnaur and Pangi valleys.
--- any post that takes longer than 20 seconds to write, isn't worth writing
For example, I knew a Pakistani family in London who had relatives in the remote Karakorum region of Gilgit. The only way to get internet there was to use satellites, but this was beyond the means of many. So the London family had to rely solely on snail mail.
Thanks to the sheer inefficiency of both Royal Mail and PAkistani mail, letters took months, yes, months to get to the destination. However, if the messages travelled over wires as far they could, then both the costs and delays could have been reduced significantly.
Nothing to see here
No wonder all our jobs are going to India... their snail-mail is much faster than ours!
... is whot bwings os tugevza tsuzay.
Clever thing, using the computers that way. I've offered to do the same thing for a friend in Iraq. Cuts a few days off. News? Barely.
Great, now I can get all that spam in print!
... to this service
It is a prerequisite to presume that the service chain must be driven with trustworthiness. The old folks who are illiterate must trust the messenger, and the sender must assume the delivery chain is trustable.
Imagine a powered-by-human ATM cash machine.
Normal mail has the implicit benefit of sealed delivery, until received by the receipient.
Hey, that's my password you are typing
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
Hmm. I know that TCP over avian carriers is old news.
What's the next free RFC number? I'd like to propose TCP over mail runners.
The postal service here is now experimenting with genetic modified eagles to get them to fly faster than the speed of light, in order to catch up with the Indians.
More news at 23:59 MOT (My Own Timezone)
Duplicates posted later on slashdot at the top of every hour!
The concept (handwritten letter->intermediary format->printed copy) reminds me of V-Mail in World War Two. People states-side would write a letter to their man in uniform on a special form. This form would be printed on microfilm, and carried over to Europe or the Pacific. The letters would be printed and handed out to the troops.
The advantage was that the mail took up significantly less weight. 150,000 letters could be reduced from 2,500 lbs to around 45 lbs. The space savings could be used for war material.
Does anyone else see a stiking similarity with the old telegraph system?
Windows in 6 Bytes (IA-32) : 90 90 90 90 CD 19
The method of final delivery (guys walking around with a staff, bell and mailbag in the middle of nowhere) reminds me of the book by David Brin, and the movie The Postman.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Email and online bill paying must some day put them out of business. I know they had financial difficulties for a while. I bet they will have to adapt in the coming years or die off.
/t
Certification Authorities. Think about registered mail: i can send you a letter from anywhere in the world and get a proof that it was delivered to you and only you. The post office is a federal governmental entity with offices all over the country, and they know who you are (well, at least your address).
In the near future, you might go down to the post office, show some form of accepted identification and they would generate a personal certificate for you, free or for some nominal charge. The problem with current commercial CAs is that they are basically about certifying businesses. They will issue personal certificates to individuals, but their main interest in that area is selling certification infrastructure to corporations for use on their networks. When it comes to the idea of standardized "electronic identification cards" (optional or mandatory...) the PTOs look like a very good candidate.
#!/usr/bin/english
Watch any western movie. Somewhere in it someone will want to send a message to someone else who is far away. The first guy will go to the local telegraph office and dictate his message to the clerk. Clerk hands message to the telegraph operator who keys it into the system in a binary-like format. Message travels via wire to remote telegraph office where second telegraph operator decodes the incoming signal and transcribes it. Hard copy of message is then delivered to recipient. Later improvements allowed for messages to be keyed-in and printed without human interpretation.
No news here. Couldn't system resources be better used watching for SCO's latest folly?
The three most important words in a relationship are "I love you." The two most important are "Humor me."
Federal Express CEO Fred Smith made a huge investment in FAX over a private satellite network called Zapmail. The idea being they could do better than next day delivery by getting documents there in the next few hours.
Unfortunately for them high-speed FAX machines using dial-up phone lines became cheap and common and ZapMail was abandoned in a year.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
How is this different than a fax machine exactly?
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
just email me @ x.400:G=William; S=Gates; CN=bgates; O=microsoft; OU=xstaff; PD-PN=Bill Gates; PD-S=1 Redmond Way; PD-A1=building 8; PD-CODE=98052; PD-C=USA...
in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
but then they're also talking about a person reading letters to the whole town...
a totally different paradigm.
I'm surprised that postal systems in other countries don't do more to bridge between electronic and snail mail. You should be able to write a letter, put an email address on the envelope, stick a stamp on it and have it scanned and delivered. Similarly there could be a service where (with some appropriate means for payment) you could have your SMTP message printed out and delivered like a telegram. The effort required to scan in a document and type an email address is no more than that currently expended on sorting letters (and the technology used to read handwritten postal addresses can be applied to electronic mail too). Although perhaps returning undelivered mail to the sender could be tricky.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
The funny thing is that the Indians were also doing this in the last century.
Now every one can enjoy spam...even rural India.
"Get Rich Programming! Big US Companies Need And Want Indian Programmers Because US Programmers Too Expensive. We pay for your schooling for a small percentage of your future salary. Nothing to Lose!"
Helllooooo....
:)
Email is used to support snailmail and not the other way round. Snailmail that reaches point X is scanned and emailed. This email is opened at Point Y and there it is printed out and taken to wherever it has to be delivered.
Thus email is used to convey the information in a letter from Point X to Point Y...
What u say makes sense only if snailmail is used to support email...
"Programming is like sex. Make one mistake and support it for the rest of your life !!"
And you guessed it, the return address was the customer's e-mail address. The note compained how their e-mail was not working.
Weren't Americans doing this in the 1800s (i.e. the century before the last century)?
That is the telegraph I'm referring to (19th century invention, I believe).
The USPS is self contained per its money. Why do you think rates go up every couple of years? Because of inflation. They do not take any money from the government (although yes they are a government agency.)
Dear Sukh Das,
How's the weather up there? Cold I bet. Next time you are down for a visit stop by for a Coca-Cola and some cow watching.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
...computer gets mailed!
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
Yes. By century ago I meant "roughly 100 years ago" :)
Ecce Europa - Web Design for Business
at a cheap 10 rupees (0.12) per letter I don't know if 10 rupees is cheap, you can buy a pack of chips for that much there. A pack of chips that size goes for a dollar here, paying the equivalent of a dollar for every letter doesn't seems very cheap. Why don't the post offices just get those people email accounts(liks a someone@townpostoffice.org) or something and just have people email stuff to eachother at the post office only(so they don't kill business), and charge a lot less.
Exactly the same system was launched in China in late 2000. At the time, the Chinese postal service "promised" that it would not read any of the emails.
The system has not been an overwhelming success.
A dream is good. A plan is better.
I suppose before people had phones &c, there were lots of telegrams, designed to get to localised points (eg post office), where it would be dispatched by local services.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
The earliest form of electronic communication was the telegraph. A person wishing to send a message would go to the telegraph office and dictate it to a telegraph clerk. The message would be sent by Morse code, one letter at a time, and decoded and written out at the far end. It would then be delivered by a boy on a bicycle.
Apart from using rather more sophisticated electronic devices than a simple telegraph key and sounder, what has really changed? Certainly if anyone was trying to patent this, there might be some prior art under the names of Cooke and Wheatstone.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Someone has to deliver the Viagra you order.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
It's funny how the digital divide kicks in: in some countries you cannot find decent infrastructure, whilst in others there is plenty of it available to the ones willing to bang out a buck for it.
Spain is, together with Italy and Greece, to be perceived equivalent to Mexico, only that it is slightly more important. Which means that the "fax" is still used on a daily basis - not that email wouldn't be available, it's basically a state-of-mind thingy.
To get it straight:
I remember back in the early days of prodigy, (yes it still exists) they had a feature that allowed you to type in an email, and they for a nominal fee, they would print it out on quality paper, and mail it.
It may not be as advanced geographically as this concept, but it did decrease the sending time a little, and it is the same basic principle