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Lost Package Derails Project To Preserve Super Nintendo Games (eurogamer.net)
A developer's quest to preserve (and validate) every game ROM for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System has hit a glitch -- thanks to the U.S. postal service. Byuu, the creator of the Higan SNES emulator, had been expecting a package with 100 games from the PAL region (covering most of Europe, Africa, South America, and Oceania).
wertigon writes:
As it turns out, someone at the USPS thought it was a good idea to lose the package, thereby robbing the project of roughly $5000 and the sad hopes of ever seeing a full indexing, like the one done to the U.S set. Byuu writes... "I do still want to dump and scan the Japanese games I already purchased. But we will never have a complete PAL set.
Kotaku reports the games were worth up to £8,000, and though Byuu says the sender never requested reimbursement, it's going to happen "because I can't live with myself if it doesn't." He's asking for donations on Patreon, adding "If the package ultimately arrives, I will be refunding all donations."
In that Thursday update, Byuu writes that the post office had finally shipped him the label from the package "and nothing else, claiming the machine ate it." They've launched an investigation, reports Byuu, adding "It's still an incredibly long shot that they'll find anything, but we'll see. I really, really hope that they do."
That's up there with "the dog ate my homework".
Or did someone misprogram AIs so they thought "Bytes" were "bites"...
"She's furniture with a pulse"
The caliber of people working for the USPS is marginally one step above the DMV or TSA.
Whenever I have to go into the post office, the body language of the employees just *sucks* and I feel like I have interrupted their otherwise important lives by trying to mail a package.
How about purchasing an insurance next time you ship a package worth $5000 ?
It's really sad that this happened, but really, sending something irreplaceable, (and arguably culturally important), by POST for Christ's sake, strikes me as irresponsible. I know courier companies lose stuff too, but I highly doubt that the automation equivalent of "the dog ate my homework" would be offered as an explanation. And if the package had been lost by a courier company, I suspect there would a better chance of it being found sooner or later.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
He's doing more than just dumping the ROMs, he's been photographing the carts and scanning the manuals as well as part of his preservation project. He has a custom rig for dumping that knows more about some obscure hardware quirks of how it does addressing to properly map out the ROMs.
But maybe I should let byuu explain:
Missing the point. This is a preservation effort, not a piracy effort.
Nintendo makes a NES Classic Edition and a guy wants to preserve games for others to play. Hmmmm...inside job? The damage for cartridge games has already been done, but if you go online to actually find easy to download Nintendo ROMs of any kind right now, it's become very very difficult without going to shady websites.
Not that easy, some ROMs straight don't exist except in some display or sales-pitch cartridges.
And yes, as you can imagine, they command insane prices. Collectors are kinda nuts that way. There are generally 3 kinds of games that are rare and hence valuable: Those that only exist in low number because they were just produced for events or to pitch them to investors (e.g. Nintendo World Championships), those that were produced so late that nobody gave half a shit about NES games anymore (e.g. Little Samson) and those that are SO bad that even without the internet word got around that they suck (e.g. Action 52).
So believe it or not, the most valuable games are those that are simply too bad to even play them. Nobody gives you a cent for Mario 3, but you don't even want to know what you'd have to pay to get a real stinker.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You might want to do some research. For whatever reason, theft by USPS workers is far more prevalent than 10 or 20 years ago. It is particularly bad among people who are coin collectors and ship coins using USPS.
Naive child, maybe where you live, people are honest. Where I live, there is one angry woman (demographic withheld) who is known to slice open packages and give you empty boxes. She literally remembers faces or has a list of names. I was banished from my post office as well as my neighbor for coming in and demanding an explanation. Things of all sorts for me, from adult lubricant my boyfriend ordered to jewelry was stolen. For my neighbor, valuables were also stolen. A Yelp review had nothing but similar reviews of snotty service and things being obviously stolen or "lost". Yet another friend literally had tire tracks from a postal truck on his package. The carrier apologized and said he could reject it but he had his suspicions on why it was that way and wasn't allowed to go any further than that. This friend got the OK to look at the treads on the truck, and sure enough, the pattern matched the impressions in the package. Carrier apologized that someone would have the nerve to do it but he was not allowed to point fingers.
This doesn't happen with FedEx or UPS. Something might be stolen off the front porch, but packages aren't sliced into routinely. Real companies have real tracking and cameras all over the place to keep fraudulent employees in check. Their investigations are actually investigations.
You must be naive. Those have been pretty common occurrences for a long time...a few years ago, a notebook of mine that had to sent to repairs "disappeared" without leaving trace...
There will be always thieves in the system.
As others said, I understand packaging all together to save costs, however it also attracted some unwanted attention.
Such as buying a plane ticket and putting them in your carry on... as a bonus you get a nice visit to the scenic USA :P
It was shipped from Germany.
Copyright (c) 1990 - 2014 Dice. All rights reserved. Use of this comment is subject to certain Terms and Conditions.
I'm not saying stuff doesn't get stolen by employees. but that's not the delivery service "seeing fit" to lose anything.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Working for the USPS is a shit job, it doesn't pay much, you have to piss in a cup and take an exam and wait around for ages to find out if you've got a job so the most desirable people get offered some other job and subsequently take it while the USPS is still trying to figure out where the application is. So they apparently just hire whoever actually takes the time to go through the process and you end up with a bunch of dingleberries. They still don't have anything clever like automatic detection of routing loops built into the system, like every other shipper does. Sadly, they are the cheapest option by far.
It's not just USPS that's gone downhill, either. California Overnight used to be super fantabulous. Now Amazon is using them and it's nothing but complaints. Who knows where they delivered our stuff. We got it refunded and/or replaced (it was several items) so the only problem was a delay, but still. This shit isn't rocket surgery. The number is on the mailbox and there's no other mailbox at this driveway. It's not hard.
I've had no end of problems with the USPS, I think someone there has got it in for me on a minor, low level so they just dick with me. It all started when I requested a hold via the web. I checked the box saying I would come to pick up any accumulated mail, and in the special instructions box I said "OK to deliver letters but please hold all packages". They held everything, which was OK, and then when the hold ended instead of holding the mail for me to come pick it up as requested, they delivered all of it and it got soggy in the rain. After that they decided to hold all of my packages forever and ever amen, whether they were supposed to be held or not. I had to go in and argue with them about it twice to get them to stop.
Now the problem I'm having is that apparently all small packages from China (or which look like they might have come from China) are apparently for me. I order a lot of $1-5 crap from China on eBay, apparently more than anyone else in my post code, because they routinely mix other people's packages in with mine. I just write MISDELIVERED on the back in big fat black magic marker and drop them back in the mailbox. They told me to stop writing on them, but that's bullshit. I'm doing precisely what you're meant to be doing, and they're just trying to hide the fact that they are not giving any fucks.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I think it's more likely that the dealer lies and doesn't actually send a coin than that the USPS loses your mail.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I'm not saying it happened here, but many people do not understand that you have to put things in appropriate packaging for the machines to process. It saddens me every work day to see what is thrown out of the machines without the packaging it came with. No address, no delivery. Only paper goes in envelopes for example. Not hard items. Not keys. Not pens. Not coins. Not makeup you want your friend to try. Not anything but paper. And that is because it has to go around hundreds of steel rollers, held between high speed belts for sorting. If you have a hard item, put it in a flat bubble-wrap protected envelope for protection and processing through the Automated Package Processing System machines, or, better, in a well-taped box with an address written on the box. And NOT a tiny box. Heck, if you have ANYTHING that is very important, put it in a flat or a box and make it bigger than the item by far. And let me say that only a very tiny percentage of the 156 Billion pieces of mail the USPS processes every year is damaged, destroyed or lost. And most all of that is due to improper packaging of items. Think before you send because people don't route mail anymore, multi million dollar machines do, and at high speed and accuracy.
E Proelio Veritas.
Oh that's funny you think the USPS will cut you a check when they lose an insured package?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
This is what Registered Mail is for.
It gives end-to-end point-to-point traceability. At every moment between when the package is handed to the clerk and when it is handed to the recipient, it is either in someone's hands or in a locked storage container. Every time the package changes hands, the new holder has to sign for it.
The US Postal Service HATES it. They try HARD to talk you out of using it. It is a pain in the patootie for them, being forced to do their job properly.
If you ever want to see a postal clerk get a SICK look on his face, tell him "I need to trace a missing Registered Mail piece." He knows, in that instant, that one of his co-workers may be about to lose his nice cushy job, and quite possibly move into a Federal zero-star hotel, the kind with iron bars on the windows and doors.
Yes, they do, and they offer insurance, too. So if someone doesn't take out insurance on a valuable shipment and they say they 'lost' it, then they are acting dumb.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
There's always a possibility they'll end up somewhere like govdeals.com where the USPS lists items.
https://www.govdeals.com/index...
The part of the Sega Genesis memory map allocated to the cartridge is a linear sequence of bytes from $000000 to $3FFFFF. The part of the Super NES memory map allocated to the cartridge is not. See my diagram of Super NES address space.
The 65816 divides its 16 MiB address space into 256 banks, each 64 KiB in size. In order to make certain addressing modes more efficient to use, the Super NES divides up cartridge ROM address space as follows:
The "HiROM" mapping (mode $21 or $31) is a linear sequence of bytes from $C00000 on up. Because of incomplete decoding of the address bus, the second half of each 64 KiB bank is usually mirrored into $808000-$80FFFF, $818000-$81FFFF, $828000-$82FFFF, ..., $BF8000-$BFFFFF. In addition, banks $80-$FD are mirrored into banks $00-$7D, so that the 65816 CPU can find the reset vectors at $00FFE0-$00FFFF (which is mirrored from $80FFE0-$80FFFF). Usually, battery save memory is at $306000-$307FFF, $316000-$317FFF, ..., $3F6000-$3F7FFF.
You might notice that everything in the above skips banks $7E and $7F. That's where the Super NES puts its 128 KiB of RAM, with the first 8 KiB mirrored into banks $00-$3F and $80-$BF. It also mirrors the memory-mapped I/O ports associated with the CPU's memory controller and the Picture Processing Unit (PPU) into banks $00-$3F and $80-$BF. They are made accessible through all these banks so that the same value of the Data Bank Register (DBR), analogous to the Data Segment (DS) register on 8086, can see RAM and ROM at the same time.
The "ExHiROM" mapping (mode $25 or $35) has two linear sequences of bytes: from $C00000 to $DFFFFF and then from $400000 to $5FFFFF, which get mirrored down into the second half of $80-$BF and $00-$1F respectively. Only the largest games, mostly exclusive to Japan such as Tales of Phantasia, use ExHiROM.
The "LoROM" mapping (mode $20 or $30), more common on early games, does not connect A15 out of the system to the ROM. This means it uses only the second half of each bank: $808000-$80FFFF, $818000-$81FFFF, $828000-$82FFFF, ..., $FF8000-$FFFFFF. Banks $C0 through $FF mirror the 32K of data in that bank into both halves of the bank, and banks $00-$6F are a mirror of banks $80-$EF. Usually, battery save memory is somewhere in $700000-$77FFFF.
Cartridges use either slow or fast mask ROM. Modes $20, $21, and $25 are "slow ROM", where the CPU slows down slightly in order to allow use of cheaper 200 ns ROM. Modes $30 and $31 are "fast ROM", which needs 120 ns ROM that was more expensive in the early 1990s. Mode $35 has fast ROM for the $C00000-$FFFFFF region but slow ROM for the $400000-$5FFFFF region.
Slight differences in address decoding in each cartridge lead to differences in which address ranges actually contain mirrored ROM (as opposed to open bus) and which address ranges contain battery-backed RAM. Furthermore, some coprocessors included in cartridges can change this mapping at runtime.
It was insured, but for only about $1,000. The carrier would not let Byuu's friend insure it for the full value.
But you can't make a tape backup of coins.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Then why did they still procede with shipment with this carrier? Or not split it up into smaller $1000 insured chunks?
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
I don't know about that, but USPS will insure up to $50,000USD. I guess they weren't using USPS.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It's really unfair to say he was dumb in this case though, for sure. It's more accurate to say, "he was unfamiliar with safe shipping practices." Like many people (including myself) don't make backups until they lose something.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Look at the pictures from the reddit thread, buddy shipped a package wrapped in brown paper.
http://i.imgur.com/kLxZo0Z.jpg
It was probably sheared off in a sorting machine, and nobody has yet to give a shit about some label-less package sitting around.
If you/re shipping 5K, insure it for at least 5K if not 10K. That allows you to replace it and deal with costs associated with that replacement. If this did anything other than delay the effort, its from sheer incompetence.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
They do but their tracking system is about 20 years behind what competitors can do.
And if this was an international package, then the tracking data is first entered by the origin postal system and they have to properly hand off that data to the USPS or else it won't even show up in the US system. International tracking numbers also greatly increase the odds of wrong results or weird status updates.
In any case, a package this valuable should have been shipped another way. If it was PAL,probably DHL would be the carrier to use. Maybe UPS.
Sig for hire.
Have you ever heard of anyone collecting on the insurance from USPS?
Yeah, including some in this very story, along with detailed advice on how to get them to pay.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
When you send a package internationally, there are a lot more hands than just the USPS involved.
Shipper. Did they box and package it correctly? Did they understand how durable the package had to be?
Point of origin postal service. In many countries, these operations are corrupt or prone to theft or delays. If the actual value was declared, that is a huge invite.
Point of origin Customs service. Who knows what they may open or inspect or sample. Will they reseal it properly? Who knows.
Shipper. Boat, airline, whatever. They toss it in with all the other mail. Hope it was packed correctly.
Destination country Customs service. They will check it, may open it, inspect it, impose duties or fines, or confiscate it entirely. The item is not released back into the mail until Customs clears it. If they open the box, they are supposed to reseal it properly.
Destination country Postal Service Who knows.
Sig for hire.
You need to stop pissing other people off.
How do I square that with expecting people to do at least the minimum? Should I just lower my standards so far that I suck their fucking cocks just for showing up at work and giving me bitch face? These people are grade "A" fuckups. And here's the thing, I'm more than willing to help. When the weird-ass prior mail carrier chick's classic Willys broke down, I was the only guy to stop and see if she needed help. I am polite, I smile, I say please and thank you. I do all the same shit that most of these fuckups don't bother to do. I get along great with the one postal employee who actually does her job with grace if not a smile (personally I think smiling is part of a customer service job, but I realize that people have shit days and so I don't care much) but if I rub some of them the wrong way by having some basic standards then that's just going to fucking happen.
I piss people off just by virtue of existing. I'm a gigantic part-Mexican with liberal attitudes who drives a German car in a redneck backwater full of hicks in sticks. And I do not go around telling people how backwards their ideas are, no matter how dumb I think they are. That's not my job and they don't give a shit. I treat people with more respect than they show me, and if they're not satisfied with the level of treatment they're receiving, then they can give a little more or they can fuck right off.
I stop and pick up hitchers, I stop and ask people if they're doing OK and I'll go back and get my tools and come back for them if they need me to. But I also expect people to know how to drive and keep to their side of the road and in general do their fucking job. If that's too high an expectation for you, you know where the door is.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
....like all of my packages that I am missing. I'm now on the third package that was never delivered and last place each of them registered is the exact same postal sorting facility in Jersey City. They must have a huge pile of unhandled mail and packages at that place. One of the missing packages came from Staten Island and had to go only a few hours up the Hudson. Anyone who lives near that facility, can you do the world a favor, hop over the fence, and get our mail? Thanks!!
That is most likely true.
if you see me, smile and say hello.
byuu is lying. It wasn't insured properly because the German sender is a welfare defrauder and he can't admit to the government that he owns so many expensive video games. He had to lie they are worth 1000 EUR because the welfare agency would raise a red flag if had more than 1000 EUR worth of video games.
When people caught byuu on this, he added this info to his Patreon page, but on the very end and worded in a way that tries to play on people's emotions by portraying the German defrauder as a poor guy who can't give up his childhood collection. Only an idiot would believe this German person got 400 SNES games as a kid, including the rarest ones.
Not surprised. I ordered Cerwin Vega speakers. Used FedEx. 4 ft high boxes......Lost. Then wouldn't pay the claim for over a year.
i know anecdote != evidance but... i sent something through USPS to a ebay buyer. Got insurance, signature, tracking, the works. Went through minimal hoops, and was was told incorrect info on how to file. But in the end, it was paid out.
It was shipped from Europe, so it was handed off to the USPS when it entered the US. The postal service may only allow up to $1,000 in insurance.
Actually there's a lot of that, especially on stuff that someone might think is valuable and easy to hide/dispose of.
He got the package label, which is very suspicious.
"machine ate it" is b.s., but not because machines don't damage or tear packages, but rather because the contents, even damaged, didn't arrive. They will reseal a package, or even rebox it if they have to, so if only the label arrived, it's a pretty clear indication that someone decided to take the contents for walkies.
In the military a friend got a box of VHS tapes from his family back home. (Yes, this was a while ago) It was a month and a half late, and had been opened. Even more so, all the tapes had been watched and not rewound, except for one that was stopped partway through. Some jerk in the US Postal service (yes, it was all US Postal personnel) decided to steal his tapes and watch them all. At least the creep finally let sent them back to the rightful owner.
Plane trip to the UK. First leg was no stop, and I saw them load my luggage. (It was rather easily identifiable.) By the time we'd hit the first stop where I had to change planes, they'd already lost it.
Spent the entire layover dealing with the red tape over the lost luggage.
Had reports of it in various places, all of which were later denied.
My aunt who lived in another state and had never been mentioned got called to come to the airport and pick it up for me. She gets their, and they deny everything.
This was in the 80s, so it's been a while.
Finally I got a call that my luggage had arrived. It was 10 months and 4 days AFTER my flight. Nobody knows where it had been, or why, but it had a tag from Red Star. I still don't know what the heck Red Star is, and neither did anyone else. Since that was pre-internet, and a name like Red Star would automatically be associated with the USSR, which hadn't broken up yet, it was all very strange.
I did say carry on...
While I'm sure he'll find plenty of mistakes. There's one kind I don't see mentioned anywhere in this thread.
How is he supposed to KNOW that the bits in the cartridge are correct?
Radiation and high-temperatures still effect ROM memory. Otherwise, why would we need rad-hardened ROM memory on satellites? And what is space? Just a more dangerous version of what we have on Earth--but Earth still has some radiation. Now add DECADES of sitting around absorbing background radiation, with periods of sitting thrown around on top of someone's table under hot sunlight.
There's a reason super-long-term storage is not as simple as burning a CD.
Now, yes, yes, the practical cure of things like boot loaders, ROM hacks, poor early dumps, and all that crap. Sure. I'm clearly NOT debating that. But tiny artifacts in sprites? Single bit changes in code? Maybe not so much...
...then you're a fucking MORON not sending it fedex, and/or insured.
Funny story, at my workplace we recently shipped a 700 pound, $100,000 robot across the country via FedEx.
When it arrived at its destination, somehow they had managed to rotate it vertically 90 degrees, even though every side of the crate was clearly marked as to which side was up. Sensors were smashed, cables were torn apart, joints were broken. The base frame wasn't ruined, but it was damaged.
We had it insured, fortunately, but getting paid for it didn't suddenly make our schedule not slip by several weeks.
Since then we have decided not to use FedEx again.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
this side up and fragile just mean they use it as a foot ball.
This information does not appear to be clearly stated on the Patreon page. While it could maybe be implied by the very brief bit at the end of the one post there, it's certainly nowhere near proving such allegations. In fact, it makes it sound rather like half the reason it had such a low insurance value was difficulty proving that these games really are worth $10,000. I also don't see anything saying it's the guy's childhood collection, or that he actually paid $10,000 for games worth that much - you can get fantastic bargains on retro games if you have patience and root around, so it's entirely plausible for someone on welfare to have managed to do so. Especially if he's too disabled to work, which as a seemingly long term claimant is likely, giving him a lot more free time than most people to do such bargain hunting. Do you have any additional sources you'd like to cite? Without them to provide a more complete picture, evaluating the accuracy of your claims is rather difficult.
I know i am going to get flack for this, but i don't like him.
When he was the zsnes sound dev, and higan was bsnes he purposefully sabotaged the zsnes alsa sound system by ignoring the dev documents and grabbing the audio hardware directly. When this was put up as a bug he refused to fix it by saying 'switch to oss'.
By that time oss had LONG since been deprecated because the company backing it tried to sell foss's devs hard work on the system as their own as a commercial *nix sound system.
So i consider this karma, he fucked with people's enjoyment of snes games because he had a software political belief. Some overworked and underpaid united states postal service worker nicks his package of thousands of dollars worth of snes games and claims the machine ate it.
That's the problem... You're just too darn friendly.
Much like any modern preservation of media. Games, television shows, books... Hell, even a modern preservation of ancient cave drawings would include super high res scans and such. Of course, this project is only dumping hashes of the actual game data, but that allows any archival copy to be properly verified as good. Which'll come in handy next time Nintendo wants to put "pirate" versions of ROMs onto the Virtual Console. Kinda embarrassing for them to be so anti-emulation (at least of the unauthorised kind) and then to be found to be using ROMs from the very "pirate" sites they supposedly despise.
I'm not defending anyone, I'm asking for information/verification of such accusations. Thank you for the link you provided, although it still does not back up your statements, or even disprove the hypothetical alternatives I described. Plus, possibly getting into trouble with welfare departments does not mean defrauding them, as a disabled woman who's never been capable of work (and so, always dependent upon welfare myself) I'm acutely aware that welfare rules can change suddenly, often into completely batshit crazy nonsense that doesn't even vaguely reflect reality, including the medical reality of many chronic illnesses. Hell, this guy seems actually willing to be "found out", as long as that would mean the media and the people were aware of the entire situation, rather than only that government department. People who are actually guilty of wrongdoing tend not to want a spotlight shone upon it, or to have their deeds deeply analysed and judged. So, yes, links to forum posts (preferable to images of them for various reasons, such as surrounding context) would be much appreciated if you'd like to expand upon or back up your claims :)
It's not just USPS that's gone downhill, either. California Overnight used to be super fantabulous. Now Amazon is using them and it's nothing but complaints. ...
At one of my previous apartments, my local UPS guy was awful (I'd be home, and see him walk over with a filled out slip saying I wasn't there, stick it on my door, and leave... without ever touching my package or knocking on my door). However, my local USPS guy was awesome.
At my current apartment, the situation is reversed. My USPS mail person routinely delivers all mail for the building to one of the 3 mail boxes, shoving it all in there. It often includes mail for neighbors, and even some completely random addresses that look nothing like this address. I'm frequently hand delivering boxes, and I rarely get my own deliveries, even though work from home and am always here when they walk by with my package, not even leaving a notice. I get notified by the seller that it was delivered, check USPS site, and find out it's now held at the post office. Requesting re-delivery has never worked. If I wanted to walk a mile and to stand in line and pick up my stuff, I would have gone to a store.
Between those, I had a HUGE issue with FedEx. That particular person just couldn't figure out and remember where my door was (it was a ground floor unit that opened to the sidewalk, while the rest of the building had a separate entrance). I was never able to get a successful delivery from them.
IE. while there may be some general issues or benefits to the various delivery outfits (UPS, USPS, FedEx, etc), the last mile has held most of my complaints, and the carrier doesn't seem to matter.
Finally getting to my point... back in the day, I used to be able to specify which delivery method and service I wanted to use when I ordered a package online. Every vendor allowed that choice. That allowed me to vote with my wallet, so to speak, and get the one that was working. I can't find that option anywhere now. IMO, that should almost be a crime. Even when I can specify UPS, UPS will often use USPS for the local delivery to save a few cents.
Bring back carrier choice when ordering items, and I think most of these issues would go away (that said, USPS would probably be 1/10th the size it is now).
The package being "found" is a lot more likely to happen now that some Postal worker realizes his theft has been made very very public, and that investigations are going to come his way and shine the light on what really happened if the games aren't returned. Or her.... Probably him.
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
I work in the logistics industry and truly, whatever you ship you should ASSUME it's going to be tipped on every side. To go from point A to point B, *generally* you should assume that's going to be handled (loaded/unloaded) at least 6-7 times - from you loading onto local truck, unloaded at local terminal, loaded onto route truck, unloaded at next terminal, loaded onto local truck, delivered at local place.
All handled by people who, even if reasonable, are in a tremendous hurry all the time. Some - for example, if someone has to move your THING out of the way to unload his company's THING from the truck - doesn't give the faintest shit what happens to yours.
"Do not stack" and "No Stack", while some conscientious handlers will respect them, usually only cause one to hesitate before loading that 1000lb pallet atop your crate. If yours has a flat smooth top, it WILL get loaded on.
No, I wouldn't use fedex for such a shipment, either. I'd find a good local LTL firm where you could make special arrangements - the larger/more anonymous the freight company, the less anyone cares about your stuff: after all, if it's broken insurance will pay for it.
-Styopa
I work in the logistics industry
In all seriousness, what company do you work at where it is at all reasonable for somebody to tip over a 700 pound crate that is clearly marked with "fragile" and "this side up" on every surface just because they are in a "tremendous hurry"? I will make sure to not use them.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
I was living abroad once and a family member sent me a care package. A box of food, inside which they had put a card. I guess they originally had planned to just mail the card, because it was in its own envelope and addressed, though it did not have a stamp. When they decided to send a package, they put together the package, slipped the card/envelope inside, and sent it all.
A couple months later, I went to the local post office and was handed the envelope. Addressed, but no stamp. Someone in the post office (or customs) opened up the package, removed the card, kept the package, and sent the card along to the final destination.
I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry. If I had never received the card, at least I could have pretended that the whole package was simply lost. Somehow that feels a bit better than knowing someone stole everything else.
"Nothing shocks me. I'm a scientist." -Indiana Jones
I work in an industry that believes if it's not important enough for YOU to pack correctly and safely, it's not our problem to babysit your stuff.
Sorry, your "super important package" is precisely as important to us as everyone else's.
-Styopa