Ok, I read the whole 2-page document, and it's clear that Federal Express, Airborne Express, UPS, DHL, and um, every other carrier violate it thousands of times per day. It has either been modified, reinterpreted, or abandoned more recently.
Hm, yes, so scary. What on earth would it be like if the USPS had offered the first e-mail service?
- USPS has very strict government regulations regarding privacy. Less distribution of your email address.
- USPS is non-profit. Less *motivation* to sell your email address. We wouldn't get more spam... instead, we'd be reasonably sure that if we never gave out our email addresses, we'd never get *any* spam. Not so with many (most?) of today's ISPs.
- Post offices are literally everywhere in the country. People who currently find email inacessible because they're in the boondocks might not be in this situation.
Fact is, if the post office had gone ahead with development of electronic mail, it probably would have been a lot like the proprietary services (i.e. AOL, CompuServe) before the internet boom. ARPA still would have seen a need for the internet, they still would have gone to university research (TCP/IP was invented at a public institution, with government money... and look how horrible it turned out), and USPS along with everyone else would have been scrambling to make themselves compatible with it.
The worst possible thing I can think of is that maybe those millions of AOL subscribers who currently have no concept of what the internet is, but manage to rampage across it anyway, would instead be USPS subscribers. Would that really be worse?
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, I read the whole 2-page document, and it's clear that Federal Express, Airborne Express, UPS, DHL, and um, every other carrier violate it thousands of times per day. It has either been modified, reinterpreted, or abandoned more recently.
"It's already illegal to compete with the U.S. Postal Service for non-expedited personal mail."
Um, you'd better mention that to UPS Ground service.
Can you actually point us toward the regulation that says this?
Hm, yes, so scary. What on earth would it be like if the USPS had offered the first e-mail service?
- USPS has very strict government regulations regarding privacy. Less distribution of your email address.
- USPS is non-profit. Less *motivation* to sell your email address. We wouldn't get more spam... instead, we'd be reasonably sure that if we never gave out our email addresses, we'd never get *any* spam. Not so with many (most?) of today's ISPs.
- Post offices are literally everywhere in the country. People who currently find email inacessible because they're in the boondocks might not be in this situation.
Fact is, if the post office had gone ahead with development of electronic mail, it probably would have been a lot like the proprietary services (i.e. AOL, CompuServe) before the internet boom. ARPA still would have seen a need for the internet, they still would have gone to university research (TCP/IP was invented at a public institution, with government money... and look how horrible it turned out), and USPS along with everyone else would have been scrambling to make themselves compatible with it.
The worst possible thing I can think of is that maybe those millions of AOL subscribers who currently have no concept of what the internet is, but manage to rampage across it anyway, would instead be USPS subscribers. Would that really be worse?
government != evil.