Eugene Leitl wrote:
>
> On Thu, 18 Oct 2001, Mike Lorrey wrote:
>
> > A solution to the 'anthrax in the mail' problem is rather obvious:
> > irradiate the mail. This would eliminate any threat of bacteriological
>
> A letter would take about a cent to process.
>
> > biowarfare through the mail, and may actually be useful against viral
> > contagions as well.
>
> Nice, how about plant seeds, spores or bacteria cultures I want to arrive
> alive at the other end? Photo film? Anything sensible to radiation?
Well, there are obviously different classes of mail already which are
treated differently. Since undeveloped film obviously goes to a limited
number of processing centers for a specific reason, this is obviously an
area for a specific exempted class of mail.
This may also require the employment of courier services, where said
package is chaperoned at all points in the shipment and said chaperone
can vouch for its security.
Film, floppy disks, data tapes, etc are all data storage formats that
need to be outmoded. This will force the shift to digital photography
for anyone that doesn't have their own darkroom or local developer (most
communities have at least one locally these days), and for the other
formats, there is this neat solution called the internet that any idiot
should be using already to move their data.
Seeds and other biological samples, if they are too low value to go the
courier route, should be in a class of mail where the sender
insures/bonds against it being bad stuff.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat May 11 2002 - 17:44:15 MDT