Fast Snail Mail

This essay is about a suggested student project in Java programming. This essay gives a rough overview of how it might work. It does not describe an actual complete program. I have no source, object, specifications, file layouts or anything else useful to implementing this project. Everything I have to say to help you with this project is written below. I am not prepared to help you implement it; I have too many other projects of my own.

I do contract work for a living, which could include writing a program such as this. However, I don’t do people’s homework for them. That just robs them of an education.

You have my full permission to implement this project any way you please.

The CurrCon Java Applet displays prices on this web page converted with today's exchange rates into your local international currency, e.g. Euros, US dollars, Canadian dollars, British Pounds, Indian Rupees… CurrCon requires Java 1.1 or later, preferably 1.6.0_06 . If you can’t see the prices, of you if just want to learn more about CurrCon, click here for help.

If you want to send something to Indonesia fast, you are out of luck. What you could do is send it electronically, have it printed there or copied to floppy, then delivered by courier to a non-connected Indonesian company. They could send stuff back by having it scanned, (possibly OCRed), then sent back. With a decent scanner you could handle large documents or high resolution. All transmissions are compressed, digitally signed and encrypted.

You build an easy to use suite of software to handle electronic submission, routing, billing. You then encourage people throughout the world to set up interconnecting stations. It would be low overhead, and a extra source of income. For the most part the owner of the site would have to do absolutely nothing except put printouts in envelopes and apply the pre-printed labels. Submissions are handled completely electronically.

If the law will allow it, you could also send money by the same scheme. You might be able to bypass banking laws by buying and selling some token, such as shares in the company, or computer services. Banks charge about $50.00 CAD to wire money to Indonesia, and they keep it for a couple of weeks before delivering it. They make you fill in pages of forms, and wait in lines for hours. This service could handle it for peanuts with no wait time. Unfortunately with a buy/sell kludge you could end up with huge fees in sales taxes.

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