XPost: rec.arts.sf.written, rec.arts.sf.science   
   From: rod.speed.aaa@gmail.com   
      
   Bernard Peek  wrote   
   > Doc O'Leary wrote   
      
   >> My main question is why such a delivery service always seems limited   
   >> to one industry (e.g., lunch boxes).  I mean, it should be pretty easy   
   >> (I did it for my network) to abstract the need to just move *things* in   
   >> boxes.  It makes no sense to me, for example, that FedEx and mail and   
   >> pizzas and newspapers (and on and on) all use completely isolated local   
   >> delivery networks.  At the same time, I can't buy groceries from my   
   >> local co-op because they don't do deliveries at all, even though they're   
   >> right next to the pizza shop that does!   
      
   > The roots of my 'pod' system lies in an idea I had about 40 years ago   
   > when I first studied object-oriented programming languages. I noted   
   > at the time that the essence of shopping for something was to send a   
   > message to an object persuading it to change its ownership and location.   
   > I think we are now at the point where we could implement that.   
      
   Trouble is the immense infrastructure needed for it to be viable   
   and how that would be paid for. The big advantage with self   
   driving cars is that they use the existing infrastructure instead.   
      
   > It fits quite neatly into a possible future version of the HTTP protocol   
   > used for web pages although HTTP didn't exist at that time. The other   
   > thing I though of at that time (and wrote about in a letter to Byte) was   
   > an encoding scheme for non-latin characters.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)