On 21 Sep 2006 09:29:41 GMT, put finger to keyboard
and typed:

In uk.d-i-y Mark Goodge wrote:
On 21 Sep 2006 07:52:42 GMT, put finger to keyboard
and typed:

In uk.d-i-y Mark Goodge wrote:

Also, the Royal mail website has a page giving details of SmartStamps,
and one of the items is about the barcode. It says about the barcode
that:

All information in the postage mark is encoded into a barcode
which read by Royal Mail sorting technology to prevent the
posting of fraudulent or duplicate items.

I'd be surprised if the Royal Mail sorting offices have instant online
communication country wide.

Why not? All it takes is an Internet connection at each office.

Plus a lot of software and databases to be able to match things
appearing on opposite sides of the country quickly.

Any client-server application with a central database can do that. As
a coding exercise, it's trivial. The only problem is what happens when
the connection goes down. But that's solvable by various means, so
it's not a major issue.

Mark
--
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