In yesterday’s article on future shopping I outlined a concept I called a local depot. I want to expand more on that concept. The basic idea is web shopping from an urban warehouse complex with fast delivery not to your home, but to a depot within walking distance of your home, where you can pick up items on your own schedule that you bought at big-box store prices within hours. A nearby store that, with a short delay, has everything, cheap.

In some ways it bears a resemblance to the failed company Webvan. Webvan did home delivery and initially presented itself as a grocery store. I think it failed in part because groceries are still not something people feel ready to buy online, and in part for being too early. Home delivery, because people like — or in many cases need — to be home for it may actually be inferior to delivery to a depot within walking distance where items can be picked up on a flexible schedule.

Webvan’s long term plan did involve, I was told, setting up giant warehouse centers with many suppliers, not just Webvan itself. In such a system the various online suppliers sit in a giant warehouse area, and a network of conveyor belts runs through all the warehouses and to the loading dock. Barcodes on the packages direct them to the right delivery truck. Each vendor simply has to put delivery code sticker on the item, and place it on the conveyor belt. It would then, in my vision, go onto a truck that within 1 to 2 hours would deliver all the packages to the right neighbourhood local depot.  read more »

BSG is a combined UK/Canada/USA production. I think they missed a nice opportunity by not declaring that various colonies had various Canadian, American, British and other English-speaking nation's accents. Then most of the actors could work in their natural accent, though a few would have to switch, which of course they are capable of.

Not too many though. It's perfectly possible for a military father like Adama to have a different accent from his son Lee (who in real life has a strong British/Irish accent) by explaining that as a military brat, he grew up on a a different world, his father mostly absent in space. Many characters come from Caprica (which would presumably be assigned one of the Canadian or American accents) but because Caprica was the colonial capital, it would be pretty easy to explain characters there as immigrants. Aside from allowing actors to focus on other things besides doing the right accent, this would also have added a nice touch of character to the show, since we don't normally get a sense of these people as being from different planets which only united in CW1 the way we should.