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Neil Williams wrote: > On Sat, 2008-11-15 at 07:47 +0000, tom wrote: > >> I was also interested in purchasing a bulk load of usb pen drives to >> send to third world countries so that students could save their work and >> take it with them, knowing that the data was safely in there hands and >> not at the mercy of the cyber cafe and the next user that logged on. >> >> Pen drives are easier to send in volumes to far off places.... >> > > I wondered about that - presumably the data on a USB stick is safe for > such mailings but I wondered if the contents have to be declared in > order to cross certain borders? > > (Mind you, the rate these things go missing from governments across the > world, it won't be long before some idiot claims that transporting such > things is a threat to national security.) > > I wonder if it would be possible to send these things through the more > paranoid border controls of, say, the USA. ;-) (You know, the ones who > confiscate laptops as "terrorist devices".) > > >> When I looked at this a couple of years back it was a chicken and egg >> situation. To get the discounts you had to buy large volumes and when >> you multiplied up the large volumes you ended up having to pay serious >> money. >> > > It's the serious money that permits the filling of the order. ;-) > > >> Perhaps if there are enough people out there who want to buy cheap but >> not necessarily "super" large volumes of pen drives we could form a >> consortium in order to get a reasonable discount for the volume they >> required ? >> > > I'm in - probably 50 per order. > > >> Perhaps a simple web page with contact email address, volume / capacity >> of pens required and desired unit price. >> > > Feel free to use the DCGLUG Wiki, or if the group could include people > outside DCGLUG, maybe wiki.earth.li: http://wiki.earth.li/LUGs > > >> Once we hit some "magic" >> numbers we could negotiate a bulk purchase price agreeable with the >> supplier / consortium members and then place an order. >> >> However consider that even if you could get 100 pen drives @ 50p each it >> is still costs £50. >> > > There's no way around that - real physical items are rarely completely > free, otherwise everyone would want hundreds. (Witness the Hoover > debacle a few years back.) > > Aria.co.uk offer 1Gb at £0.99 and Memorybits.co.uk in Jersey is another possible supplier. John -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html