> There was a problem that I noticed right away, though: this text was from the GPL v3, not the GPL v2. In my original request I had never mentioned the GPL version I was asking about.
>The original license notice makes no mention of GPL version either. Should the fact that the license notice contained an address have been enough metadata or a clue, that I was actually requesting the GPL v2 license? Or should I have mentioned that I was seeking the GPLv2 license?
This is seemingly a problem with the GPL text itself, in that it doesn't mention which license version to request when you mail the FSF.
Anyways I don't think this defense would ever fly in court. As soon as the plaintiff's lawyers produce evidence that you are aware of GPLv3 (such as pointing out that you have GPLv3 software on your PC or phone) the judge is going to see that you're trying to game the system on technicality and sanction you. Judges really don't like this sly loophole BS where it's extremely obvious that you're feigning ignorance for the sake of constructing an alternate reality where you hypothetically never knew there was a GPLv3.
If the sender requests GPL, I find it natural for him to receive version 3, because it's the latest version. At the time of receiving the license, he gains knowledge about the existence of version 3 (the header on the print says the GPL he received is version 3).
If the sender has a notice about GPLv2, it means that there's a high chance that there's also GPLv1. This should be a sufficient hint that requesting only "GPL" is not sufficient, because the sender should be aware of the risk of receiving GPLv1 if he won't mention the "v2".
Linux is actually the famed example of v2 but not v3.
A few years back I worked on an embedded linux project. For our first "alpha" release one of the testers read through the license agreement (as opposed to scrolling past all that legalese like most people do) and found the address to write to to get all the GPL source, he then send a letter to the address and it was returned to sender, invalid address. Somehow the lawyers found out about this and the forced us to do a full recall, sending techs to each machine to install an update (the testers installed the original software and were expected to apply updates, but we still had to send someone to install this update and track that everyone got it). Lawyers want to show good faith in courts - they consider it inevitable that someone will violate the GPL and are hoping that by showing good faith attempts to follow the letter and spirit the court won't force releasing our code when a "rouge employee" manages to violate the license.
The more important take away is if your automated test process doesn't send letters to your GPL compliance address to verify it works then you need manual testers: not only are you not testing everything, but you didn't even think of everything so you need the assurance of humans looking for something "funny".
If this test was reproduced today, we may see different results ;)
[1]: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/fsf-office-closing-party
> Standard mail forwarding lasts 12 months. You can pay to extend mail forwarding for 6, 12, or 18 more months (18 months is the maximum).
Edit for source: https://www.usps.com/manage/forward.htm
That's kind of awkward when you consider people will find that address for source code where that license file just wont be updated for decades to come, if at all.
With 20/20 hindsight, if the FSF had used a P.O. Box number in the license, the license addresses would always be correct even if the FSF office changed addressed or (as now) was no longer maintained.
Of course, the cost of a P.O. box over 40 years would have added up to thousands of dollars and that is less money for FSF advocacy. And time spent going to the post office to check the box would also have taken away from advocacy time.
Another physical mail DNS-like idea is mail forwarding -- but it typically has time limits at the post office although not for private mail forwarders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_forwarding "Private mail forwarding services are also offered by private forwarding companies, who often offer features like the ability to see your mail online via a virtual mailbox. Virtual mailboxes usually have options to get your mail scanned, discard junk mail and forward mail to your current address."
Although strictly speaking, these forwarding services are not quite like DNS (even if they do get at the idea of indirection). A true mail DNS would be more like a service you mail a post card to with a person's or organization's name and which mails a post card back to you which tells you what address to currently write to in order to reach that person or organization. (At least, if you write to that received address during some time-to-live window of validity of the address.) And I guess Encrypted DNS would be like you and the service using more expensive security envelopes instead of post cards? :-)
To be fair, renting office space in downtown Boston also adds up to tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of dollars, every year. By comparison, $500 dollars a year [0] for a medium PO Box (in the lobby of the building for their new office, no less!) is a steal.
This should not require any Internet access to view by whoever is scanning it to be sorted for delivery.
What happens when all project maintainers die and the source code disappears?
https://www.softwareheritage.org/ https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Codearchiver
the only issue "redoing" the request is that people at the old address can block it, so be sure to talk to them first.
That's so strange, especially when you consider that for legal purposes, if you receive mail at someone's home, you are now a "resident" and it is harder for police to kick you out. Why would anyone willingly want your mail to come to your address.
Disclaimer: in the USA
When reviewing stuff that introduces new emails and whatnot I always spend 10-20 seconds sending an email with "Please respond if you see this" to verify it actually works and someone receives it, as I've experienced more than once that no one actually setup the email before deploying the changes that will show the email to users.
Is this an actual, real risk? Has a court ever forced anyone to release their code because they were violating the GPL?
My understanding is that this is not how this works. If you violate the license you simply don't have a valid one and basically committing copyright infringement. The punishment for that isn't being forced to comply with the license, it's having to pay damages to the copyright owner.
Showing good faith doesn't really change the end result: you're using code that you don't have a license to. The only fix is to start complying or stop selling your software until you remove the code you don't have a license to use.
The text of the GPL is release source code. There are a few people who want release source code to be the only way out of any infringement. If a company intentionally violates the GPL that starts to look like a reasonable argument to courts. However if a company takes "enough" effort to not infringe and does anyway a smaller penalty would apply.
If you don't have a license and distributed software, then that is a copyright violation and the author is entitled to damages. Exactly what those are is something the court figures out. However one important piece of evidence is the license was release your source code. Thus lawyers want that additional cover of we knew and decided not to use GPL code, and there are the steps we took to ensure we didn't: since we took effort you shouldn't apply that extreme penalty.
I do know that good faith in other areas has made a difference. Companies have been caught bribing foreign officials before - which is a shut down the company level event (many countries have laws that if you bribe a government anywhere, not just in their country). However because the company could show they made good faith efforts to ensure everyone knew not to bribe this was just the act of a rouge employee.
How real is it? Hard to say. Good lawyers will tell you that putting in some effort to ensure you don't infringe is cheap protection even if the risk is low.
The address the OP sent a letter too has already been removed from the canonical version of the license (and was itself an unversioned change from the original address), and section 3 doesn't require a physical offer if the machine-readable source code is provided.
I stopped putting in requests for source code offers because I've had a 0% success rate.
If you put in a source code request and get no reply you should try to contact the copyright holder or someone like the Software Freedom Conservancy or the EFF, because they are breaking the law. There was a case recently in Germany where a court forced a maker of home routers to give up not just their source code, but also the scripts to install modified software - as required by the license. (As I understand it there is no precedent in a civil law system, but it does mean at least one judge believes Tivoization of GPLv2 software is illegal)
[0]: https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html
There is a slight possibility we have a driver that you could get access to, but without the hardware it won't do you any good. Once in a while we have hacked the source to fix a bug, but if it isn't upstream it is because the fix would be accepted (often it causes other bugs that don't matter to use), and in any case if it isn't upstream, the kernel moves so fast you wouldn't be able to use it anyway.
So presumably as a hardware company you'd be offering your hardware with your custom linux installed, and then people wanting to audit or hack the product they bought would request the code from you.
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/mar/25/install-gplv2/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/jul/23/tivoization-and-t... https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017...
Which changes as times change.
In the 90s, requiring access to the internet and an email address would have been exclusionary and decreased access.
Now, 30 years later, it's reversed and physical mail is difficult.
But from another perspective... the goal should be to ensure that anyone who wants to do a thing can, with as few third party requirements as possible.
In the sense that the FSF wants to be the exact opposite of {install this vendor's parking app to pay for parking} + {get an email account with this particular provider to ensure your email goes through} + {install TicketMaster for access to venue} + {this site requires IE^H^HChrome} all the other mandatory third-party choices we're forced into.
Postal mail, for all its faults, is universally accessible by design. And continuing to support the most accessible method of communication is laudable!
Accessibility and convenience >> convenience
This is a good starting point, but if you have no barriers then you get abuse problems which is why email is terrible. I remember being horrified in the 90s about attempts to charge 1 cent per email. Now I long for a world where that actually happened.
Even with the best spam filtering on email, I’m well over 5 minutes a week of distraction from it.
I think it's important to note that this isn't actually true. For a lot of homeless people or people who move often postal mail isn't as good. Online communication is actually more universal. Most (all?) public libraries have computers now.
Other than that, there’s good old ‘poste restante’, in which you can supposedly address mail to any post office and they’ll hold it for the recipient (even internationally), although I’ve never tried this.
(I appreciate that not everyone may actually know about these options, though.)
Even if you mean access instead of accessibility, presumably a person who can find a way to acquire stamps can just as easily make it to a library with public computers.
Some people find IRC less accessible, but I find having a phone number that I'm willing to give to a third party is a much more difficult requirement.
(The Agent Smith effect is something conspiracy theorists made up to explain why every time they show off their conspiracy theory in public, every single person around them suddenly gains the same opinion of them. I'm using it humourously)
Believe the repliers: I created an account in May 2024 and I have not added a phone number. Here's a screenshot from my settings: https://imgur.com/a/Q7kJpDv
But also, your eyes aren't lying to you: some servers require accounts to have confirmed phone number in order to join. So there is probably a lot of people who have had the experience of creating a Discord account, trying to join a server / accept an invite, and immediately seeing a "you must provide a phone number" prompt.
For a different country, I'd have no idea. Especially if it's so far away like the USA and I can't locally get a special reply post stamp. What I would have done is to put in 5€ in the envelope and call it a day. The person would probably be happy seeing other money.
This skill is something we expect of 8 year old children.
So I usually do some practice writing on scratch paper before attempting the final version.
Notice he said "printing the address would have taken less time". That doesn't sound like the issue was formatting or knowledge. It reads to me as the physical skill of penmanship.
It's not very far-fetched -- especially for regions where paper checks became outdated long ago, like my European friends have told me has been the case there since the Earth cooled.
So how, specifically?
These days, I get paid electronically. I pay my bills online. I bought some Forever stamps and mailing envelopes once about 5 years ago, but I haven't had any reason yet to use any of them. If I have to send out a package, I'm using a service like PirateShip and printing a self-adhesive label to keep it consistent with other packages. My work is usually done with a computer -- and when it is more hands-on, then it's usually work that doesn't imply writing anything at all.
When I want to take a quick note, I use my pocket supercomputer. For longer notes and correspondence, I use a real computer. If I need to draw a diagram to share with others, I'll probably be sharing it with them electronically so I produce that diagram electronically from the start.
I did use a pen the other day to draw a napkin sketch of a wiring diagram for some changes I want to make in my garage. AFAIK, I only have 1 working pen at home. I knew exactly where to find it; it was sitting in the last place I used it, about 3 months ago.
But now I'm inclined to reproduce that diagram electronically so I can easily move elements around and label it all clearly (so I can formulate a complete plan and spend more of my time doing the work instead of thinking about it once I get up on a ladder in the dark), so drawing it on paper may have been just a duplication of effort.
If I have time I prefer to scan forms and fill them out with a computer.
All my text generation is digital using either a keyboard or touchscreen.
I disagree. It requires taking time out of business hours, and they don't pay you your salary while you line up multiple times for 30 minutes each. I've sometimes had to line up for 2 hours total (4 times) just to mail one thing. Once to ask "how do i mail this", once to ask for a pen (couldn't cut the line because a Karen wouldn't let me), once because I filled the wrong form, etc. Typical USPS experience
You buy the stamps (from the post office, another shop with opening hours you prefer, or online), sick one on the envelope and put it in a mailbox.
Overcomplicating everything so you can grumble on the internet isn't required.
GP said postal services are "universally accessible". So first, it doesn't matter is it's "normal", it matters if it happens at all. And USPS does not represent postal mail universally - I have never even seen a USPS building in my life and don't expect to. Is postal mail as universally accessible to a homeless man in Laos and a 5-year-old kid in rural India? I think it's ludicrous to claim that postal mail is "universally accessible" and displays a huge Western bias.
I usually end up screwing it up a few times in the process too. I didn't realize that the free boxes they give you are only for 2 day service (and doesn't work for 1 day or 3 day). 1 day is a different box, 3 day is bring-your-own-box.
The pens they provide don't work, you have to line up to get a pen. You have to line up to ask a question. The workers are grumpy, the people in line are grumpy, I've had the experience that sometimes nobody will let you cut anything even if it's just for a pen or a piece of tape.
Oh and they charge you if you ask for more than about X of tape. It's a tricky dance. I think X is about 20cm. If you ask for 30cm, they will refuse even the 20cm and ask you to buy 300cm, which entails getting in the 30 minute line again (so the actual cost of the tape is 0.5 * your hourly consulting rate, so if you're a software engineer paid $100/hour of stocks and $100/hour of equity, that'll be a $50 roll of tape plus $30 of stock assumimng Trump just announced more tariffs). If you ask for 15cm, they might give you 20cm for free. It's tricky. I wish there were a sign that said "free tape: <=20cm" or whatever the actual number is, in front of each employee's desk.
Which reminds me, the actual number also seems depends on the mood of the USPS employee, so you also need to carefully watch your position in line so that you try to get yourself in front of the happiest employee. If the grumpiest employee is almost done with their previous customer, you have to fake needing to fix something really quick and let someone ahead of you in the line so that they get the grumpy one and you get the happy one. Or you can try to estimate the processing time of the few people ahead of you in line by eyeballing the complexity of shipping whatever they are holding, and time your place in line to be in front of the happiest employee when it gets to you. That way you are more likely to get more free tape to seal your box.
You also need to think about how to keep them happy. That usually involves some small talk. More small talk gets you more tape. Weather is a good safe topic on the east coast, because you can commiserate the bad weather with the USPS employee, but in California the weather is always good, so it doesn't make for good small talk, and the USPS employee might be at risk of going from happy to grumpy because they'd rather be outside.
I have seen people struggling to complete tasks at post offices and banks, queuing multiple times unnecessarily, being afraid of choosing the wrong options but not doing any research, etc. They don’t take the basic steps that the others in line do to make their visit work.
Shipping quotes are trivial to get online. It's also easy to print shipping with pirateship.
USPS picks up packages for free with your regular delivery.
Almost everyone will just use their search engine to find this page: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html
What can you do to serve the licence to those who can't or won't do that (for whatever reason)? I think it is hard to find something more universally accessible to serve that edge case.
You describe your story of how sending a letter went to you, and I admit it sounds like a bit of a pain. But you managed to do it. And by the sound of it you were totally novice at it. (didn't even bring your own pen!) Someone can do the same thing you did anywhere from Nairobi, McMurdo, Pyongyang, or Vigánpetend.
It is not "universally accessible" in the "easy and comfortable" sense. It is "universally accessible" in the "almost anywhere where humans live you can access this service" sense.
I have multiple computers and phones, I thought that was the interface to the post-2000 world.
I do have paint, but that's a little clumsy.
I grudgingly own a box of BIC pens now, but ... It's like requiring people to own a horse to do something these days. And in past experience during school days, those goddamn BIC pens all go bad (ink dries up or something), before I use even 5% of one of them.
I realize this all probably sounds very silly to someone born before 1980 but ... yeah it's just the reality of the world, I don't normally need pens to do anything, and am used to pens being provided in the rare occasions I need to sign a receipt or something, and usually I just end up drawing a cat on the signature line.
I was born after 1980 and I think you're beating a dead horse, here. You're conflating accessibility with convenience. Not just with this comment, but others you've made in this thread.
> those goddamn BIC pens all go bad (ink dries up or something), before I use even 5% of one of them.
Grab the pen by the end opposite the nib, give it a good shake for a few seconds, lick the nib, scribble on a scrap piece of paper until it starts writing again. Problem solved. You can't resurrect a dead laptop or computer by licking and shaking it (at least I've never succeeded in doing so).
But i have been exactly where you are. We were having a book club and trying to vote on the next book to read, and turns out none of us out of twenty literature loving people had a single pen on us. So yeah, that is for sure the current reality.
> usually I just end up drawing a cat on the signature line.
Thats awesome! Do the they accept it usually?
The only place I've had it mattered is when signing bank documents in Asia.
That's very much your problem, and the rest of the world doesn't need to accommodate it.
Paper is on its way out, electrons are the new medium.
So it would've been pretty rich for someone to say, "talking to these illiterate peasants to their faces is on its way out. Don't they know that writing is the new medium?"
No, the ink does not dry. What happens is that the ball gets stuck if it is used too infrequently. This is solved by rubbing it against paper, or even better something rubbery. The underside of most people’s shoes works well for this. Just last week I used a Bic that was at least 30 years old. These things are very dependable.
I find this mind-boggling.
I immediately came up with a parallel -- "they wanted me to walk to the counter but I do not own shoes."
Which took me to the universe of Pixar's _Wall-E_ and now I can't help but imagine that the subset of "people born after 1980" are helpless in their floating chairs and apparently I am aberrant because I learned to walk, and that makes me old.
https://www.usps.com/ship/online-shipping.htm
If you're talking about letters, the innumerable blue drop boxes.
Not having envelopes at the ready is one thing, but ordering stamps... on eBay??? And then wasting a few envelopes because writing down the address is unusual? That kind of blew my mind.
I am a software engineer, and I always have a paper notebook and a pen next to my keyboard to write down stuff.
I guess this all tells me I'm getting old :-).
OP was ordering US stamps to include _in_ the letter, on an SAE (self-addressed envelope) they were sending _from_ the UK, so that the FSF could reply (from the US) using said stamps.
As a millennial myself, I have no idea where else I'd look for <recipient country> stamps should I want to include them on a SAE I was sending to said country, so that they recipient wouldn't incur the cost of replying to me.
I don't find looking on eBay particularly strange, though I'd do a quick search for alternatives first.
I would try to buy them online from their post office. For the USA, there is https://www.usps.com/business/postage-options.htm:
“Print Labels Online with Click-N-Ship
With your free USPS.com account, you can pay for postage and print just one label or a batch of shipping labels online”
Germany has (https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/germany-news/deutsche-pos...):
“You simply need to open the app, select the appropriate postage service, tick “Code for labelling” (Code zum Beschriften), and pay with PayPal. You will then immediately receive a code, consisting of the letters #PORTO and an eight-digit string, which you must write in pen in the top right-hand corner of the envelope or postcard. Then, just pop it in the post box, and you’re done! The code is valid for 14 days and can only be used for Germany-bound mail.”
That 14-day limit may not be a good idea for this use case.
In addition, the 14-day limit no longer applies. Deutsche Post were challenged in court, and the digital stamps must now last for as long as conventional stamps do:
https://nrwe.justiz.nrw.de/olgs/koeln/j2023/3_U_148_22_Urtei...
Is return postage something that, normally, my local post office would help me with? E.G. do they have some method of marking or adding post to a package that would be accepted globally (or at least within the destination country)?
I think I've sent far more international letters and parcels than domestic. Christmas cards for elderly relatives in the country I was born in, and postcards when I travelled abroad.
Some obscure things I sold on eBay were mostly sent abroad.
United Kingdom
The Royal Mail stopped selling IRCs on 31 December 2011[26] due to a lack of demand. United States
The United States Postal Service stopped selling international reply coupons on 27 January 2013.[27]
"""
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_reply_coupon#Uni...
That explains why I was confounded in my efforts to search within USPS results.
https://shop.post.ch/en/packing-sending/sending-letters/regi...
> I was disappointed to find out that the UK’s Royal Mail discontinued international reply coupons in 2011. The only alternative that I could think of was to buy some US stamps.
I don't have any pens, paper or a printer in my house, so I'd probably go to my workplace if I needed to send a letter nowadays. I do occasionally send a parcel though, which involves printing off a shipping label, so the process isn't completely alien.
I'm not sure exactly what you think people must be handwriting:
- Notes? I use Obsidian for work notes, Google Keep for stuff like shopping lists
- Signatures? Delivery receipt signatures are done with a finger on a touch screen, stuff like employment contracts and finance paperwork have basically all moved to e-signatures. I genuinely think the last thing I signed with a pen might have been my mortgage, and that one I had to go to solicitor's office anyway as it had to be officially witnessed.
- Paper forms? Print, sign and scan was occasionally requested until a few years ago, but I did it in the office because I also didn't own a printer at that time. Even "important government forms" are done online now.
I do have an iPad with an Apple Pencil, but even that I use quite rarely - though I at least know where it is. If I'm annotating a PDF, that would be my tool of choice.
Aside from that, I'm not sure that my daily life is really that unrecognisable from anyone else's. Just that instead of writing stuff on paper, I either type it or tap it on my phone. For maths, I'm just quite quick at TeX input.
I did print a page at work recently, the second one since I started my job 5 years ago.
I did have a small inkjet printer at one point, but the ink kept drying up, so in the end it was costing me £10 and a trip to Tesco every time I needed to print something. Thought about getting a laser, but it's quite a lot of space to waste on something I use so rarely. I might get one of those little thermal printers that are small enough to keep in a drawer.
Sending letters isn't an alien concept to me either. I'm old enough to have done it regularly as a kid. I especially liked the part where you have to write the zip code in those machine-readable digits.
How long ago was that? The machine have gotten really good at deciphering regular handwriting quite a while ago.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Russian_postal_codes...
It was pretty recognizable as trolling--the very good and clever "old school Internet" style of trolling where it sounds plausible and sincere, but then you get done reading it and say, "Oh lawd, he got me! Good one!" The kind of writing that people used to spend a lot of time perfecting on Slashdot. I refuse to believe there are adults out there where things like using a pen to write and mailing a letter are alien concepts that need to be learned. It was very earnestly written though, bravo!
Well, believe it. I'm in my 40s and haven't written a letter since I was a kid. Why would I ever have to? Ask someone who was born in 2003 if they've ever written and mailed a letter. 99% are going to say no.
That's crazy to me - tax returns for our micro-business and personal tax has been online since at least 2005.
Attaching statements — This program does not allow you to attach any documents to your return, except those available through the program. If you need to attach any such documents, you will have to print and mail in the return.
Especially with business returns, it's common to have to attach statements to certain forms, for example if you choose the de minimis election for equipment repairs that would otherwise have to be capitalized, or when the § 174 changes went into effect and everyone had to start amortizing software development expenses over multiple years. You can't do that on Free File Fillable Forms.
Why didn't you efile like a normal person? The only time you need to do it the hard way is if you are under 16 and filing for the first time.
Edit: In hindsight, I could have just waited until the start of 2025 to update my address in the HR system and gotten a single, normal W-2, but then I would be both violating the remote work rules (by not adding my new work location) and (probably) committing tax fraud.
Even older relatives - we sent a physical gift a bit ago, but the response/thanks was by text. It just doesn't make sense to send a letter, have it take a week, never know whether it got lost, etc.
It certainly takes less time than writing a check and stuffing an envelope, though, what with saved credentials and smartphones; I can do this in a matter of moments while lying in bed every other Friday morning.
0. Went to Fedex to check on the shipping cost for this tiny box. It was $120 so I passed
1. Went to USPS, found that they were closed, the only option was a 30 minute line to use the machine. Lined up for 30 minutes, found that it the goddamn UI on the machine did not support international shipments.
2. Went home to generate a USPS international shipping label. $25, much more acceptable. FedEx should be out of business.
3. I didn't have a 2D printer at home, tried to 3D print the shipping label with 1 layer of white and 1 layer of black but it wasn't high resolution enough in the X/Y direction for the label to be readable so I gave up
4. Went to FedEx to use their 2D printers but realized I forgot my USB drive at home
5. Went home to get my USB drive
6. Back to FedEx, realized I forgot my mask (this was COVID times, so no go)
7. Went home to get my mask
8. Back to FedEx, printed the 2D shipping label
9. Back to USPS, found out they had no tape
10. Back to FedEx to buy a roll of tape because I don't know where the hell else to buy tape same day, and all my tape at home are electrical tape, teflon tape, or Gorilla tape
11. Back to USPS and the stupid package drop box had a mechanical issue preventing it from opening more than a few cm, not enough to fit my package
12. Went to another USPS to drop the package
This sentence really captures the absurdity of this story.
Right?
Those crazy retail rates exist so businesses can get big discounts. The company I work with ships maybe half a dozen packages international with FedEx a year and they still give us like 60-70% off retail.
You have a USPS drop box for tiny boxes in front of your house.
I can't afford a house ($2M+ where I live), so I don't have one of those mailboxes. My apartment complex doesn't have a visible USPS pickup anywhere that I know of.
If you meant those inverted U shaped things that look like they are from WW2 (maybe WW1?), I forgot about those, but somehow I never know how frequently they are checked ... there is no indicator about when they were last opened and I wonder whether the mailman might just forget about a couple of them in odd parts of town, which is why I always feel more "secure" dropping it at a USPS.
I was once walking down the street when I saw a presumably-GenZ person who thought they were a trash can and casually dumped trash in it so there's also that concern, if everyone is using them as trash cans now ...
They usually a slot or little door for outgoing letters, if your package was larger than that, sometimes you can leave them at the 'office' of your complex if they have one. But yeah, in your case, going to an actual post office might have been the solution if you don't trust the street mailboxes.
Some adults were born in 2007
I wouldn't expect them to need to buy a pen first, or to need several attempts to write 10 words nearly.
I don't think it's just a age/generation thing though. I'm one year older than my wife, but I grew up in Sweden in the 90s, she grew up in Peru. Somehow, sending/receiving letters was something I've done multiple times growing up, but she never did, and wasn't until we were living together in Spain in the 2010s that she for the first time in her life sent a letter via the street mailboxes. She's not in tech either, if that matters, while I am.
In your country,
- how do you get a new bank card, when the current one expires?
- how are you informed about a change like a price increase for electricity?
- how do you pay for electricity? (Knowing how much to pay, when etc) What about an elderly person?
The electricity company has their own employees to deliver paper monthly statements to all their customers, they can attach other communications if needed.
My bank has a connection to the electricity company, and can look up in realtime what my open balance is, which you can view and pay in the banking app. You can also pay it in cash at various offices (e.g. Western Union) around the city.
You can also just give the electricity company permission to automatically take it out of your account every month (ppl don't trust the electricity company to get the amount correct, so folks don't usually do this. I do this for the water bill though).
(this is my experience living in Ecuador for 10 years, I'm from the Netherlands, most of this is weird to me :)
Contrast to where I live now (Spain) where I can still go to the bank to deposit/withdraw money, so the use case for the branch/building/office is kind of obvious.
You don't even visit a branch to become a customer as long as you have an account with some other bank, which gives you BankID, a digital ID/signature system that's ubiquitous in Sweden. I have accounts with three Swedish banks. Of those, one doesn't have physical locations to visit, and a second I never visited. It's surely been ten years since I went to the third, my main bank, in person, and the branch office I went to closed years ago. Looking it up, my main bank only has one office left in the city, it's only open for three hours a day and requires a prior appointment for any services.
Cash is only handled by a few bank branches (not all banks) and even then by prior booking - cash has been pretty much gone from society for a while now. Your card gets sent to you by postal mail. If you need to talk to someone at the bank, they'll suggest telephone or video calls, and will only see you in person as a last resort. Safe deposit boxes have also been largely discontinued as a service.
But it should be noted, except the physical objects, those letters can be also replaced with other means of communication. Just calling people via phone is common, or nowadays sending an email will also do the job. In my country we have a working and reliable postal system, but companies are still replacing letters with digital communication as far as laws allow it. Payments are also running automatically, so the bills are more informative and for taxes.
The bank sends it through mail but they warn you that if it doesn't arrive within 2 weeks you should go in person to the bank to retrieve it. Depending on where you live there's a 50/50 chance that it never arrives through mail so you just wait 2 weeks and go to the bank.
> - how are you informed about a change like a price increase for electricity?
Email. Or the news channel for elderly people (if the increase is too big). If the increase is small that's a fact of life, everyone just expects it to increase a bit every 2 or 3 months.
> - how do you pay for electricity? (Knowing how much to pay, when etc) What about an elderly person?
Website or bank app. There are physical places that take cash payments and do the online process for you, elderly people generally use those.
For bank cards you go to their branch and get a new one from a person who works there, or by interacting with a terminal which prints your name on a blank card and spits it out. Some banks deliver them to your home address by courier service and hand them over in person, and they're not "elite" or special by any means.
Utilities are paid through online/mobile banking, there are many alternatives and it takes maybe 10 seconds. Even my 70-something year old relatives use them. Some even older ones rely on help from others, or to go physical bank branches and pay there (which wastes a lot of time of everyone waiting in line to be serviced — I don't personally know anyone who does that, but have seen it a couple of times).
Price increases? Local news, or you can subscribe to receive them by email. Or just check in the online banking app when it's time to make another payment, it's all there.
As for price changes regarding utilities (or really, anything) we get an e-mail from the service provider or from the landlord (who then gets an e-mail from the service provider). We also pay for utilities via an online bank transfer or automated subscription to the service provider or to the landlord via a bank transfer (who then pays via an online bank transfer or has an automated subscription).
Elderly people set up automatic subscription services in their local bank branch or by calling the bank, I have not heard of a single elderly person using mail to pay for anything.
My electricity payment is direct debit - though I can pay manually via the app if I wish. The app has the amount on it, and they notify of service changes via the app and email. I suppose that if I ignored the electronic notifications they'd eventually send me a letter.
Even if you do get your statements by post, basically nobody here would pay for it by mail. If you really hate computers, you can pay over the phone, or set up a direct debit by phone/letter, or use a "PayPoint" - which includes most corner shops, supermarkets and post offices. It's also quite common for elderly people to just have one of their younger relatives manage it all for them.
https://apnews.com/article/postnord-denmark-postal-service-m...
To our questions from Germany:
- by Post, but I can imagine this changing as payment via phone/watch/... is spreading and I can imagine banks willing to reduce cost, making physical cards an paid extra.
- on my contract via e-mail and the energy company's website. There are paper based contracts available, though.
- In Germany/Europe SEPA wire transfers work well for that and are being used for decades, even with online banking being wide spread in the 90ies. (Pre Internet via BTX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bildschirmtext )
> Writing the address on the envelope was awkward, as I haven’t used a pen in several years; it took a few attempts and some wasted envelopes, printing the address would have taken less time
Some time last year, when trying to write something by hand and finding it alien and awkward, it occurred to me that for probably something like 15 years, and maybe more, I've perhaps not written more than a hundred words (signatures aside) by hand per year.
I have kids, so nearly all those words are on the stupid forms they constantly make you re-fill-out from scratch for no apparent reason at doctor's offices. If not for that, it'd be even lower. Some years I bet I was under 50. I go months without writing more than two or three words, total.
The envelopes I'm used to look like this: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B2%D0%B5...
I'm an American and I've used envelopes that have lines to write addresses on. I used to see them every now and then. In fact, I have about half a box sitting in my filing cabinet next to me that I probably haven't used for years.
Many envelopes don't have the lines, though.
https://help.royalmail.com/personal/s/article/How-to-address...
My father writes the address staggered; that is, each subsequent line being indented a centimetre or so relative to the previous line. Were you taught to stagger the address at your school in the 90s?
Now that I'm reminiscing a bit, it was also fairly common at the time for people to order a batch of sender labels that they could affix to the envelope. My grandparents had particularly distinctive golden metallic labels which meant you could instantly tell who it was from (if you didn't already recognise the handwriting).
AFAIK modern Russian ones just say "Почта России", but the overall design is retained, including pre-labelled lines for various parts of address.
My coworker looked at me like I was crazy. "The what?"
"The normal printer paper, the 8.5 by 11 inch paper"
"Why do you know the exact size of printer paper??"
I did not know how to respond to this question.
I've never seen it in any office or stationary shop in Europe. It's available online, at a premium.
Thus HP printers continually displaying "PC LOAD LETTER" on printers outside the US dealing with documents generated by people in the US.
Only if there is an issue with the rollers or something and it can't feed the paper from the paper cassette. No one ever wants to read the manuals or do basic troubleshooting though. Hell newer ones have a menu on them that will walk you through each of the troubleshooting steps, but people would rather put a post-it on it saying it's broken.
For anyone else curious as I was: Mexico is the 4th country, and I don't believe there are any others (but I could be wrong).
You’re so funny heheh
If I format the page size, Libreoffice does offer "Letter" and "Legal". GIMP shows them as "US Letter" and "US Legal" but again they're not the default.
It wouldn't surprise me if most non-US users hadn't seen them at all, and certainly not that they don't realise the US uses a different size.
In most cases it still doesn't matter, either because software defaults to scaling to fit, or else because the margins are large enough that it works out even if printed in true size. But sometimes stars align and then you learn about those weird paper sizes.
Back in the old days when people still wrote by hand, they also made mistakes, but just scribbled them out and kept going. Starting over was only necessary with doing something special.
[1] Still around: http://mixsoftware.com/product/powerc.htm
https://shop.post.ch/en/packing-sending/sending-letters/regi...
I leave it to y'all to monkey-knife-fight for the rest of the roll.
The post-its can be sorted, stacked, moved, stuck to pertinent notebook pages, altered, and ultimately recycled when they are no longer relevant. It's much freer than a document on a phone or computer, where it can still be a pain to move information from one domain to another.
It's also much easier these days to find out how to correctly format an address for a given destination. (At least for alphabet-based languages; I recently tried to decipher a Korean address in a business park and got nowhere fast.)
It's efficient to transmit information over the internet, but it's still essential to send physical items by post. When I visit USPS branches, I always see plenty of people mailing packages.
Sometimes I cut out my address from a bill and tape that on as my return address. I know it’s formatted right.
I’d definitely do the same on a “self”-addressed stamped envelope that I need returned.
You still have to send back your cut up old driver's license, though I have my doubts that someone is sat there checking and cross referencing each one they receive.
The stamps I have, I bought years ago - by now, they don't cover current letter prices. I wind up putting too much postage on the letters, because I'm not going to go buy even more stamps that I probably won't need...
Indeed.
The author also seems unaware that a 1991 document could not contain a Web address because the world wide web did not exist yet. They guess it is because it is not widely available. That astonished me.
Always interesting discussions with my wife who works in an office where paper mail, fax machines, and signing things on paper all happen multiple times every single day.
Wow -- I mean, sure, I don't use a pen that often, but I'm sure I hand-write something at least once a month...
Personally, I find pen and a memo pad much handier than a phone. There is no unlocking, searching, or loading. And I can write much faster than tap a little screen keyboard. Even more importantly, on my memo pad there are no notifications to completely sidetrack my lizard brain.
But aside from the practical, it is also just such a nice change of pace to use analog technologies when I can. I use my computer and write software all day. It's good to get a break sometimes.
(I do some handwriting for notes taking, but that's some writing based on block letters, not script as in a signature)
I'm not sure I could ever prove I am who I say I am using my signature. My wife signs my name most of the time when it's necessary for a check or a health form for the kids or whatever. Whenever I go to vote, I try to sneak a look at their copy of the form to see how I signed it when I registered. I think my credit union has one 'on file' for me, but I'm sure it's nothing like how I actually sign my name and is from ~25 years ago.
FWIW I have a signature that is barely recognizable as my two initials, and I have never had it rejected on such grounds in the five different countries (using two different scripts) I've had to sign documents using it.
I don't have roommates, but if I did we'd probably use a whiteboard for tracking errands and schedules.
What date are you putting on the food? Every packaging here in Spain (and Europe I assume) has both the production date and "best before" dates printed on them from the factory, and stuff that doesn't have packaging you know if they're bad by looking/smelling/tasting.
I also label things like the date I install a new HVAC filter, or how much to cut off on a piece of lumber, etc.
For most foods evolution has graced us with the ability to see, smell or taste any issues well before they actually become a problem. There are some things you have to look out for like botulism or salmonella, but for simple foods like bread and milk there isn't much point in taking precautions
But then I am in UK where milk is easily obtained in 2 pint or less packages and is all long term - over a week. It is harder to gat 4 int or gallon containers which I think are more common in the US.
Except sometimes the 1/2 gallons will be randomly on sale where you can get like 3 of them for the price of a gallon. Milk economics makes no sense to me. But yeah, it's usually cheaper to buy more than you need and just throw it out if you don't use it, as is the American way.
What do I have on me basically all the time? My phone.
I've done everything in Apple Notes for years now, and it's so much less hassle, and actually works for me. I just make sure to include words I might use to search for a note, when writing a new note. Search does the rest. I can and sometimes do organize things into directories, but usually it's kinda wasted effort. Search is enough.
Meanwhile, the few dozen pages scattered across four or five notebooks that I generated in that brief kick remain, passively, a pain in the ass. I've carted them through two moves, meaning to digitize them, because when I remember they exist and browse I'm like "oh yeah, that was a good idea!" but, out of sight out of mind and when I stumble across them I'm always in the middle of doing other, more important shit.
In what is perhaps the most ironic blend of high and low tech, I wrote my own software to build grocery lists, which I then print and use a pen to cross items off as I shop. This is by far the most efficient vs trying to faff about with some mobile solution.
(I know other apps have also done it, but having it on a built-in is really handy and it works well)
UNIX is a friendly environment for me to write my own software like this. Phones are hostile, they’re more like appliances. Pair up UNIX with old-school peripherals like printers and I’m in business.
But yeah I love my phone for its appliance-like uses.
For notes especially I find the digital version preferable because it is automatically archived, searchable, and readily accessible across all my devices.
Visa's debit card limit on Denmark seems to be 100,000 DKK, roughly 13,000€. There's no limit with the national system, Dankort.
Faster payments [0] is pretty much instant. Some banks have lower limits, and CHAPS[1] is same day and unlimited. I used faster payments for buying a car, and for paying a house deposit. My bank transferred my mortgage via CHAPS.
[0] https://www.starlingbank.com/resources/banking/guide-to-fast... [1] https://www.hsbc.co.uk/current-accounts/what-is-a-chaps-paym...
and a normal check is the same as an ACH transfer, so I will do the ACH transfer
or lawyer's escrow
and every other larger transfer has been cryptocurrency in my life, its been over a decade of that unlimited amount, zero scrutiny, 24/7/365 option
(I've tried various other country's and international system transfers, and the convenience is completely over-embellished, and limited to small amounts at best. and yes, I'm talking about instant SEPA in European banks. A lot of people don't have balances in crypto currency so it would just be more inconvenient for them to get into that system)
but the only time I'm personally using checks are because a new employer's HR system wants me to write VOID on a physical one, and I've opted to photoshopping a template with my account number and routing number, because checks are the same as an ACH transfer, and they could have just asked me to copy and paste those numbers into a input field
(But we can also just scan the QR code of the recipient's bank account with the e-banking app and initiate a transfer that way.)
I'm in the US so I use permanent marker to write my lawyers phone number on my arm before protests
And yet as far as I can tell, most middle class Americans seem to refer to "their lawyer". Do you pay a monthly fee? Are they a criminal defence lawyer, or something broader? How often do you talk to them? How do you find them?
It is possible to have an attorney on retainer though, either as a consequence of having hired that attorney in the past or as part of a subscription service.
I've only run into this among the so-called "upper middle class" here (e.g., physicians making $500K+/yr) and even then it's pretty rare.
Funnily enough, Americans do not use the term solicitor; that's reserved for lawyers working for the government!
It is certainly a rare term in American English. I associate it with the probably now-archaic "NO SOLICITORS" signs, which used to be commonly used in an effort to ward off door-to-door salesmen and such. The specialized usage you are referring to is the use in titles of certain important government lawyers (I'm only aware of this in the federal government). The most famous is the Solicitor General, which is an appointed official in the Department of Justice whose job is mainly to argue on behalf of the government before the US Supreme Court.
Now I journal on a paper notebook, take daily notes on a whiteboard and I'm rediscovering index cards for long term storage, but I wish real life had a search function.
If I had an automated scanning + OCR + convert to Org system, I would never use a text editor for notes ever again.
I think that gives the improved retention plus easy filing of the result and if your writing is like mine the ability to actually read what you wrote a year before.
For my blog, I can usually go straight to typing, but for my bigger projects I start by writing out any ideas, research, etc. I find that writing stuff helps me recall it later, even if I don't actually read the notes. It's especially helpful for big blobs of interconnected ideas.
Schools used to teach this a minimum but they no longer do. It was also standard to learn that for job hunting but, again, I don't think many people apply for jobs by post nowadays although it can still be useful to know how to write a formal cover letter.
I'm sure I do too, but I couldn't actually tell you what I used it for. Probably to cross items off a shopping list or sign my name on something. Actually we got a new car and I needed to sign the form at the DMV to get license plates, so I guess that was it.
https://github.com/moritz/otrs/commit/e845575e1848fd0124fb8d...
And of course, as happens more often, this issue was raised to us by Debian developers, who care a great deal about 'correctness'
Free Software Foundation 31 Milk Street, # 960789 Boston, MA 02196 USA
Many GNU projects use a rule that will fail 'make distcheck' when it sees an address in the sources [2].
[1] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnulib.git/commit/?id=bf31... [2] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnulib.git/commit/?id=086c...
Made a note to add an fsf-address check to check-all-the-things.
I make a practice of sending (picture) postcards to each of my descendants, when i arrive at a new place. It is a very rare occasion when I can find them, even rarer for the vendor to know what they are. Once the vendor was insisting that a flash card (smallish, lined cards for taking notes) was indeed a postcard. Sadly, I often have to buy them at the airport on arrival.
Occasionally actually post them before I leave a place (ideally soon after I arrive).
Generally they arrive substantially after I get back.
It is so much fun to watch my spawns showing me the cards they got with strange stamps and neat pictures of far away lands. I address them individually, so there are plenty to write, still fun.
These are called “index cards” in the US, although you can certainly use them to make flash cards if you want. Source: Am old enough to have used index cards unironically.
I'm probably younger than you by quite a bit.. no descendents, no time to travel, not allowed in many countries or US states anyway
I can pretty much guarantee it'd be an adventure for my teen, nearly adult, children.
I'm old enough to remember penmanship in school, but I was into computers from a young age so my penmanship ended up just as bad as author.
I did improve it a lot by getting a penpal through reddit. We communicated for a year and change, and during this time I went through the process of learning to be patient and write my letters slowly so they were legible.
It hurt my hand a lot to write a whole letter and I felt like I had said about as much as I have in this comment, but with time I became faster and faster.
Now probably 10 years later I still take a greater care when I write, ensuring each letter is legible.
Circa 2010, I bought a vintage Concept2 Model B rowing machine, made in the 1980s, and wanted to fix it up. The paper order form I found for parts was similar to those tiny order forms at the bottom of an ad in an old comic book, where you'd handwrite your return address, and it told you the address to mail it to, with your payment.
Somehow, not only did this address still reach them, but they were set up to fulfill parts orders this way, they actually had the parts for this decades-old model, and sent me the parts (for a pittance), and they tossed in a free service manual.
I already loved the product (from using it at gyms), and now I loved the company.
I wonder what percentage of 25 year-old URLs still work.
Wild that so many commenters don't see the satire dripping from the post. Is it just a UK thing to never take things at face value?
That’s what I usually get on the envelopes from stamp sellers: decades old stamps from the “bad investment” portions from stamp collectors.
I contacted the seller and it turned out her husband was a stamp collector and gave her his low value cast-offs to use as postage. I found it amazing that 30+ year old stamps were still valid. It's only recently they've become invalid postage as now stamps require a barcode.
Also I used to get items delivered to my office, and the office manager's husband was a stamp collector, so she used to ask to keep the stamps I got (I used to order electronic components from all over the world) so this completed the philatelist cycle.
Another old currency anecdote. I used to work on the checkouts at a supermarket in Cambridge circa 2009 and at least two times we'd get visiting academics from the USA who had studied in the UK years before and they'd try to pay with currency they'd had from the time, except it was the awesome old pre-decimal money (We switched to decimal in 1971). I found it quaint that they thought it was still valid and thought to bring it with them.
We can't see the full set of "lower denomination" stamps on the letter, but I'm not 100% sure it's actually lower denomination. The sender of the stamps seems to be using the "2 domestic forevers + some amount of cents = 1 global forever" formula. I think the UK sender didn't need to include _two_ global forevers.
From the blog, the letter from California was dated April 2022, at which point the rates were domestic = $0.58 and global = $1.30. So the California sender correctly attached two domestics valued at $1.16 total plus an additional $0.14 to make $1.30.
It would be hard to know that ahead of time though. The global forever stamp is good for letters up to 1oz which can be as little as 4 US letter pages. It took the FSF 5 double-sided pages. Granted, it looks like lightweight paper & the post office doesn't seem to be very picky about this. But I think sending two forever stamps was being on the safe side.
>...... "Oh Well."
May have been more apt.
Is eBay really anyones first thought when looking for a (non-collector) stamp to (actually) mail?
Perhaps he should have picked up a few £1 coins on eBay, use them to purchase some stamps from the post office?...
I guess the a more "digital native" way would have been to first check if the USPS supports some kind of downloadable/printable stamping method, like QR codes or pre-bought labels (which, according to come early comment, they do).
The FSF has moved a few times.
* 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge.
* 59 Temple Place, Boston
* 51 Franklin St, Boston
* 31 Milk Street, Boston
The first address wasn’t around for too long, but does still exist. It’s an office building above a bank in Central Square, Cambridge right above the Red Line stop.
The second address was around for a long, long time. A few years ago, the building was demolished and turned into a hotel. I don’t know if 59 Temple Place is still a valid address or not. For this one, I found many of most frequent places and filed bugs to get it updated. Greg K-H helped me update the kernel and many of the issues I opened got resolved with other projects. Worth noting too that the FSF had two different offices in the same building but mail would go to the building. Mail did forward from here to the next address for a while, but I’m not sure if it’ll forward again to the latest address.
51 Franklin St is just around the corner from 59 Temple Place. When they moved here, many staff were able to walk their stuff over to the new office. This one finally closed last year. I worked here my entire time at the FSF.
The final one is a PO Box but also around the corner from 51 Franklin St.
https://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~trent/gnu/bull/16/gnu_bulletin_23....
> The FSF Deluxe Distribution contains the binaries and sources to hundreds of different programs including GNU Emacs, the GNU C Compiler, the GNU Debugger, the complete MIT X Window System, and the GNU utilities.
> You may choose one of these machines and operating systems: HP 9000 series 200, 300, 700, or 800 (4.3 BSD or HP-UX); RS/6000 (AIX); Sony NEWS 68k (4.3 BSD or NewsOS 4); Sun 3, 4, or SPARC (SunOS 4 or Solaris). If your machine or system is not listed, or if a specific program has not been ported to that machine, please call the FSF office at the phone number below or send e-mail to gnu@prep.ai.mit.edu.
> The manuals included are one each of the Bison, Calc, Gawk, GNU C Compiler, GNU C Library, GNU Debugger, Flex, GNU Emacs Lisp Reference, Make, Texinfo, and Termcap manuals; six copies of the manual for GNU Emacs; and a packet of reference cards each for GNU Emacs, Calc, the GNU Debugger, Bison, and Flex.
> In addition to the printed and on-line documentation, every Deluxe Distribution includes a CD-ROM (in ISO 9660 format with Rock Ridge extensions) that contains sources of our software.
I wonder how many (if any?) were sold, it'd be an excellent museum piece.
When I worked at Creative Commons we closed the office down there too and I got a PO BOX in Mountain View where the office was at the time and that seemed to work out okay.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the US and some other countries decided to do things differently... As a European, I don't think I've ever seen something not A4 or A3/A4 in a professional context in my life, ever. Are US letter sizes what people use instead of A4 in a workplace for documents and such (seems confusing if so), and do printers sold in the US default to US letter sizes when printing? Or just happens to be something FSF only seem to be doing?
Americans are just very obstinate about those things. It's like the Windows of metrology - backwards compatibility trumps everything else, even when you have utterly bonkers things like ounces vs fluid ounces.
It's not just obstinance, switching everything to metric in the US would likely cost billions (if not trillions) of dollars. And other countries that have made the switch have often ended up with weird Frankensystems of measurement, like the UK where they mix metric and imperial all the time (plus the weird UK-specific measurements they have like "stone", which is based on the pound).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_Stat...
One does have to wonder what it is about Anglo countries specifically that makes it so difficult for them, though. Well, Canada at least has the excuse of being next door to US, with the resulting economic effects. For UK I'm pretty sure it's just about not being like "the Continent" at this point.
A huge percentage of those countries didn't have established industrial bases, infrastructure, etc. And also no educated general populace that needed reeducating. And often those countries were effectively forced into adopting metric through colonization and/or invasion.
These are conversions I know off the top of my head, I didn't need to look them up. Which is the point the GP was making: it's not hard to memorize the handful of conversions you will encounter in everyday life. Most people living here did it as children and have never had to think about it since. That's why there's no actual gain for us to switch to metric units. On the other hand there would be quite a bit of pain as everyone had to adjust to estimating things in kilos vs pounds, grams vs cups (in recipes), and so on. So for the typical American, it is actually a net negative for the country to switch to the metric system. It isn't just stubbornness.
What's clumsy about 30cm though? If you are working at scales where this level of precision is needed, you can just use cm throughout, and the beauty of metric is that even someone who has never had to do that before will know immediately how much it is because conversion to meters (or millimeters, or whatever the primary unit is in their usual applications) is so easy.
Similarly, I've heard similar sentiments expressed about lack of pound equivalent in metric. But in practice we just say "500 grams" etc (and for bonus points you get 400 grams, 300 grams etc).
Miles and yards are both used as units of distance, so conversion is obviously relevant. The only reason why "yards in a mile" doesn't come up all the time is because Americans work around it by subconsciously (?) avoiding any such cases where the conversion is non-trivial. E.g. a road sign in Europe might say "400 m", whereas in US a similar one will be "1/4 miles".
And "evolved from hundreds years of usage" generally means a lack of internal consistency, because most units originated a long time ago as a way to measure something very specific - in many cases, something completely irrelevant to most people using those units today. Nor did those units remain consistent through history - just look at how many definitions ounce has in US in different contexts, all of them historical! Or regular vs nautical vs survey mile. Even just cleaning up that mess would be a massive improvement.
This is where we disagree. It would be a small improvement at best. Most of what you're pointing out are the awkward corner cases that just don't come up or, like you said, we already have other solutions for. Outside of some specialties, pretty much no one needs to know how many cups are in a gallon or yards in a mile or what a nautical mile is. I don't know those things, and I somehow get by OK.
This is not true and that's trivially verifiable.
No calculator, no references, no Google:
How many inches are in 5 and three-quarter miles?
How much does 5 & 3/4 gallons of water weigh?
The point is that it is easy to interconvert units in the metric system: they're all interrelated and all of them can be expressed in terms of other units.
A litre is the volume of a cube that is 10x10x10cm. A cubic cm of water weighs a gram. Therefore, 10 cubic cm of water weighs 1kg. In other words, a kilo is the weight of a litre of water.
It takes 1 calorie of energy to heat 1g of water by 1ºC. So to heat a litre by one degree takes 1000 calories, or 1 kilocalorie. To boil it, you need to raise its temperature to 100 degrees, because that's the boiling point of water. From room temperature of say 20º that means
100-20 = 80 80 x 1000 = 80,000 80 kcal
This is useful. You can work out how much energy you need, using a pencil and paper.
This makes it easy to convert. Units that are easier to convert are more useful.
Whereas, as Josh Bazell put it:
« Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities. »
That's stupid. They can easily be related, but the people who devised this batshit set of scaled random numbers a few centuries ago didn't think of it.
It's not "what you're used to is better".
It's "one system is easier to work with than the other, and lets you do things the other system does not permit you to do."
Metric is objectively, demonstrably better than imperial.
And the common response of "oh but my system is what people feel" is also total bullshit, because that is 100% what you're used to.
A warmish day is feels like 20º to me. A hot day feels like 30º. A burning can't think straight day is 40º. Below freezing is below zero: it's simple and intuitive.
Except they didn't actually, see my points about the UK (similar points apply to Canada).
People get very worked up about it too. People got very worked up about a government proposal to allow people to put imperial units on food in larger type than metric (at the moment it has to be metric larger - or at least the same size).
Everything in engineering and science has been entirely metric since the 80s.
Some of those "Metric martyr" types, the kind of people who think anything which changed after they were 35 is an abomination, but somehow anything which changed ten years before they were born has never been any other way, will vandalize legal stuff which uses (in their opinion) the wrong units. So if you put a (legal and reasonable) 1.5km distance sign on a cycle route, but some car driver who thinks sane units are fascism sees it, they might smash it to pieces which is annoying.
There has been a very gradual lean towards sanity, after all my mother was taught decimal currency because it was forthcoming when she was at school, her parents had used a non-decimal currency system. When I was a teenager I still had coins which, though they were treated as their modern decimal value, if you read their faces had a non-decimal value printed on them, because it's too expensive to replace the currency when you switch.
When I was a child I would buy a quarter pound of sweets. At the turn of the century I'd ask for, and receive, 100 grams or 200 grams as I felt, but most customers would use pounds (although legally they'd be served in grams). These days everybody else would likely also ask in grams. So it's changing, it's just very slow.
OTOH on road sings, US at least seems to be using miles alone consistently, so you end up with labels like "1 3/4 miles" every now and then, which I find to be difficult to parse quickly.
I tend to think in metres at that scale but a yard is near enough.
And sure, of course metric isn't necessary. You can also write all software in COBOL and PL/I. But over the long term, the convenience of having a self-consistent system based on a few simple principles rather than historical precedent adds up.
Anything to do with STEM is metric.
Milk is also allowed to be sold in pints, traditionally glass bottle re-usable milk bottles were one pint.
It is also usual (but not legal) to sell a pint or a half of various soft drinks, in theory you should be sold these in some other way, I always say "large" or "small" but in practice ordinary people say "pint" and after all the staff will probably more or less fill a pint glass so, whatever.
Spirits (e.g. gin) are measured in either 25ml or 35ml shots. An establishment can choose either, post which one they picked and use that consistently. Why two seemingly unrelated sizes? Well, historically there were two different non-metric sizes permitted in law, and when the government legislated to make these SI units there were lobbyists demanding they allow this to continue despite the opportunity to rationalize.
As in the US, containers you purchase in a store are labelled, but here the labels must prominently show SI volume units and EU-style value metrics are required on shelf markings, so e.g. 10p per 100ml of Coke is a good price, maybe the Pepsi is on a deal for 9.5p per 100ml, the store's terrible own brand is 5p per 100ml. This EU strategy prevents people screwing with sizes to make you think you're getting a better deal, that cheaper bottle may look like a good idea but hey, it's 18p per 100ml, ah, it's slimmer in the middle which makes it actually much smaller than it looks.
Using French Revolutionary units doesn’t really matter in STEM, either: one can conduct science just as well in any units one wishes. One unit of measure is not more scientific than another. For example, degrees Kelvin and Rankine measure the same thing with different units. If anything, the Rankine degrees are more precise!
Anyway, the French system isn't what people mean by "metric" in this context, they mean the SI system of units, and so in practice it's not so much that it wouldn't matter which you choose as that you don't have any option except SI.
If you wanted an independent system of units you'd need to do a lot of expensive metrication, and in practice Americans are too cheap for that, so the US "customary" units are just aliases for so-and-so-much amount of some SI unit, they aren't actually independent at all.
The reason people focus on metric is that for everyday people that's the part which jumps out as more intuitive. All these nice powers of 10, very tidy.
For T&E it really matters see NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter and the need for heroics in the Gimli glider.
You need to keep to the same unit.
> You need to keep to the same unit.
Completely agreed. You’ll get similar issues if you have one set of parts using m/s and others using km/hr.
And you’ll avoid those issues with any standard, whether it’s m/s, knots or mph. The important thing is to have a standard.
That's the missing link for Americans.
Much to my surprise, a random check of a US-based office supply company shows that they do have A4 in stock -- at a price about 40% higher than letter-sized.
Hacker News users may be familiar with Julia Evans (http://jvns.ca) who creates technology zines that work in both A4 and Letter sizes, folded in half.
This one surprised me quite a bit. I think most people have A4/letter-sized folders. Why does anyone think that papers slightly longer than those folders are a good idea?
Legal folders can be great to be able to print letter-sized things on, then you have an area at the bottom to write notes and stuff.
Sure. But I didn't know I use legal size paper or even what it is before I asked the apartment complex to print the lease agreement, and it didn't fit in their own folder with the other move in papers. In my rank of weirdness discovered upon moving to the US, this is at about the same level as the different ounces.
Why are two slightly different standards needed? Does legal really need to print "just a little bit more" text than others? If so, why not just use that one for everything?
It is no more confusing to Americans than the fact that Europeans use A4 is to Europeans. Why should it be? Just like you didn’t know standards other than A4 exist, Americans don’t think about the fact that standards other than 8.5x11 inches (I.e. letter) exist. All printers, binders, folders, hole punchers, etc. are made with letter size paper in mind, and most people unless they are involved in business with other countries have never encountered an A4 sheet of paper in their lives and probably have no idea other standards exist.
A0 is 1 square meter
An to An+1 means cutting the paper along the middle of the longer edge
Each An has the same aspect ratio
Those are pretty useful properties and precisely define the dimensions of A4.
Like a lot of mathematics it does matter in your daily life but you actually just don't think about it because of course this works - unless you're an American and so no it doesn't.
The A-series paper sizes mean everything scales very naturally. Poster? Pamphlet? It's just the same ratios again but bigger or smaller. There is a single design where this works, and that's why the A-series exists, you can't just pick anything, only this works.
I'm not trying to be combative; I genuinely don't know.
This feels obvious - of course it works like that, until your paper sizes aren't using this ratio (which the US ones don't) and then the frustration is apparent.
Like the fact that the aspect ratio chosen allows manufacturers to just use one base sheet and then subdivide it into smaller page sizes is convenient for manufacturers, but it's not a necessary property for scaling the contents of the page.
Same for printing two copies per page (2-up). With a 1:√2 ratio, you can perfectly fit two copies of something side-by-side on the same paper size. This was incredibly common back when I was at school, where A4 worksheets were printed 2-up on A4 paper so that each individual one was A5 in size (half the area, √2/2 the length). With A4, you then just chop the printed pages in half and the worksheet fits perfectly. With any other aspect ratio, either there'd be wasted space due to the different aspect ratio of the chopped-in-half paper to the original, or you'd have to print 4-up on larger paper and chop it into quarters. The 1:√2 aspect ratio of ISO paper sizes means you can just chop a page in half and get the same aspect ratio, and that's useful to people doing printing, not just manufacturers.
But if you really think it’s important, then you can consider a series of sizes like tabloid, letter, and memo to be equivalent to A3, A4, and A5. Each is exactly half the area of the previous, and can be had by dividing the larger size in half along the longer side.
This seems like you entirely missed the thread? The whole point is that this actually works for the A-series and in your made up US series it can't work because the ratio is wrong.
Let's try, start with 216 x 279 Letter and we'll scale that so we can fit two on the 279 long side, so they're just under 140mm wide now, memo size, but um, when we do that the scaled down pages are only 180mm high, even though they've got 216mm - there's a huge amount of empty white space wasted (at the top, or the bottom, or both) and that's because this ratio does not work.
Plus the copiers are a bit more clever than you give them credit for. Instead of scaling the whole page down they put a bounding box around the actual content on the pages, to exclude the margins, and then scale that down to fit. The size of the margins changes slightly but not enough that anybody cares. This is especially true when you’re copying a bound book because there’s a really big margin in the middle to accommodate the binding. You don’t need that any more once you’ve printed the pages on a single sheet of paper.
A4 folded in half (size of an A5) fits in a C5 envelope.
An ISO standard that makes sense and isn't based on different professions like "letter" vs "legal" vs "folio" and other US sizes.
But also the reason that, for example, screens have 80 columns, (also related to punch cards), but that was about the width of a "letter" page at 10cpi.
You can derive letter paper with two pieces of information: 8½ and 11. Just having a laugh, of course — I do admire the A/B series, even if I wish that they were based on a square yard :-)
Well, A4 (and variants) are not Europe-specific formats, it's the formats most of the world except some few countries (including the US) use, so I'd say it's slightly more surprising than the other way around.
Even if every other country in the world used A4, the only people in the US who would even notice would be people who commonly do business with other countries or who live near the border. And in reality, Canada and Mexico also use letter so the border thing doesn’t apply.
So why should letter confuse us just because other people use something else?
That's the part I initially quoted; "the paper that the text was printed on wasn’t an A4, it was smaller and not a size I was familiar with. I measured it and found that it’s a US letter size paper at about 21.5cm x 27.9cm"
The author isn't from North America, so they had forgotten the format was different, so they got confused when they assumed it would have been A4 like the rest of the world, but it wasn't.
> the only people in the US who would even notice would be people who commonly do business with other countries or who live near the border
Or, as in the case of the author, they live outside of North American and send/receive letters to/from North America.
I can guess why the Philippines uses ANSI sizes. But Chile?
Or you can get whatever you want - I wanted B4 paper to print a booklet (or B3 maybe) and I just bought a ream that was larger and had a print shop slice it down to B4. My US laser printer was fine printing onto B4.
We just bought new ones when needed.
Good thing it wasn't a complaint then, just questions from someone who doesn't know how it works across the pond :) And it seems to be the story of someone outside of North America trying to interact with the North American standards, not some internal confusion between internal states or whatnot.
One particular “standard” that sticks out in my memory was “math paper”, which I recall as being unbleached, about 5” x 8”, and used pervasively in primary education (at least in New England) into the 1990’s.
My general point is just that I'm surprised so many people seem to notice and care about paper size in general. I've just never thought about this at all.
But, yes, for most people it doesn't really matter - you go to the store, you buy paper, you shove it into your printer, and it mostly just works. However, it's also not all that hard to run into situations where things break. E.g. most PDFs originating from US are rendered for Letter size paper, which means that printing them outside of US generally requires setting "fit size" rather than "original" to ensure that nothing gets clipped. Vice versa also happens, but because US is so culturally dominant, Americans rarely run into that particular issue.
Yes, it is just our standard like A4 is yours. When you pull a paper out of the pack it is A4 when we pull it out it is ANSI A, commonly known a US Letter size. Instead of 8.27”x11.69”, we use 8.5”x11”. We also commonly use US Legal size, which is 8.5”x14”. Slightly longer and can fit in the same envelope.
> do printers sold in the US default to US letter sizes when printing?
Yes. However all of our printers can do all sizes since our paper is slightly larger, while an A4 specific printer couldn’t print a US letter.
My current printer, like most printers I believe, can be configured to print custom sizes. The maximum is something like 9 or 9.5 inches wide IIRC, and the length can be set much longer.
Margins on left/right might be skinnier, but length wise US letter fits.
A4 is readily available in the US but not commonly used.
The main problem is that if you cut it in half, you get a really silly sizes (too narrow) instead of A5.
I found out that they do not automatically adapt to JIS sizes. My wife’s work once had a printer that somehow got configured to use JIS, I assume JB5. It then refused to print on US Letter, but as printers are wont to do, didn’t produce any useful error message, nor relay this information to the computer. It just wouldn’t print. I only discovered this (because if you work in tech, you must know how to fix printers, right?) by laboriously scrolling through every menu on the tiny LCD screen, and finding that the paper settings were incorrect.
You kid, but it turns out the assumption was correct in this case. I suppose the truth is that by working in tech, you are likely very methodical and rely on deduction, which are both essential in fixing printer issues.
I don’t know when or why this skill declined, but it’s upsetting.
I am familiar with A4, A5 and such. But I think that fewer and fewer people are. It's just not something used every day.
As a side note, most of the big important house bills and statements I still insist on receiving via US mail for protection reasons. There is a risk if I only had them emailed to me that my wife would not have access. If I were to suddenly die, I don't want my wife with our kids to miss a critical bill. By having them show up at the house in physical form provides a bit of defense in depth here.
Letter size is 8-1/2 x 11 inches by US standards.
Yes, the default printing paper for US is US Letter. I prefer to use my computers with US English language, and macOS defaults to US Letter as print and page size when you use US English as the default language.
Moreover, I had a ream of US Letter paper in the past, given me by our neighbor (I live in a A4 country, so it's that "odd" size).
8.5 x 11” is US Letter, or 215.9 x 279.4 mm. We also have US Legal, which as the name implies, is frequently used by legal professions. I have no idea why. It is 8.5 x 14”, or 215.9 x 355.6 mm. Finally, we have US Tabloid (I guess used for small newspapers?), which is 11 x 17”, or 279.4 x 431.8 mm.
And yes, our printers default to US Letter. The line from the movie Office Space: “PC Load Letter? WTF does that mean?” is the printer’s cryptic way of saying “Load Letter-sized paper into the Paper Cassette.”
EDIT: there are are apparently more US-specific sizes I was unaware of, which you can view and compare with others on this site: https://papersizes.io/us/
I agree that UPU members are required to accept them. PostNL closed all of their post offices a few years ago in favor of contracting out to businesses, who may not be familiar with them.
It looks like Omniva (aka/fka Eesti Post) also ships worldwide and charges in Euro.
In the old days when they released GPL v3, Linus Torvalds considered it "not the same license at all". He felt betrayed because the FSF "try to sneak in these new (tivoization) rules and try to force everybody to upgrade". People could fork the Kernel and relicense the fork in a way that prevented him from merging their improvements upstream. He referred to the FSF's move as "dishonest", "sneaky" and "immoral" and decided he would "never have anything to do with the FSF again".
When no version is specified in the request, returning the latest version seems like a reasonable thing to do.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.txt has no postal address.
https://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-2.0-only.html has "51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA" in red italics, and says: " Text in red is replaceable (see Matching Guidelines B.3.4). License or exception text will match to the text for the specified identifier if it includes a permitted variant of this replaceable text. The permitted variants can be found in the corresponding regular expression as shown in title text visible by hovering over the red text."
Which in turn says: "can be replaced with the pattern .{54,64}" (that is, any string between 54-64 characters long).
The USPS doesn't honor either 301 or 308. As someone who moves just about every year, and fills out the paperwork to get my 301s and 308s for free, instead of paying a third-party service, I can tell you that the 301/308 at USPS is only good for one year.
To get around this, I used to use a 305: Use Proxy, but then my UPS Store of choice closed, and I was back to 301/308 land.
Can this redirection be forever?
> no future organizations will be able to reside in that address
You are supposed to put the name, no? "Some Organization, <old address>" would unambiguously refer to the new org.
[1] https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/fsf-office-closing-party
I wonder if this was just rhetorical flourish? Are there really people who never ever use a pen?
I barely ever handwrite anything but there are still crosswords and the occasional form to fill in.
I heard that Boston was a small hub for tech companies back in the 90s (which is is much less true these days), which might explain this.
I have to wonder if the whole exercise was a prime example of a brit "taking the piss" 8-)
> the US, Canada, and a few other countries don’t follow the standard international paper sizes, even though I had written about it earlier
I literally laughed out loud at this 8-)
And the outrageous expectation of obtaining... stamps!
It was just too funny.
For unfamiliar muricans: The success, according to british cultural standards, in the humiliation of the intended victim is increased, when the victim replies while being completely unaware that they are actually being mocked.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/51+Franklin+St,+Boston,+MA...
I can imagine that in the future a company doesn't need to have a physical address to be registered. But we already have that too, PO boxes and addresses where you can register your company without having an office here.
Lol this is a bit ridiculous but a fun blogpost!
TLDR: To save space, some old GPLv2 software didn't include the full license text, instead just a short notice with an address you can contact to obtain it. Blogger did so (glad the address still worked after 30+ years), included return postage (some nifty US stamps bought off eBay), but the reply received was version 3 instead. So they did so again, and received the correct version.
Really??
YAY!
I have a really, really dumb question.
Why don't we have more licenses and contracts like this? Do we just need to set up a foundation that drafts them and makes them freely available to use?
Like, for instance, "Hi, Mark - we'd like to offer you a job here at our daycare, but first we need you to look over this contract and sign it."
This contract says, roughly, that if there's an accusation of sexual abuse against children that it will go to a mediator who has final say, and if they say it was a credible accusation, that Mark immediately loses his job, and can never work anywhere that uses this same contract, ever again. Sorry, you lost your chance to work with kids. It sucks that it might have been a false accusation, but our kids are just far too important to trust to the existing systems.
Guess what? Churches should follow a similar license. Letting priests or pastors move from town to town, abusing kids? That was completely bonkers insane. And I feel like a contract like this (and a registry, and etc.) could have helped. If people forced their daycares and churches to accept a license like this.
Another one, "Hi, Greg. We understand we'd like your endorsement from our political party? Sounds good, here's a contract for you..."
It says, among other things, that if Greg switches political parties that he must resign from office. Sorry. He's welcome to run again, but he can't stay in office on our votes.
Like, shouldn't we have more contracts like this?
You mean dropping some hard earned human right like Presumption of Innocence?
You may think it doesn't apply to you, but the landlords and HOA can add a similar clause, because children must be safe at home too. And every software company may add the same clause because they (may) have a game division and children must be safe online too. And ...
Suddenly, any accusation that a non-professional fake-judge says is "credible" makes you an outcast of society.
To a specific point, though,
> Guess what? Churches should follow a similar license. Letting priests or pastors move from town to town, abusing kids? That was completely bonkers insane. And I feel like a contract like this (and a registry, and etc.) could have helped. If people forced their daycares and churches to accept a license like this.
Er, yes, that does sound bonkers; where are you that every school, church, and daycare isn't already doing a background check on every single person working there?
Someone has to be convicted for something to show up on their background check, yes?
EULA, TOS, and Docusign have mostly forced people to forget their right to negotiate contracts because all they let you do is agree to the terms offered. So it seems natural today that people just want standard contracts for everything.
Lazyweb: what’s that story about the guy who redlined his credit card contract and the bank accepted it?
So... like a social scorecard that's easily manipulated?
No.
We have tons of them, they are written by lawyers.
