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I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)

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Re: I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)

#241

Post by [deleted] »

bradley13 wrote: post #121
NoboruWataya wrote: post #3

Not sure if it's being exaggerated for comedic purposes but it is interesting to me how alien the act of sending a letter by post is to the author. Granted I don't send them very often but I wouldn't think much of it if I had to. But I guess younger people and particularly those in tech may genuinely never need a reason to send a letter (or, it seems, write an address by hand).

Honestly, sending letters is increasingly alien: I rarely send one letter per year. This year I have sent two, only because I am trying to contact an incredibly old-fashioned directorate of the German government that doesn't seem to have an email address. 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…

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Re: I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)

#242

Post by dheera »

ethbr1 wrote: post #166
NoboruWataya wrote: post #3

Not sure if it's being exaggerated for comedic purposes but it is interesting to me how alien the act of sending a letter by post is to the author. Granted I don't send them very often but I wouldn't think much of it if I had to. But I guess younger people and particularly those in tech may genuinely never need a reason to send a letter (or, it seems, write an address by hand).

Slightly alternate take: this post (and the fact that FSF still replies to paper mail) is about accessibility 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 thin…

> is universally accessible by design

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

Re: I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)

#243

Post by int_19h »

sanderjd wrote: post #187
int_19h wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think GP is referring to the name - "letter" implies that it's the standard paper size used for writing letters specifically, as opposed to printed documents (of course, in US it's really both).

Oh... I don't really see why "letter" is a more confusing way to describe a paper size than "A4"... 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.

Well, "A4" doesn't imply anything about the intended use. The format of the name also implies that there is A3, A5 etc, both of which aren't all that uncommon either.

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.

Re: I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)

#244

Post by philipwhiuk »

voidUpdate wrote: post #46
WaitWaitWha wrote: post #18

This was written in 2022. Do people still know how to postal-mail things? Asking as the acquisition of envelope, paper and stamps read like a new adventure for the author. 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 c…

What places don't have postcards? Whenever I go to places in the UK, tourist tat shops will often have hundreds of them in every flavour of souvenir

I always like to buy a postcard.

Occasionally actually post them before I leave a place (ideally soon after I arrive).

Generally they arrive substantially after I get back.

Re: I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)

#245

Post by pasc1878 »

eadmund wrote: post #222
School-Cotton wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are not particularly obstinate, we just have no strong reason to change. Metric is already used in areas where it actually matters (e.g. STEM)

> Metric is already used in areas where it actually matters (e.g. STEM) 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!

However the abbreviation is STEM. For S and especiually M you can do in different units.

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.

Re: I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)

#246

Post by tialaramex »

eadmund wrote: post #222
School-Cotton wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are not particularly obstinate, we just have no strong reason to change. Metric is already used in areas where it actually matters (e.g. STEM)

> Metric is already used in areas where it actually matters (e.g. STEM) 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!

You shouldn't use degrees for Kelvin, it's an absolute unit, the degrees are needed for the relative units like Celsius.

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.

Re: I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)

#247

Post by VikingCoder »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #160
VikingCoder wrote: post #134

I think these licenses are incredibly useful. 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…

If I follow correctly, then yes I agree that having more widely used standard licenses/contracts would be nice. One of my crazy legal fantasies is that all EULAs have to go through a central government authority that pushes back on new ones, because one of the things I love about FOSS is that there's only a handful of common licenses, so you can reasonably read them once and then just see them and know what you're ge…

> 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?

Re: I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)

#248

Post by Alex-Programs »

01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #114
int_19h wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't even remember the last time I've used a pen for anything other than writing a check.

Not even a whiteboard marker? I'm in the US so I use permanent marker to write my lawyers phone number on my arm before protests

As a Brit, the concept of "My lawyer" is slightly unfamiliar. The average Brit doesn't "have a lawyer"; they would only find a lawyer if they had a specific need, eg being accused of a crime or wanting to write a contract etc.

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?

Re: I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)

#249

Post by pasc1878 »

HideousKojima wrote: post #37
int_19h wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like most other weird things in US that pertain to measurements and units thereof, letter-sized paper predates the A-series standard (which originated in Germany). FWIW the latter didn't became an ISO standard until late 20th century. 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…

>Americans are just very obstinate about those things. 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 i…

For the UK in practice it is only distance measurements that are non metric now. For some things like small liquid amounts we colloquially use imperial - pints - which differ from US pints. I think the actual official volume is the metric it is just you could say slang that keeps to pints.

Anything to do with STEM is metric.

Re: I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)

#250

Post by [deleted] »

eadmund wrote: post #222
School-Cotton wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are not particularly obstinate, we just have no strong reason to change. Metric is already used in areas where it actually matters (e.g. STEM)

> Metric is already used in areas where it actually matters (e.g. STEM) 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!

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