361–370 of 585 posts
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How wonderful! Since the game of the day seems to be the technicalities of the minutiae, could you explain the decision to send the GPLv3 vs GPLv2? Is this a request that happens often?
The sender didn't specify the version in his request, so I find it natural that they've sent him the latest version.
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> legal (letter but longer) 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 size folders exist and are widely used by people who use ... legal size paper. 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.
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I'm also a millennial software engineer but I usually write stuff down to text files. I do use pen and paper to draw things if that helps my understanding of them. Like when there's geometry involved. 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.
When and where were you required to write the ZIP so strangely? I've never heard of such a bizarre requirement.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Russian_postal_codes...
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Some companies still do this mainly to make the GPL request process more annoying so fewer people do it. If you have to mail a letter with a check to cover shipping/handling and wait for the company to send you a CD-R with the code on it, fewer people will look at the code compared to if the company just put it on Github or something.
Most of the time the GPL request is a waste of time with no purpose other than annoy a company. You can download linux source code from many places, why do you want to get it from us? 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…
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The trouble is there is just very little gain. It really just doesn't matter. All the systems are fine, they all work. If you come live here, you'll adjust after 2 years. If I moved to Europe, I would adjust in 2 years. Once in a blue moon you have to bother with converting units but c'est la vie . There's bigger things to worry about.
I've been living in US for 15 years now and I still can't remember which unit scales are factor-of-3 and which ones are factor-of-4. How many cups are there in a gallon? How many yards in a mile? I don't want to waste my brain cells on stuff like this, yet it comes up all the time in e.g. cooking, or using maps for navigation.
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.
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I just sent in my taxes by USPS mail a couple of weeks ago. Long after online payments were available, I would pay my monthly bills by writing checks and sending them in the mail, as that process actually took me less time than logging in to five or six different websites and navigating through their online payment flows.
That's very uncommon. All my bills are set to autopay on my credit card. Who manually pays bills? You don't need to click the buttons every month.
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.
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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…
It's like the classic argument about IRC vs Discord. IRC is more convoluted to use, the clients are subpar, you need to set up a BNC to receive messages when offline, but Discord requires you to give up your phone number. 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)
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Once I had to send an international RMA that they wouldn't pay for the shipping. It went something like this: 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…
>12. Went to another USPS to drop the package You have a USPS drop box for tiny boxes in front of your house.
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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, e…
https://www.usps.com/ship/online-shipping.htm
If you're talking about letters, the innumerable blue drop boxes.
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>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…
Every single country in the world that is on metric today had to switch from something else at some point in the past. Why overfocus so much on UK when you have literally a hundred successful examples? 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…
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.
