501–510 of 585 posts
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On average, zero per day, maybe 5 to 10 per year.
I'm really surprised that it's more than 1 ever.
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).
Disappointed that International Reply Coupons are no longer a thing too! I used one back in the 1980s to write to the authors of the Power C compiler[1] in the US about a bug (yes, a bug report by mail). I enclosed an IRC in case they wanted to reply. They were kind enough to write back, and didn't use the IRC (but sent it back). They did however include a floppy disk with the fixed compiler, which was nice of them.…
https://shop.post.ch/en/packing-sending/sending-letters/regi...
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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…
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.
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Anyone, even someone born in 2007, should know how to use pen and paper. This is a basic component of being an educated person, not knowing how to do that is as shocking as being illiterate.
Sure. But why are they mailing letters? I remember being 18 myself (a looong time ago), and having a helpful adult shocked that nobody had ever taught me how to write a check. I think I've written a total of 8 in my whole life now?
I wouldn't expect them to need to buy a pen first, or to need several attempts to write 10 words nearly.
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His difficulty was finding postage stamps for the self-addressed return envelope, and clearly the author is not American. Do you think it would be quite so easy to "buy envelopes and stamps" if you had to send a stamped return envelope to Nepal or Manila? Is that a "basic life skill" or would you have to do a little research to figure out what you'd need?
He had difficulty writing an address on an envelope. This skill is something we expect of 8 year old children.
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I didn't see any request for a return envelope or stamp. Author decided to include them (unless I missed something).
It seems like common courtesy for me. Given the FSF are providing that service out of altruism, and are not the ones who neglected to give OP the license in the first place, it's only appropriate to not impose upon them to go buy stamps to send an international letter.
At least he got a response. Meaning the address didn't change mostly. 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 addr…
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.
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I'm not an American and I did write letters in my country of origin as a kid, but one thing that annoys me about US-style envelopes to this day is that they have no lines for address - you're just expected to line text up on your own correctly. If you're used to writing on lined paper because that's the standard in your country (including envelopes!), it can be frustrating. The envelopes I'm used to look like this: h…
>you're just expected to line text up on your own correctly. It only has to be lined up well enough to be read by a human, they don't reject them just because it's sloppy or not lined up correctly.
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True, any page oriented software like LibreOffice, Inkscape, Gimp, will show you US Letter sizes and US Letter Envelope sizes and you may have messed up with printing on wrong size... but as other posters say, maybe this days nobody prints on real paper anymore...
They all default to ISO sizes for me. 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.
> 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... 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...
I recently was in an awkward situation when ordering my new passport. Most times I got to sign some papers I have some signature which is a few waves, not forming many letters. In the passport office the clerk told me they can't recognize any enough letters in there, so I had to do multiple attempts till they were happy ... now my passport got a signature I won't be able to replicate ever. (I do some handwriting for…
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.