I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022)
(code.mendhak.com)596 points by ekiauhce 16 hours ago
596 points by ekiauhce 16 hours ago
I'm not sure if I go one day without writing something.
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.
This thread is more interesting to me than the article itself. I am the complete opposite. I always have a pen in my pocket along with a really small (2"x3") notebook, and I absolutely use it all the time.
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 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 notes taking, but that's some writing based on block letters, not script as in a signature)
>now my passport got a signature I won't be able to replicate ever
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.
Genuinely curious, I don't write anything long by hand, but do you not jot down disposable information with frequency, or date food, or anything like that? I date food we put in the fridge/freezer. I jot down something like a phone number if I am redirected. I have to give my pet medication occasionally and I use a post-it to track so the household can know. Like I said, I'm not writing anything even as long as a card, but I use a pen multiple times a week, and essentially daily. I know a lot of people use their phones for this stuff (and I do too), and maybe I'm an old person now for not using my phone for all of that.
> I date food we put in the fridge/freezer
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 batch cook and freeze meals, and some of them look similar (sauce and chicken vs sauce and pork) and I want to eat the older stuff first. There are also some products that are recommended to be disposed of within X days of opening, which fall well before their best by date.
Unopened, a jar of pasta sauce is good basically indefinitely, but as soon as you actually open the jar the clock starts ticking. We don't make enough pasta at a time to use a full jar, (and in fact will usually use a small fraction of the jar) so I write the date that I opened the jar on the lid to plan its use a little better. "Hey, better find a use for this sauce, it's going to go bad eventually."
Food that's not prepackaged. e.g., I recently threw out a container of eggs that had been in my freezer for about two years because my hens were laying so much faster than we could consume, that we had dozens of extras.
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.
When I open milk, I write the date on the cap to help keep track of how long it'll remain good.
I tried for a while to do the whole "notebook life" thing that was really trendy to blog about some years back, but found I never had the notebook I wanted on-hand (even if I was just using one notebook...) or forgot to grab a pen or can't find a pen et c. Then making it possible to find anything in them requires more effort afterward.
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.
Wow, I use a pen nearly every day. Sometimes I deliberately get a pen or pencil and paper rather than a phone. I was doing some home improvements in my attic, and I would often need to jot down a measurement so I could cut wood etc. I did this once or twice on my phone and realized it's much easier to do this with a pencil and small notepad.
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.
Apple Reminders has native grocery lists now. The collaboration feature (a household can keep just one shared grocery list) and auto-categorizing by store section are serious time and frustration savers. No "oh shit, I left the list at home", no "I could go to the grocery store while I'm out, if we need anything... but the list's at home...", no manually organizing the list, no grocery-list-by-text. It's so nice, saves far more time than any faff it introduces (I'd agree that without the collaboration and auto-categorizing, grocery lists on phones would be more trouble than they're worth)
(I know other apps have also done it, but having it on a built-in is really handy and it works well)
I prefer an app for grocery lists since it can be managed with a single hand while shopping - no need to stop in the middle of an aisle to pull out a pencil and cross something off, nor to print anything out before heading to the store, for that matter. Plus, I won't have to re-sync the list with what remain on the physical list at the end of the trip.
My software is highly idiosyncratic. I input recipes for the week, and it adds ingredients to the shopping list, but only some ingredients. Other staple ingredients are things we keep in standard inventory and these go on the shopping list periodically rather than on demand.
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.
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?
My hand writing got rusty and awkward until I read that writing something by hand is shown to strengthen one's memory and recollection. It definitely seems to be the case for me and has made me much more organised.
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.
Try using a tablet with hand written notes. There are programs (or even applications that replace the popup keyboard ) that will convert your writing into computer text.
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.
>but I'm sure I hand-write something at least once a month..
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.
He's also obviously not used to write/type letters... The whole thing is quite awful.
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.
That reminds me on the time the FSF moved, they changed their address, and the open source product I worked on had to change their address in the license notices in our product:
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'
The FSF offices have moved again if you weren't aware. The new address is
Free Software Foundation 31 Milk Street, # 960789 Boston, MA 02196 USA
In Gnulib we distribute and use the license with just a link to <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/> [1]. I would just use that.
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...
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 card (smallish, lined cards for taking notes) was indeed a postcard. Sadly, I often have to buy them at the airport on arrival.
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
It seems to be a cultural thing. As an European I am used to find postcards in every town, but when I went to Singapore I had a hard time procuring them. None of the souvenir shops had them, and when I asked the employees they often looked at me as if I were some kind of strange animal. I finally found a small, dusty selection in the darkest corner of a huge department store.
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.
Yep, same path. Arrive, get cards ASAP, usually as I walk out of the airport, give it to the hotel concierge the next morning. They will often stamp and drop it in the mail for me.
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.
my flash cards all store at least 32 GB of data but are so tiny I keep losing them.
Yes! Check out Postcrossing, where you can sign up to send and receive postcards to random people. :)
I know how to send mail but it's like doing taxes, I'm afraid I'll get something wrong and not find out until I'm in trouble for it
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
> After a few weeks of waiting, I eventually received the ‘African Daisy global forever vert pair’ stamp which was round! I should have noticed that the seller sent me the item using stamps at a much lower denomination that those I had ordered. Oh well.
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?
I’m surprised this stamp seller didn’t cover half the envelope in 5 cent stamps.
That’s what I usually get on the envelopes from stamp sellers: decades old stamps from the “bad investment” portions from stamp collectors.
I don't understand the satire, can you explain?
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.
Indeed, the formula is correct. Wikipedia maintains a list of historic Forever pricing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_United_States_posta...
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.
> I think the UK sender didn't need to include _two_ global forevers.
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.
I think quoting that part alone, didn't make it clear I was referring to the whole article.
>...... "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'm interested in hearing from someone at FSF (and I used to know someone, but I don't think he's there any more), who can tell us how often this has happened. I can't imagine it's a frequent occurrence.
I love how small of a world this site is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43784538
As I implied in my top level comment, it should happen more often than it likely does. If you work on a commercial project with any GPL code ask your test group who has done that and when - if you don't see a lot of hands go up then your test group isn't doing their job. (if you are only automated tests, then I assume you have an automated test to send this letter and verify the response)
Yeah I sort of hoped it would cover that bit not just the author's foibles at writing a letter.
Postman probably just redirects, with a business or institution it's easy to just have the Post Office direct all mail addressed to "Free Software Foundation" to the current address.
Standard mail forwarding is one year, and you can extend that for an additional 18 months. I don't know of any reasonable person who would call that "a few months"
I used to work at the FSF and one of my jobs was replying to these letters. They would be so infrequent by 2008 that I think I handled less than 10 in my time there. I sent way more copies of books to prisoners who requested them, gave more tours of the office, etc. I also did some other stuff when I worked there but if you were to look at the FSF website today you might think I’m still there as pages often have the name of the person who created the page listed as the author still.
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.
I'd always wanted to see a physical copy of the $5,000.00 'Deluxe Distribution' -
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.
> The first thing that came to attention, 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. I completely forgot that 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 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?
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 ounces vs fluid ounces.
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!
>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 is based on the pound).
Interestingly, it's actually codified in US law that the metric system is the "preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce" -- however it wasn't a mandatory change so most industries didn't make the change, nor did the government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_Stat...
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 UK I'm pretty sure it's just about not being like "the Continent" at this point.
>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?
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.
Other countries switched. Short term pain for long term gain.
It is a weird mix in the UK, distances are measured in miles, and speed limits are set in miles per hour, but fuel is sold in litres, for example.
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.
The UK uses metric for almost everything. Miles/mph for driving and pints in the pub are the only things that are always non-metric. Human height and weight are the only other thing that is often non-metric, and even then a lot of people will know their weight in kg rather than stone.
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.
If you buy beer "loose" like at a bar it has to be sold in pints. Most people will have seen a "half" and anybody who likes stronger beers or goes to festivals where you taste different ones will know a "third" of a pint is also a legal amount of beer to sell. You would not want to try out a few different 8% stouts if they were sold only in whole pints, unless they're going to make it a multi-day event and provide somewhere for you to sleep it off.
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.
Also, switching everything to metric is just not necessary. We already use the metric system all the time. We also use imperial.
Yes, so you have all the disadvantages and none of the advantages.
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.
It’s US standard. Hence the infamous default PC LOAD LETTER message on HP printers that made zero sense to anyone outside the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_LOAD_LETTER
Nearly everything in the US uses letter, legal (letter but longer), or tabloid (double width letter, to be folded over).
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.
Don't forget my favorite size, "statement". This is half of letter size. Sometimes used for small statements, sometimes used as letter folded.
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.
I used to work at Kodak and they had an industrial printer division in my building. They would go through pallet-fulls of A4 for their testing. Only place Ive seen it in use in a business setting in the US.
> seems confusing if so
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.
A4 isn’t some random format, you can derive it with three pieces of information:
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.
Not sure where you got “random format” from the comments, but we (U.S.) also use a very precise method for defining the size of paper, which is 8.5x11 and legal as 8.5x14. For the US, both are sized to fit in the same standard envelopes. I’ve never thought, “boy, I really need half this sheet length-wise but made shorter to keep the same aspect ratio for this situation”, so while I can understand why that could make sense when creating an international standard, it isn’t more or less random or more/less precise than any other basis. Our basis simply evolved naturally from our system of measurement and our needs with countries we traded most closely, rather than as an international standard based on a different system of measurement that needed to be shared among numerous countries situated closely together.
True, but I don’t understand why this would make letter size confusing to Americans. European office workers are not sitting around marveling at the mathematical elegance of the definition of A series paper. It just doesn’t matter in daily life.
Not only that but C envelope sizes match the A size. So an A4 piece of paper fits a C4 envelope flat.
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.
> A4 isn’t some random format, you can derive it with three pieces of information …
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 :-)
> It is no more confusing to Americans than the fact that Europeans use A4 is to Europeans. Why should it be?
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.
Right, but why does that make letter size confusing?
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?
> Right, but why does that make letter size confusing?
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.
There's a map of ANSI vs ISO paper size usage around the world which crops up on Reddit occasionally: https://reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/19dswr4
I can guess why the Philippines uses ANSI sizes. But Chile?
Yes, in the USA letter size is the standard. A3,4 don't exist. It isn't confusing because I would guess that more than half of all people in the USA don't even know that letter size isn't the standard everywhere. I was probably in my late 20s before I found out that Europe doesn't use the same size paper as we in the USA do. I can remember exactly once that I encountered it in the wild (I was at a conference and someone from Europe had some handouts).
The European sizes exist in the USA if you want them, you just have to order them from a print shop or supplier.
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.
No, letter is used throughout North America and in parts of South America.
Look, there's plenty of things to complain about with regards to the US - especially these days. But getting upset about US citizens not using all the same standards in their daily lives as many other places is just silly. --It's like complaining about the UK and a relatively small number of countries that chose to drive on the left instead of the right. Could they change? Sure. Are they likely to change? Seems pretty unlikely.
> But getting upset about US citizens not using all the same standards in their daily lives as many other places is just silly
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.
I’d guess that nomenclature originates in the world where every small US Main Street had a stationary store carrying all manner of paper sizes and stocks for diverse purposes—none of which involved use in anything more sophisticated than a typewriter.
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.
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.
> Are US letter sizes what people use instead of A4 in a workplace for documents and such (seems confusing if so)
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.
Since they are talking about physical paper size, I assume they meant that an A4 printer that physically only takes A4 sized paper would not be able to print on letter paper stock, as its physically too big to fit. I can print any size onto a business card too with down converting and messing with margins.
Yes all paper is usually letter. It's close to A4, so you don't usually need to reformat documents to print on one or the other. Most printers take A4 and US letter and adapt automatically.
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.
> Most printers take A4 and US letter and adapt automatically
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.
> if you work in tech, you must know how to fix printers, right?
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.
Yes, but that’s the annoying part. So many tech problems that people encounter can be trivially solved with a quick web search, poking at menus until you find something promising, or a combination thereof. I remember helping my mom over the phone to troubleshoot something on her iPhone – at the time, I had an Android, so everything was foreign to me, but I was able to deduce where a given setting might exist, and figured out whatever the problem was.
I don’t know when or why this skill declined, but it’s upsetting.
It's the standard here in the USA. The other standard is the US Legal at 8.5 inches by 14 inches (216 mm by 356 mm). This is what is used in court settings (hence the name) but also things like paper mortgage statements will typically come printed on that. That is much similar to your A4 size.
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.
> 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?
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).
Oh no, it’s worse.
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 once was reading a software license, and deep inside it there was a promise: who has read till this place will get a certain prise. I emailed them, they kind of confirmed that I am eligible for the prise. But it was a far away city, so I never went to claim it.
A few countries I'll be visiting this summer still sell International Reply Coupons. It might be interesting to pick some up and see how difficult it is to exchange them. Would a PostNL point even know what to do with one?
Perhaps the FSF got confused about which license the author was referring to, or perhaps they intentionally mailed back GPL v3 — this isn't the first time they haven't been generous.
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".
is the owner of the address a perpetual owner of the GPL? Example: - Step 1: Create evil Corporation - Step 2: Buy that address - Step 3: Create a new GPL, still GPL but technically a new version. This can make sure the sole owner of the claimed IP (remove the FSF of course). - Step 4: Sell your updated license to anyone that'd want to go around previous GPL.
Different addresses are stated in different copies of the license. https://opensource.org/license/gpl-2-0 has: "59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA"
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).
Exploring implications of an absolute physical address. FSF basically claimed a physical "domain name" and no future organizations will be able to reside in that address. FSF can move out and ask USPS to do a 301 Moved Permanently or 308 Permanent Redirect.
At my first job, we'd occasionally have old people showing up to pay their water bill (with checks, of course!) because 20 years previously, the local water utility occupied the same building that we were in. They were generally pretty upset because we had no idea where the water company was and they were paying in person because the bill was late, and their water could potentially be shut off.
they actually did move in the meantime :-) [1]
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
ask USPS to do a 301 Moved Permanently or 308 Permanent Redirect.
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.
Dude wastes the FSFs time, complains about wrong license without telling them the one he wanted. Then complains again that he needs to recover from the HORROR of using the postal service that was a deliberate, POINTLESS CHOICE. Gets fame on Hacker News for it.
YAY!
This was such a laugh!
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.
“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”
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 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?
> and if they say it was a credible accusation, [...], but our kids are just far too important to trust to the existing systems.
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.
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 getting. I don't need to re-read the GPL every time I use a new piece of software using it, because I already know what it says.
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?
> 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?
Contracts are negotiable. Don’t like the numbers in paragraph twelve? Can’t agree to forfeit one of the rights listed in appendix G? Redline it and see what they say.
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?
I could imagine a judge holding a contract to resign from office void as contrary to public policy (on the basis of the intuition that elected representatives shouldn't have their continuance in office subject to random contracts with third parties lest this interfere with their service to the public.)
> 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...