Mexico Decriminalizes Small-Scale Drug Possession 640
Professor_Quail notes an AP story that begins, "Mexico enacted a controversial law Thursday decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and other drugs while encouraging free government treatment for drug dependency. The law sets out maximum 'personal use' amounts for drugs, also including LSD and methamphetamine. People detained with those quantities will no longer face criminal prosecution when the law goes into effect Friday." An official in the attorney general's office said, "This is not legalization, this is regulating the issue and giving citizens greater legal certainty... for a practice that was already in place." In 2006, the US criticized a similar bill that had no provisions for mandatory treatment, and the then-president sent it back to Congress for reconsideration.
Comment Re:Website? (Score 1) 278
How great! Are they in Second Life as well? I might start checking that out to say hello.
Comment Related: Miserware (Score 1) 258
This reminds me of a piece of proprietary software called Miserware. The original license said you needed permission to publish data reported by Miserware. After some rumblings, they issued this e-mail:
Dear MicroMiser beta participant,
Thank you for your involvement in the MicroMiser beta! The response so far has been tremendous and well beyond our expectations. The information we are getting when you run the mw-feedback script is really helping us improve our products and documentation.
The license you agreed to when registering for the beta said you needed permission from MiserWare to publish data reported by our software. We would like to lift this requirement to some extent by allowing you to share performance and power numbers reported by MicroMiser. More precisely our lawyers told us to say it like this:
"You are hereby authorized to disclose information regarding the performance of the MicroMiser software, provided that such information is provided to you in a MicroMiser software report."
This includes any information (including energy savings information) provided by MicroMiser in any of its log files and/or information reported in tools such as the mw-feedback script which reports system specific information to MiserWare thereby aiding future development and earning you points in the incentive program.
Several folks have asked about benchmarking against other power management software. With regard to benchmarking, we want to clarify the intent of the license. Our intent was not to preclude benchmarking altogether, but to ensure the measurement methodology is fair to all parties. More precisely, our lawyers told us to paste both permissions together:
"You are hereby authorized to disclose information regarding the performance of the MicroMiser software, (i) provided that such information is provided to you in a MicroMiser software report, or (ii) provided that such information is obtained using techniques approved in writing by MiserWare."
There is no need for you to sign another license agreement as these clarifications simply give you additional permissions under the original license.
These clarifications are the result of your feedback. Please continue to send your comments to feedback@miserware.com . We promise to keep listening.
Regards,
MiserWare
Good thing they have lawyers, huh? Needless to say, I thought about it for a millisecond, and realized I could live without this particular piece of software.
Dear MicroMiser beta participant,
Thank you for your involvement in the MicroMiser beta! The response so far has been tremendous and well beyond our expectations. The information we are getting when you run the mw-feedback script is really helping us improve our products and documentation.
The license you agreed to when registering for the beta said you needed permission from MiserWare to publish data reported by our software. We would like to lift this requirement to some extent by allowing you to share performance and power numbers reported by MicroMiser. More precisely our lawyers told us to say it like this:
"You are hereby authorized to disclose information regarding the performance of the MicroMiser software, provided that such information is provided to you in a MicroMiser software report."
This includes any information (including energy savings information) provided by MicroMiser in any of its log files and/or information reported in tools such as the mw-feedback script which reports system specific information to MiserWare thereby aiding future development and earning you points in the incentive program.
Several folks have asked about benchmarking against other power management software. With regard to benchmarking, we want to clarify the intent of the license. Our intent was not to preclude benchmarking altogether, but to ensure the measurement methodology is fair to all parties. More precisely, our lawyers told us to paste both permissions together:
"You are hereby authorized to disclose information regarding the performance of the MicroMiser software, (i) provided that such information is provided to you in a MicroMiser software report, or (ii) provided that such information is obtained using techniques approved in writing by MiserWare."
There is no need for you to sign another license agreement as these clarifications simply give you additional permissions under the original license.
These clarifications are the result of your feedback. Please continue to send your comments to feedback@miserware.com . We promise to keep listening.
Regards,
MiserWare
Good thing they have lawyers, huh? Needless to say, I thought about it for a millisecond, and realized I could live without this particular piece of software.
Comment Re:"M$" (Score 0, Flamebait) 1008
I agree. Move this crap out, or tag it "typoinsummary"
Comment Re:With friends like these, who needs enemies? (Score 1) 1008
I think you're missing the point. Check up on what free software commentators have been spending their last 3-4 weeks on. Not only are the devs behing F-spot, Beagle, Gnome Do and Tomboy getting side tracked, a big chunk of the FLOSS community are too, getting absorbed in this endless discussion. If you think that topics not directly related to their projects are not eating into the 24 hrs that every day of a distro developer consists of, think again.
Comment Re:Richard "Dick" Stallman also says no to... (Score 1) 1008
That was supposed to be the judicial paragraph sign, but it was screwed up...
Comment Re:Richard "Dick" Stallman also says no to... (Score 1) 1008
No, it's RMÂ
Comment With friends like these, who needs enemies? (Score 2, Insightful) 1008
Interesting, compared to this which has been his comment earlier. Nice to see RMS give the Mono haters more fuel to their flame wars, so that developers can get tangled up in endless discussions about this in stead of actually hacking away. Again, this is one of the reasons GNU/Linux is not gaining more than it does. All MS needs to do in order to keep hackers busy not making great software (and cloning already great C# apps instead), is issue some kind of new vague statement on the nature of .NET. Then, we all lose. Like we've been doing since day 1. Nice. Thanks. With friends like these, who needs enemies?
Richard Stallman Says No To Mono 1008
twitter writes "There's been a lot of fuss about mono lately. After SCO and MS suing over FAT patents, you would think avoiding anything MS would be a matter of common sense. RMS now steps into the fray to warn against a serious mistake: 'Debian's decision to include Mono in the default installation, for the sake of Tomboy which is an application written in C#, leads the community in a risky direction. It is dangerous to depend on C#, so we need to discourage its use. .... This is not to say that implementing C# is a bad thing. ... [writing and using applications in mono] is taking a gratuitous risk.'" Update: 06/27 20:22 GMT by T : Read on below for one Mono-eschewing attempt at getting the (excellent) Tomboy's functionality, via a similar program called Gnote. Update: 06/27 21:07 GMT by T: On the other side of the coin, reader im_thatoneguy writes "Jo Shields, a Mono Developer, has published an article on 'Why Mono Doesn't Suck,' why it is not a threat to FOSS, why it is desirable to developers and why it should be included in Ubuntu by default."
Comment Re:So, for the Norwegian Slashdotters: (Score 1) 186
Taxes; it's 25% VAT IIRC
Partly correct. It's usually that, but 14% on food that you take away. (Meant for making groceries cheaper, but actually also applies to take away food and coffee.) Cultural things (like going to the movies) are 8%.
Comment Re:When taking a stand... (Score 1) 503
I sure hope you base your decision on more than that. Otherwise I'd be anti every type of programming language, because of the bugs I've seen in various applications. I personally think F-spot sucks bigtime, so I don't use it. I think other applications like Gnome Do and Tomboy are great. So, your gripe with F-spot is not necessarily due to Mono, but could very well be due to poor use of it.
Comment Re:Incredible horrifying bloat (Score 1) 503
I made a slight mistake in my spelling, so I can understand some of the confusion. Gnote calls them "add-ins". My Norwegian translation of Tomboy calls them "Tillegg", which is the same word used to describe Firefox addons/extension. They're not extensions like you're used to in Firefox, but features you can turn off or on, that comes with the app.
Comment Re:Incredible horrifying bloat (Score 1) 503
It's not a third party addon, it's a feature you can enable or disable that is an integrated part of Tomboy.
Comment Re:Incredible horrifying bloat (Score 1) 503
You wrote: "Gnote is a line by line clone of Tomboy from C# to C++. Even the GUI is exactly the same."
It is not. Tomboy offers features that Gnote does not. The fact that an actual clone is worked upon does not mean it's here. You are telling me Gnote is incomplete, which it is. The reasons for lacking features are largely irrelevant to the user.
It is not. Tomboy offers features that Gnote does not. The fact that an actual clone is worked upon does not mean it's here. You are telling me Gnote is incomplete, which it is. The reasons for lacking features are largely irrelevant to the user.
