In what way is everyone else straight (I assume you mean actively heterosexual as opposed to just "plain"). Kirk I remember seeing in sexual situations, Troy and Ryker, Whorf in heat ... surely it's just your prejudice, or did they mention in the films/shows that "all the crew are heterosexual"? There are lots of kids in the shows, presumably they're pre-sexual.

If a character's sexual activity isn't mentioned why do you assume they're in an active heterosexual relationship as opposed to being chaste or pansexual or a xenophile or whatever?

Did I miss something and people get some sort of mark on them that shows what sex the people are who they're having sex with? How can you say it didn't, you can just pick a character and imagine them to be heterosexual, or homosexual, or pansexual, or only fuck with aliens, or whatever you like - sex is just not part of the plot in general is it?

Maybe phasers just shift the person to an alternate phase, so they can't interact directly with matter in our universe. Trapped between dimensions, or something. Scary!

"the pound is already re-stabilizing and didn't fall that far to start with!"

a) no it isn't
b) 10% isn't a big fall????

It's fallen to the lowest level since 1985. It's the 3rd largest currency fall ever, of any currency. It's twice the fall that happened on 'black wednesday' when we crashed out of the ERM - which caused a whopping recession and soaring interest rates.

The FTSE only stabilised after the Bank of England offered an extra £250 billion - yes, with a b - in liquidity to banks, who were amongst the hardest hit.

And that was ONE day of post referendum trading.

HSBC have said they will move at least 1000 jobs to the EU if the leave the single market. The rescue of Port Talbot - 11,000 jobs - is under threat as potential investors are backing out now due to Brexit. Tech, cars, financial services, and all other sorts companies that rely on exports to the EU are all looking at if they'll be better off in Ireland or Scotland (assuming it leaves the UK) to stay inside the EU single market.

The bonfire of the UK economy has literally only just started. Petrol is going up next week due to the sterling crash, electricity & gas prices will follow, and food prices will be going up soon - we import 40% of it.

Actually whoever the new guy is, I don't find the site to be "improved" at all; seems a little crummy. The story was butchered and incorrectly interpreted, and the all important software for interaction seems less interactive.

But what do I know?

As to my absence I've been a bit overwhelmed by work stuff, sorry about that, it's no excuse :)

The story as published implies that the ruling overruled the lower court on the 3 issues. In fact, it was agreeing with the trial court on the third issue -- that the sporadic instances of Vimeo employees making light of copyright law did not amount to adopting a "policy of willful blindness".

>A CD (as so many folks are using as their example) is instantly recognizable as being used after it's initial use because it has been removed from it's original packaging. //

The media companies tell us it is not the CD that we bought but a license to consume the content. The content is not material, it is a logical article, it can be reproduced without change; in the USA it can be format shifted under Fair Use.

The legal logic that applies saying things should pass on to relatives after death is because those things are property, if they're property then they can be bought and sold.

Consider this if the concept is that resale of digitial goods should be denied because they are "perfect" (they may not be, minor corruption happens) then any article that is in a "as new" condition should be excluded from resale as these articles also deny the original manufacturer additional sales.

>if you believe copyright (in principle) to be a useful thing, then you de-facto have to be against reselling ebooks to be logically consistent //

You're wrong. You can believe and apply the principles of copyright and apply the doctrine of first sale (exhaustion of copyright holders rights to control distribution of an article after it's sale). Indeed doing so seems entirely consistent to me.

>Copyright exists to address the free rider problem //

No, wrong again. Copyright exist so that the public, citizens of a state for example, can aid the creators of useful works to get fair recompense for their creative activities. The public, the demos, do this by enforcing an unnatural right to a monopoly for the reproduction of works, said monopoly being given by the demos to the creator. The purpose is to ensure that creators don't lose financial (nor moral) control immediately that a work is published, the demos support them in that endeavour; the cost to the creator is to put the work in to the public domain in a timely manner (but this part of the contract has been badly perverted) - ie to allow everyone and anyone to use the work without charge, to give everybody a free ride.

>No, you didn't "buy" the software, you purchased a license //

The item was advertised as "for sale" and when I clicked the "buy" button I was given a price. On paying that price then I've completed my part of their sales transaction, if they took the money from the "buy" transaction then I've purchased the item (obvious errors aside). If they attempt to apply a post-purchase license then I can choose to agree to that further license or stick with the contract of sale already established. Yes companies have been trying to pull this trick for a long time that doesn't make it any more right now than it was then.

If they want to negotiate a license then all uses of terms such as "buy" and "own" must be excluded otherwise there is an implicit contract of sale of the product. "Own the new star wars - DVD or download" means I get to _own_ it, resell it, do as I please with it. "Acquire a license to watch the new star wars for a limited time subject to our conditions" means they get what they want. This way the consumer can choose if they want to buy stuff or acquire a limited license.

Without explicitly stating that it's not a purchase and only a license negotiation then it's just fraud.

Then they send you to prison for refusing to decrypt it?

See the UK for example - the RIP Act - where you can get a sentence of up to 2 years for failing to decrypt, when ordered, anything the police have a 'reasonable belief' that you have the keys to. Several animal rights' activists have already been convicted under this law.

Forget the password for that encrypted backup? Get sent an encrypted email you don't even have the key for? Have some file of randomly generated garbage you used to test drive throughput that might be mistaken for encrypted data? Better hope the police don't go looking for a reason to put you away...

I use Digikam.

+ It manages meta-data and tags (yes my own taxonomy) that I apply to allow me to easily find images and to give space to write some text.

+ It has an editor that's good for colour correction cropping and similar functions (I use GIMP for more complex changes).

+ It has a print manager to help arrange images on sheets of photo paper, add titles and such.

+ It also has face recognition and tagging, so I can access a folder of images and choose nice pictures based on who is in them, or if I want a picture with a certain group of people in then I can find them all.

+ Search by keywords, or by drawing a rudimentary image and doing image matching.

+ What else, oh, when it's somewhere new I usually add some geo coordinates so that if in the future if we want to remember where we were, or my kids want to find the place we visited, or somesuch then they can

+ Uploading images to Facebook (and in the past to other places like Flickr and a private Gallery2 site) and keeping track of which images were uploaded (by using tags).

That's about all I use, there's lots more in there including things like date sorting (which ignores the folder structure and lets you view virtual folders by date) and colour searching.

Tags and such are applied in well-known meta-data regions that can be ported to other applications. In fact one problem I had was that I downloaded a load of image files that were already tagged and the tags were automatically imported.

I'm using version 4.14.0-wily~ppa3 from Philip Johnsons PPA, which is pretty well up to date. I rate the facial recognition about on a par with Picasa about 10 years ago (my memory is hazy on exactly how long). It takes a lot of processing power and a lot of time to work for me. Useful but not great and missing some of the niceties that Picasa had way back.

On the whole I rate Digikam highly, having used it for many years, but the facial recognition has never really lived up to the promise for me.

I've been bitten by more BitBucket outages than I've seen GitHub disruptions :p