>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.

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.

If you look at the draft it doesn't mention ISPs either - VPN providers are just "telecommunication operators" providing a "telecommunications service", see Section 193-195 for the definitions used:

>"Communication”, in relation to a telecommunications operator,
telecommunications service or telecommunication system, includes—
(a) anything comprising speech, music, sounds, visual images or data of any description
(b) ..." //

Also the definition of data made be chuckle, it means anything that's data and any information that's not data too! Presumably that's to counter suggestions that encrypted data isn't data and to encompass types of information transfer that might not have been foreseen.

How about a blacklight/ultra-violet fluorescing label on the spine - that way you can turn the light off in a room full of books, turn on a blacklight and see the book almost immediately??

Pair it with human readable, QR and RFID labels and you've got a pretty comprehensive label. If you have a stick on label that goes in the front cover with a part that then wraps on to the cover and around the spine you'll be able to see it from the front, back or spine side too. Make it a strong contrasting colour and it will stand out on most book spines.

>Now go forth and read Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe before you climb up on that horse again. //

How about instead you provide examples of states [established in the Western tradition] adopting a common definition of marriage that encompassed homosexual couples? I'm sure we can rule out fringe cases of emperors dressing up boys as the concubine they murdered and insisting on having a wedding feast to celebrate their nuptials too, just to help you in choosing examples.

Well said. They also fail to address why incestuous relations can't "marry" under such a scheme of equality and indeed why non-sexually involved pairs of people can't "marry" if it is expedient to them.

>"there is no reason whatsoever that the law should permit e.g. visitation rights to a couple composed of a male and a female, but deny them to a couple composed of two males or two females" //

Here's your estoppel right back at you - what legal reason is there then to deny that right simply because the grouping is not a couple but a threesome or because the couple are close family? If it were about equality in this way wouldn't you expect the outcome to be even handed??

As it stands the reason states have historically supported marriages with better benefits and tax breaks and such is that heterosexual marriage provides a strong basis for procreation that supports the long term upbringing of children. So there is at least one reason, which sure you can pick some holes in (that can be countered) but is nonetheless "a reason" contrary to your assertion.

>"If certain individuals of a religious persuasion wish to consider homosexuality a sin, fine. They don't have to practice it themselves, or even associate with those who do." //

The mirror argument to this is if those who have homosexual sexual relationships want to marry they may, they just need to find an opposite sex partner, fine. They don't have to get married though, or even associate with those who do.

There is plenty in the Bible that contradicts calling same-sex couples "married". Redefining the word "marriage" by statute was not in any way required in order to provide "equal rights under the law", civil partnership accomplishes this without interfering with religious ideals. The ruling was about religion.

For computers that are on the network could they remote in to the computer they're searching and set it playing a full-screen video of flashing lights with "Call IT you've won a prize!" in neon text??

Won't work for headless computers.

May cause harm in a scientific paper should mean they found evidence of harm but not at a sufficient level to say it was certainly from eating placenta. It should mean that they believe that further study will show there is definite harm. Instead it appears that they just made it up - they should then say "we propose a hypothesis for later testing that placentaphagy causes measurable detriments to health".

Perhaps he wanted to give the kid enough rope to hang himself. Change the password and lock the kid out, or keep it and have the kid incriminate himself and get punished ...

Until very recently the trademark search from the UK government had office hours, it was turned off on weekends .. UK gov really don't seem to get how the internet works do they. Unless it's down for security problems then it should be up, presumably taking it down is necessary as modifications to the site aren't staged?

Doesn't BBT say that men working in STEM are actually just dumb kids but women working in STEM are intelligent, rich, well respected and never put a foot wrong? Bernadette and Amy never seem to make goofs or mope around like little kids but the men are so brainless they can't even fix themselves a meal or plan a vacation, it seems. Indeed the most brilliant can't just be an amazing scientist but has to be mentally deficient. Even the supposed "dumb blonde", Penny, merely has to look at the men and she has the idiots eating out of her hand.

Now that stereotype of men in STEM maybe has a lot going for it, but holding up BBT as supporting men as cherished scientific role models seems pretty far off the mark.

Link to the videos?