Why bother with the QR code? The car has a unique identifier attached to the back bumper (as well as a globally unique one in the corner of the windshield). That can be looked-up to verify that the registration is valid, if need be.

I remember a british sitcom some time ago (perhaps it was one of the last seasons or reincarnations of Are You Being Served?) where some Londoners found themselves living in the British countryside and at one point the issue of tax discs came up. One of the locals just pointed out that they used a beer coaster. The local constabulary just took it on faith that everybody in the area was honest.

I've got a cubby in bookshelf in the dining nook (most convenient spot, cable-outlet-wise) with...

Motorola SB6120
Mikrotik RB493G
Apple AirPort Extreme AC
Synology DS412+
HDHomerun

On my workbench I have a Raspberry Pi for experiments and AVR programming, and in the bedroom I've got another acting as a GPS NTP stratum 1 server.

I have a VPS offsite (obviously) doing e-mail, light web and shell duty.

So fundamentally my argument is that whatever scraps of paper exist that might be described as a constitution in the UK merely say that Parliament can do whatever the hell it wants. You're quibbling about the mere existence of those scraps of paper while ignoring my fundamental argument which is that whether they exist or not they have no value whatsoever.

Ok, douchebag. Maybe that quotation wasn't the best one. Look a bit further up on that same wikipedia page, and you'll find this one:

Parliament means, in the mouth of a lawyer (though the word has often a different sense in conversation) The King, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons: these three bodies acting together may be aptly described as the "King in Parliament", and constitute Parliament. The principle of Parliamentary sovereignty mean neither more nor less than this, namely that Parliament thus defined has, under the English constitution, the right to make or unmake any law whatever: and, further, that no person or body is recognised by the law of England as having a right to override or set aside the legislation of Parliament.
—A.V. Dicey Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (1885)

That's more evidence than you've supplied to the contrary.

Even the ECHR was merely agreed to via an Act of Parliament. A future Parliament would have no legal encumbrance to repealing it. The UK Parliament is supremely sovereign. There's no law in the UK other than, ultimately, what Parliament passes. And there's no law they can't repeal, should they so choose. Their only restraint is custom and electability.

Uh, no. There isn't one. The UK Parliament is supremely sovereign.

What's the difference between a Sunday and a holiday again?

The UK Parliament is supremely sovereign. That means you can be jailed for anything that they say you can be jailed for.

I just want to use my camera. Like virtually all cameras made in the last 20 years, it qualifies as an electronic device. The last time I flew into Newark, I was treated to breathtaking vistas of the Manhattan skyline, including the Empire State building in full plumage. I can't share those memories because of FAA stupidity.

Don't forget this, btw... The US did not declare war against Germany until Germany made such a declaration first, after the US declared war on Japan. Germany was not bound by the tri-partite pact to honor Japan's "de-facto" declaration of war (to wit, the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor), and it's quite possible that had Hitler not so declared that the US might have gone on to fight a one-front war against Japan only. I (and I don't believe I am alone in this) regard Germany's declaration of war against the US to be Hitler's first major blunder (not counting things before his rise to power, like the Beer Hall Putsch).

So... Microsoft's "research" seems to come from reading competitor's product specifications: my AirPort Extreme has been doing this for my network of macs for ages now - ever since Snow Leopard came out.

This is WoL combined with a proxy. Whenever the target machine is asleep, the proxy continues to respond (in this case) to Bonjour requests. When someone attempts to actually connect to the machine, the proxy sends a WoL packet out and then when the original host wakes up, it will hear from the requesting host and proceed as normal.

The one thing that's a little weird about this is that the AirPort extreme will actually wake the target machine up every few hours to make sure it's still there.

I've been using 6to4 ever since the 6bone shut down, and I've had no problems with it. In fact, it seems to me there are only two possible problems with 6to4 generally:

1. Bastard ISPs could, if they deeply inspect packets, see 6-in-4 packets generally as different or undesirable or whatever and do bad things like they do with bittorrent.

2. The 6to4 anycast default route as a mechanism to get from 6to4 space to the "real" IPv6 space can sometimes send your packets to a non-optimal gateway. The fix for this is simply for more such gateways to be created - preferably one (or more) per ISP - so that the traffic can be routed optimally.

I wanted to opt into Google over IPv6, but when I wrote them they told me to pound sand because I was using 6to4.