The only solution I can think of that measures actual impairment is something in the car that monitors eye movement and such to see how often mirrors and such are checked.
But surely such a large dataset would be needed for this, and have regional variations? At night you are most at risk from sleep but consequently check mirrors far less as any car will be visible through headlights. I remember doing the UK driving test and consciously moving your head every five seconds to check mirrors - hugely distracting and yet going for much longer than that without obviously glancing at a mirror gets a minor fault. As soon as the test is passed this behaviour is put to the side as it's not practical in everyday use.
This is one area where manufacturers are a bit ahead of the curve. If safety guidelines include lane departure warnings on all new cars and other similar technologies then eventually these driving errors will start to decrease (hopefully). Car structures are so safe now that the safety focus should be on the driver rather than adding more heavy bodywork.
I think driver retesting every 5-10 years is possibly the best way to go to try and keep driving standards high.
I think there was a niche generation that really really got into MD in a big way. Here in Europe there was a pretty sizeable take-up of it but it was largely word of mouth. I got a portable recorder in '96, within a year about half a dozen of my friends had similar machines. Far smaller than a portable CD or cassette player with great rechargeable battery life. The discs were small enough you could pocket dozens of them for sharing and swapping.
Over the years the portable players got smaller and smaller. After picking up a deck perfect album duplicates could be made, and with CD multichangers you could preprogram a 'mix tape' and let it run and record. My last portable player was my beloved Panasonic SJ-MJ70 which is one of the most beautiful electronic products ever put on this earth.
This was all reasonably affordable. My deck was £100 as were all the portables in the local Richer Sounds. The discs got to be really cheap - under £1 per disc as the format got more popular. I had shoeboxes full of discs, hundreds of them. Never had one fail. Cloning the TOC could get an 80m disc from any 74m disc!
Granted we were all into our music. When an album was £10 you didn't really want to carry it around or lend it out and MD was a great way to preserve the originals. The hardware costs are far more reasonable when you consider the lack of wear and tear on original media. I think the downfall of MD wasn't just the rise of the mp3 player but the movement away from the album format that came along with it. No longer would the MD be seen as one or two albums per disc, but more as a twenty song hard limit. When an mp3 player could take 100 albums and play anything in any order the argument for discrete chunks of music over different media was a losing one. Even though 128kbps mp3s didn't sound nearly as good as SD MD ATRAC it was mostly unnoticed.
But in the 90s the use of MD as data storage would have been a revolution. It would have undercut the cost of Zip and Jazz drives hugely and was durable and consumer friendly. Had Sony not been so beholden to their entertainment division they would have cornered the removable media market.
The format's lack of impact in the US tends to mute widespread online celebration of the format, but in some markets it did really well. In my class of '99 I would guess about 25% of people used it. Personally the death knell was when my new SACD player refused to do a digital output for me to make an MD copy. CDs were fine but not the few SACDs I'd invested in. Adios Sony and soon I was on a G2 iPod.
I haven't even touched on studio use. But I remember fondly the days of a player in one pocket, bunch of albums in another, and meeting someone at a prearranged time (no mobile phones!).
Some are Catholics, and believe in intercessory prayer, where you can't pray directly to God, even though that contradicts the entire Bible. You are dependent wholly on the Church still. You get forgiveness through the Church (not God) and must confess sins to a priest.
Where do you get that idea? The primal Catholic prayer is Pater Noster, directed directly to God. Nothing stops you from praying directly to God if you so choose, or Jesus, or the Holy Spirit. Prayers of intercession are a personal choice.
In modern Protestantism the vast majority of prayers are directed only to Jesus, not the rest of the Trinity.
I've heard this about the UK cycle many times but in my experience is not true. I do 400-500 miles per week, in a mixture of urban and rural driving. My current car, a 2.0l 136 bhp diesel, is rated at 40/51/62 and I would regularly get 54 or 55 mpg on a week's driving. On a long rural drive between 55 to 60 mph the consumption is over 70 mpg. In my previous petrol car I would get about halfway between the combined and rural figure. I'm not a slow driver by any means!
A torquey diesel is far more fun to drive than a petrol engine of the same power, and the midrange push is fantastic. I use about two thirds the fuel over a week as with the petrol. The downside will be the cost of repair for when the turbo or injectors go south, as I've replaced a whole petrol engine for less than the cost of fixing either of those.
On the UK website the Focus starts at £18k ($27k) but to compare like with like you have to take VAT off the UK price, so the dollar amount is around $23.5k. The Focus in the UK started at around £13k up until recently, when the collapse of the pound made this impractical - the Focus is built Saarlouis in the eurozone. I think over the history of the model the UK base price would work out around $20k. If the US next-gen Focus starts at the $12k range it's interesting and shows their pricing schemes to be regional and a bit arbitrary.
Unlike a road network though it's a relatively trivial matter for an ISP to increase their overall bandwidth. It wouldn't maximize profits but it is a matter of buying more servers and leasing more backbone.
Absolutely a terrible review. I haven't read the book yet but have read Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets several times. As someone who doesn't give a toss about Israel one way or the other Bamford's earlier works had no bias I could detect.
How did this tirade get accepted as a review by slashdot? Considering the contribution Bamford has made to public consciousness about the NSA he deserves far better.
If you're in Ireland, UTV. Despite being (in theory) also a content provider they are very unrestricted in general and have cap-free options. Local support lines too.
Tiny changes in pronunciation, attitude, behaviour of a large group and other cues. As a young lad going out a lot around town about a decade ago I could tell Protestant from Catholic very reliably, and most others I knew were the same. Back then it was a few years into ceasefire and there was more mixed socalising in the centre of the city, which was generally a new thing but still a bit hairy from time to time. However these days among young people the difference is not nearly so noticeable.
If you were to put me in another city in Northern Ireland I wouldn't be able to tell the difference. In a very old set of cultures as exist here just moving five miles up the road gives you different accents and attitudes, not apparent to the outsider but the most obvious thing to a local. It's telling that the UK Government had much more luck using informants than infiltration in fighting both factions of terror groups.
As a European who would best be described as libertarian, I can tell you it's not totally unfathomable. But not a popular position and no real formal representation. The political goalposts are different, and in terms of civil rights in the UK the libertarian issues are often best represented on the (far) left. The crushing bureaucracy and ceaseless boundary-pushing legislation of Labour will reach a crux soon I believe - we have hit $8.20/gallon, nationalised healthcare is a financial black hole, biometric ID cards are a year off, and the current cabinet want to draft a written UK Constitution.
We are far too passive as a population. Still, let them try and come to take my fingerprints.
In addition to the changes in technology, the ear's sensitivity and pitch perception changes with age. I remember hearing a story about a musician with perfect pitch who was also highly synaesthetic describing music throughout his life. With Mahler's Symphony No.5, he heard it in the C-sharp minor key it is written in as a young man, with all the associated pitches and tone colors. Six decades later he perceived the piece to be in D-minor and could barely listen to it, such was the unfamiliarity of the familiar piece.
Imagine how Dylan might feel if he is playing a song he wrote in the mid-60s, performing it exactly how he did then and it still doesn't 'feel' right. And as the GP states Dylan's hearing is likely highly degraded since his youth, especially once he went electric.
All that isn't really a constitution. It's a body of laws and legal rules that "constitute" the legal system of the country.
Of course it is a constitution, you just choose to define a constitution as similar in structure to the US Constitution. There is no difference between constitutional law and statutory law in the UK, as you refer to "a body of laws and the rest".
That's a fundamental difference. The US government starts from nothing, inserts a Constitution specifying government powers, and leaves anything not denied to the individual states to the people. While the states each have their own constitution, which creates state powers, leaving the rest to the people. While Britain starts with the government having all power, then assigning freedoms to the people.
It is a fundamental difference. However when you note the input on the US Constitution of English common law, such as the Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus and the Bill Of Rights, the Founding Fathers replicated a lot of rights that existed in the UK at the time of conception. In practice the rights to the average man equalised, with a few exceptions.
The UK is still a monarchy and although the associated powers have been transferred largely to Parliament there is still a monarch-subject relationship. There has been an official change to "citizen" from "subject" but it wasn't retrospective and will not be a country of citizens until the last subject dies. Since the people have never risen up and reformed the government under a different set of rules this relationship still technically remains. The large freedoms passed in various acts give a UK citizen/subject rights enjoyed by most other first world countries. In theory an authoritarian with a large elected party majority could rescind vast swathes of rights but oversight of European courts and the views of individual MPs, monarchal assent and citizen outrage would make it impossible to stick.
I do not contend that the UK system was started with the freedom and rights of the individual paramount. But I would suggest that the parliamentary sovereignty has its advantages with regards transparency and detail to the entrenched constitutional system. One sweeping Supreme Court decision can affect the rights of huge amounts of citizen's rights, eg Dred Scott and Plessy v Ferguson. Unless another court takes up the case and overturns the decision it cannot be challenged. Whilst rights can be disenfranchised with one Act of Parliament in the UK the passage of the Act would be practically impossible, with bureaucratic contention right through until Parliament is dismissed.
Just summarizing British law in a constitution doesn't make it the same as the US system.
I didn't say that it was the same, but it has the same power as an amendment to the US Constitution legally. In the context of the original discussion, I was pointing out that the British citizen has legal protections to their privacy laid out in various laws that have the equivalent power of an American amendment or original constitutional item. And the advantage of having it in the European Convention of Human Rights is that it is enforceable and upheld by a European court which can over-ride any attempt of Parliament to disenfranchise that right - so long as we remain a part of the EU. In the current political climate there is little chance of the UK leaving the EU and at any rate wide support of the ECHR would likely scupper any attempt to change it.
Whereas there is no US right to privacy enshrined in the Constitution - I realise you support this right and its insertion into the US Constitution. I think every first world citizen should demand every right going, the twentieth century entrenched the inevitability of big government and we should reevaluate the relationship between state and citizen for the future. Looking back at Perot I find it interesting that he had a proposal for an "electronic town hall"; apart from supplying the machines for it it would ha
Where is the UK legal structure that specifies which statutes and Acts are part of the "Constitution", and which are not?
The traditional sources for the constitution are statute law, common law, conventions and works of authority. Of these statute law is pre-eminent due to the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. Every new Act of Parliament passed is part of the constitution, taking precedence over previous statutes which may have been entirely in opposition, such as the right to bear arms. Under parliamentary sovereignty the judiciary cannot strike down an Act lawfully passed as being unconstitutional, as it only recognises Parliament to have the power to make law.
Some Acts are obviously much more important constitutionally than others - the Second Reform Act (1867), Parliament Act (1911) and European Communities Act (1972) have much longer lasting and important effects than ones dealing with fox hunting, for instance.
And what is the hierarchy to resolve conflicts?
The two pillars of the constitution are parliamentary sovereignty and the rule of law, so by definition a law passed could not be judicially challenged. Since joining the EU however Parliament has ceded some sovereignty to European courts and EU law takes precedence over national law. But since Parliament has the power to repeal membership of the EU and all its legislative and judicial systems sovereignty still exists to a degree.
A constitution is not just the body of laws that govern a country. It is the final authority of law and other governance. Where is the UK rule that says "this is the final authority, from which all authority is exclusively derived", uncontested by any other rule?
In the Westminster system Parliament is the ultimate authority, and only Parliament can repeal or change a law. And the unwritten constitution and its principal sources in the modern form date back to the Glorious Revolution (1688). There is little need for excessive interpretation and no judicial system for challenging constitutionality because elections nearly always return a governing majority and the strong whip system ensures new Acts are passed relatively easily - thus changing the constitution to the new desired effect.
Britain doesn't even have a Constitution, so I don't know how they'll protect that privacy.
In terms of the original discussion, Parliament has passed the Data Protection Act and the European Convention of Human Rights, which has specific privacy protections. So there are two specific constitutional items protecting privacy.
Having said all that, I personally would much rather have a written and simplifed Constitution. The UK has too many Acts coming thick and fast from a large majority Labour government that change fundamental things about life in the country. It is the great weakness of the system when you consider that Labour have a governing majority from just 35% of the vote. As a result the other main parties have ignored the Salisbury Convention, a consensus not to challenge mandated legislation in the upper house, based on the observation that 35% is not a clear mandate.
The UK's constitution is certainly uncodified, but it is wrong to state that it doesn't have one. The constitution consists of both statutes and Acts of Parliament, so a part of the constitution is the Data Protection Act. Whilst this does little against government snoopage, it limits what private companies and corporations can do with your personal data. Better to have it than not.
I think it simply means "panem et circenses" - the food and gladiatoral shows that the Roman emperors put on to keep the citizens content and unwilling to challenge or question the rulers. With abundant food and entertainment the principle remains true today (except that they aren't provided by the government) and the population has become generally apathetic to political and social concerns.
Do not speak for all people in the UK. I would be very happy to have one in my home, and in rural areas that is a common feeling. Rifle and shotgun ownership numbers are probably higher than you think; just because there is no constitutional right of firearm ownership in the UK does not mean that there are no guns legally held.
Look at the divide in public opinion over Tony Martin - a lot of people in the UK believe in personal responsibility for defence.
I'm not sure about DVD-Audio, but my SACD player won't output a digital signal from SACD discs. I've had to rip these in analog, and I can't see them changing this anytime soon.
Slashdot Mirror
I expect to see Slashdot announcing Facebook-only login next April 1st.
The only solution I can think of that measures actual impairment is something in the car that monitors eye movement and such to see how often mirrors and such are checked.
But surely such a large dataset would be needed for this, and have regional variations? At night you are most at risk from sleep but consequently check mirrors far less as any car will be visible through headlights. I remember doing the UK driving test and consciously moving your head every five seconds to check mirrors - hugely distracting and yet going for much longer than that without obviously glancing at a mirror gets a minor fault. As soon as the test is passed this behaviour is put to the side as it's not practical in everyday use.
This is one area where manufacturers are a bit ahead of the curve. If safety guidelines include lane departure warnings on all new cars and other similar technologies then eventually these driving errors will start to decrease (hopefully). Car structures are so safe now that the safety focus should be on the driver rather than adding more heavy bodywork.
I think driver retesting every 5-10 years is possibly the best way to go to try and keep driving standards high.
I think there was a niche generation that really really got into MD in a big way. Here in Europe there was a pretty sizeable take-up of it but it was largely word of mouth. I got a portable recorder in '96, within a year about half a dozen of my friends had similar machines. Far smaller than a portable CD or cassette player with great rechargeable battery life. The discs were small enough you could pocket dozens of them for sharing and swapping.
Over the years the portable players got smaller and smaller. After picking up a deck perfect album duplicates could be made, and with CD multichangers you could preprogram a 'mix tape' and let it run and record. My last portable player was my beloved Panasonic SJ-MJ70 which is one of the most beautiful electronic products ever put on this earth.
This was all reasonably affordable. My deck was £100 as were all the portables in the local Richer Sounds. The discs got to be really cheap - under £1 per disc as the format got more popular. I had shoeboxes full of discs, hundreds of them. Never had one fail. Cloning the TOC could get an 80m disc from any 74m disc!
Granted we were all into our music. When an album was £10 you didn't really want to carry it around or lend it out and MD was a great way to preserve the originals. The hardware costs are far more reasonable when you consider the lack of wear and tear on original media. I think the downfall of MD wasn't just the rise of the mp3 player but the movement away from the album format that came along with it. No longer would the MD be seen as one or two albums per disc, but more as a twenty song hard limit. When an mp3 player could take 100 albums and play anything in any order the argument for discrete chunks of music over different media was a losing one. Even though 128kbps mp3s didn't sound nearly as good as SD MD ATRAC it was mostly unnoticed.
But in the 90s the use of MD as data storage would have been a revolution. It would have undercut the cost of Zip and Jazz drives hugely and was durable and consumer friendly. Had Sony not been so beholden to their entertainment division they would have cornered the removable media market.
The format's lack of impact in the US tends to mute widespread online celebration of the format, but in some markets it did really well. In my class of '99 I would guess about 25% of people used it. Personally the death knell was when my new SACD player refused to do a digital output for me to make an MD copy. CDs were fine but not the few SACDs I'd invested in. Adios Sony and soon I was on a G2 iPod.
I haven't even touched on studio use. But I remember fondly the days of a player in one pocket, bunch of albums in another, and meeting someone at a prearranged time (no mobile phones!).
Jones from Police Academy is never going to pay for anything again once he hacks this.
On the second note, if Tesla's claim that they can prove their disputes with the data logging on the roadster proves true, than Tesla's going to win
OK but what is the chain of custody on these logs? If Tesla produces them two years after the fact that can hardly be introduced as evidence.
I remember reading about the Nürburgring trials after WW2.
Where do you get that idea? The primal Catholic prayer is Pater Noster, directed directly to God. Nothing stops you from praying directly to God if you so choose, or Jesus, or the Holy Spirit. Prayers of intercession are a personal choice.
In modern Protestantism the vast majority of prayers are directed only to Jesus, not the rest of the Trinity.
I've heard this about the UK cycle many times but in my experience is not true. I do 400-500 miles per week, in a mixture of urban and rural driving. My current car, a 2.0l 136 bhp diesel, is rated at 40/51/62 and I would regularly get 54 or 55 mpg on a week's driving. On a long rural drive between 55 to 60 mph the consumption is over 70 mpg. In my previous petrol car I would get about halfway between the combined and rural figure. I'm not a slow driver by any means! A torquey diesel is far more fun to drive than a petrol engine of the same power, and the midrange push is fantastic. I use about two thirds the fuel over a week as with the petrol. The downside will be the cost of repair for when the turbo or injectors go south, as I've replaced a whole petrol engine for less than the cost of fixing either of those.
On the UK website the Focus starts at £18k ($27k) but to compare like with like you have to take VAT off the UK price, so the dollar amount is around $23.5k. The Focus in the UK started at around £13k up until recently, when the collapse of the pound made this impractical - the Focus is built Saarlouis in the eurozone. I think over the history of the model the UK base price would work out around $20k. If the US next-gen Focus starts at the $12k range it's interesting and shows their pricing schemes to be regional and a bit arbitrary.
Unlike a road network though it's a relatively trivial matter for an ISP to increase their overall bandwidth. It wouldn't maximize profits but it is a matter of buying more servers and leasing more backbone.
Absolutely a terrible review. I haven't read the book yet but have read Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets several times. As someone who doesn't give a toss about Israel one way or the other Bamford's earlier works had no bias I could detect. How did this tirade get accepted as a review by slashdot? Considering the contribution Bamford has made to public consciousness about the NSA he deserves far better.
If you're in Ireland, UTV. Despite being (in theory) also a content provider they are very unrestricted in general and have cap-free options. Local support lines too.
Tiny changes in pronunciation, attitude, behaviour of a large group and other cues. As a young lad going out a lot around town about a decade ago I could tell Protestant from Catholic very reliably, and most others I knew were the same. Back then it was a few years into ceasefire and there was more mixed socalising in the centre of the city, which was generally a new thing but still a bit hairy from time to time. However these days among young people the difference is not nearly so noticeable.
If you were to put me in another city in Northern Ireland I wouldn't be able to tell the difference. In a very old set of cultures as exist here just moving five miles up the road gives you different accents and attitudes, not apparent to the outsider but the most obvious thing to a local. It's telling that the UK Government had much more luck using informants than infiltration in fighting both factions of terror groups.
As a European who would best be described as libertarian, I can tell you it's not totally unfathomable. But not a popular position and no real formal representation. The political goalposts are different, and in terms of civil rights in the UK the libertarian issues are often best represented on the (far) left. The crushing bureaucracy and ceaseless boundary-pushing legislation of Labour will reach a crux soon I believe - we have hit $8.20/gallon, nationalised healthcare is a financial black hole, biometric ID cards are a year off, and the current cabinet want to draft a written UK Constitution.
We are far too passive as a population. Still, let them try and come to take my fingerprints.
In addition to the changes in technology, the ear's sensitivity and pitch perception changes with age. I remember hearing a story about a musician with perfect pitch who was also highly synaesthetic describing music throughout his life. With Mahler's Symphony No.5, he heard it in the C-sharp minor key it is written in as a young man, with all the associated pitches and tone colors. Six decades later he perceived the piece to be in D-minor and could barely listen to it, such was the unfamiliarity of the familiar piece. Imagine how Dylan might feel if he is playing a song he wrote in the mid-60s, performing it exactly how he did then and it still doesn't 'feel' right. And as the GP states Dylan's hearing is likely highly degraded since his youth, especially once he went electric.
All that isn't really a constitution. It's a body of laws and legal rules that "constitute" the legal system of the country.
Of course it is a constitution, you just choose to define a constitution as similar in structure to the US Constitution. There is no difference between constitutional law and statutory law in the UK, as you refer to "a body of laws and the rest".
That's a fundamental difference. The US government starts from nothing, inserts a Constitution specifying government powers, and leaves anything not denied to the individual states to the people. While the states each have their own constitution, which creates state powers, leaving the rest to the people. While Britain starts with the government having all power, then assigning freedoms to the people.
It is a fundamental difference. However when you note the input on the US Constitution of English common law, such as the Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus and the Bill Of Rights, the Founding Fathers replicated a lot of rights that existed in the UK at the time of conception. In practice the rights to the average man equalised, with a few exceptions.
The UK is still a monarchy and although the associated powers have been transferred largely to Parliament there is still a monarch-subject relationship. There has been an official change to "citizen" from "subject" but it wasn't retrospective and will not be a country of citizens until the last subject dies. Since the people have never risen up and reformed the government under a different set of rules this relationship still technically remains. The large freedoms passed in various acts give a UK citizen/subject rights enjoyed by most other first world countries. In theory an authoritarian with a large elected party majority could rescind vast swathes of rights but oversight of European courts and the views of individual MPs, monarchal assent and citizen outrage would make it impossible to stick.
I do not contend that the UK system was started with the freedom and rights of the individual paramount. But I would suggest that the parliamentary sovereignty has its advantages with regards transparency and detail to the entrenched constitutional system. One sweeping Supreme Court decision can affect the rights of huge amounts of citizen's rights, eg Dred Scott and Plessy v Ferguson. Unless another court takes up the case and overturns the decision it cannot be challenged. Whilst rights can be disenfranchised with one Act of Parliament in the UK the passage of the Act would be practically impossible, with bureaucratic contention right through until Parliament is dismissed.
Just summarizing British law in a constitution doesn't make it the same as the US system.
I didn't say that it was the same, but it has the same power as an amendment to the US Constitution legally. In the context of the original discussion, I was pointing out that the British citizen has legal protections to their privacy laid out in various laws that have the equivalent power of an American amendment or original constitutional item. And the advantage of having it in the European Convention of Human Rights is that it is enforceable and upheld by a European court which can over-ride any attempt of Parliament to disenfranchise that right - so long as we remain a part of the EU. In the current political climate there is little chance of the UK leaving the EU and at any rate wide support of the ECHR would likely scupper any attempt to change it.
Whereas there is no US right to privacy enshrined in the Constitution - I realise you support this right and its insertion into the US Constitution. I think every first world citizen should demand every right going, the twentieth century entrenched the inevitability of big government and we should reevaluate the relationship between state and citizen for the future. Looking back at Perot I find it interesting that he had a proposal for an "electronic town hall"; apart from supplying the machines for it it would ha
Where is the UK legal structure that specifies which statutes and Acts are part of the "Constitution", and which are not?
The traditional sources for the constitution are statute law, common law, conventions and works of authority. Of these statute law is pre-eminent due to the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. Every new Act of Parliament passed is part of the constitution, taking precedence over previous statutes which may have been entirely in opposition, such as the right to bear arms. Under parliamentary sovereignty the judiciary cannot strike down an Act lawfully passed as being unconstitutional, as it only recognises Parliament to have the power to make law.
Some Acts are obviously much more important constitutionally than others - the Second Reform Act (1867), Parliament Act (1911) and European Communities Act (1972) have much longer lasting and important effects than ones dealing with fox hunting, for instance.
And what is the hierarchy to resolve conflicts?
The two pillars of the constitution are parliamentary sovereignty and the rule of law, so by definition a law passed could not be judicially challenged. Since joining the EU however Parliament has ceded some sovereignty to European courts and EU law takes precedence over national law. But since Parliament has the power to repeal membership of the EU and all its legislative and judicial systems sovereignty still exists to a degree.
A constitution is not just the body of laws that govern a country. It is the final authority of law and other governance. Where is the UK rule that says "this is the final authority, from which all authority is exclusively derived", uncontested by any other rule?
In the Westminster system Parliament is the ultimate authority, and only Parliament can repeal or change a law. And the unwritten constitution and its principal sources in the modern form date back to the Glorious Revolution (1688). There is little need for excessive interpretation and no judicial system for challenging constitutionality because elections nearly always return a governing majority and the strong whip system ensures new Acts are passed relatively easily - thus changing the constitution to the new desired effect.
Britain doesn't even have a Constitution, so I don't know how they'll protect that privacy.
In terms of the original discussion, Parliament has passed the Data Protection Act and the European Convention of Human Rights, which has specific privacy protections. So there are two specific constitutional items protecting privacy.
Having said all that, I personally would much rather have a written and simplifed Constitution. The UK has too many Acts coming thick and fast from a large majority Labour government that change fundamental things about life in the country. It is the great weakness of the system when you consider that Labour have a governing majority from just 35% of the vote. As a result the other main parties have ignored the Salisbury Convention, a consensus not to challenge mandated legislation in the upper house, based on the observation that 35% is not a clear mandate.
The UK's constitution is certainly uncodified, but it is wrong to state that it doesn't have one. The constitution consists of both statutes and Acts of Parliament, so a part of the constitution is the Data Protection Act. Whilst this does little against government snoopage, it limits what private companies and corporations can do with your personal data. Better to have it than not.
Maybe you should READ The Times before offering that opinion - here is today's edition.
I think it simply means "panem et circenses" - the food and gladiatoral shows that the Roman emperors put on to keep the citizens content and unwilling to challenge or question the rulers. With abundant food and entertainment the principle remains true today (except that they aren't provided by the government) and the population has become generally apathetic to political and social concerns.
Do not speak for all people in the UK. I would be very happy to have one in my home, and in rural areas that is a common feeling. Rifle and shotgun ownership numbers are probably higher than you think; just because there is no constitutional right of firearm ownership in the UK does not mean that there are no guns legally held. Look at the divide in public opinion over Tony Martin - a lot of people in the UK believe in personal responsibility for defence.
Of course when they do finally release lossless compression music, there'll be a premium price. But then who actually listens to music anymore?
Come on! The bad acting is part of the magic of Song Remains the Same. And without it Spinal Tap just wouldn't have been the same...
I'm not sure about DVD-Audio, but my SACD player won't output a digital signal from SACD discs. I've had to rip these in analog, and I can't see them changing this anytime soon.