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Utah to honour Browning M1911 semi-automatic

It's not my fault I was designed to kill

"Countless other 'murder' weapons" are designed for purposes other than killing things.

Google backslaps Schmidt with $100m award

Colonials, I'd have thought

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Leica S2 professional medium format DSLR

A dead end?

The entire MF market has been shrinking for the last few decades, particularly recently as many photographers realise they can achieve the same results with much cheaper and much, much higher tech FF 35mm digital systems from Canon and Nikon.

There are photographers who need the resolution of MF digital backs and know exactly how to use them to balance aliasing with detail, but they are few and far between. Everyone else gets a 1Ds MkIII or a D3X because they are fantastic cameras backed by fantastic systems.

Who are the biggest electric car liars - the BBC, or Tesla Motors?

Clarkson & Co

Tesla have every right to be bitter about what Clarkson & Co did, that turned out to have been a complete fabrication. I'm not sure why Top Gear making shit up still surprises people these days.

$1,000 reward offered for stolen cancer research laptop

No

It was a Mac.

Samsung EX1 compact camera

"24mm f1.8"

That's 5.2mm f/1.8 actually. The equivalent aperture on 35mm full frame is f/8.2, and f/5.5 on APS-C. There really is no getting around the laws of physics.

PS3 telly add-on update hit by splash screen crash

That's it? Seriously?

I looked up this "series link" thing, not knowing what it was.

...

People are paying £7 for THAT?

Bond 23 back on track for 2012

"no details on the film's title or plot"

That's never stopped them

Oz net filter jams up with smut, may be pulled out altogether

Re: The plural of "Attorney General"

Is Attorneys General.

World+Dog says 'no thanks' to 3D TV

On shadow mask CRTs.

If you'd like to believe 2048x1536 (or 1740x1100 as we shall see below) is equivalent to 2560x1600 then knock yourself out.

You have a screen with (as far as I can tell) a horizontal pixel pitch of 0.21mm. As a result the largest meaningful horizontal resolution you can get out of it is roughly 1740 pixels. It also has a 0.25mm vertical pixel pitch, so the largest meaningful vertical resolution is about 1100 pixels. The reason you don't get aliasing when you exceed these values is that the electron beam isn't tight enough, so the pixels just blend together.

Also flat screen != flat panel.

For the non-conspiratorially minded

"I will consider 3D when I don't need active glasses that cost $200 a pair. Why can't they use the passive glasses that you get in the theatre? Because they DON'T cost $200!"

Alternate polarisation of left- and right-eye frames as used with common passive glasses poses some technical issues on LCD screens.

Re: I do like 3D, but:

"no flat screen beats my crusty old AOC 5C 19" monitor for picture quality and viewing angle at any resolution you care to think of"

2560x1600?

Re: Not just for 3D

As they say in wiki land, [citation needed].

Microwaved hard disc, run-over PC and other data disasters

A faraday cage needs to be grounded to do anything

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'Blitzer' railgun already 'tactically relevant', boasts maker

Re: With Risks of being Owned by your own side!

"One of the drawback of such levels of EMP discharge on a mobile platform, either on land or sea will be the biological side effects on crew!"

Really?

"(the US Navy already has prior history with messing about with High EMP projects on warships, they didn't go down too well with the crews health)"

Which projects were those?

"The big Battle ships of WW2 also required evacuation of all open upper decks when the big guns were being fired or the shockwave would splash the crew over the bulkheads or overboard."

That's because their projectiles were propelled by rapidly expanding gas.

The year's best... HD TVs

WTF indeed.

I have no idea what could possibly have triggered that outburst, but suffice to say that since the Panasonic does 1080p, it is by definition an HDTV, and you are an idiot.

Gamers demand CoD: Black Ops money back

Re: Opinion it is not, fact it is

That's like claiming a dual core Atom outperforms a single core Pentium.

The processing units in the Cell use more or less the same instruction set at the Xenon, but they're also much simpler.

Opera 11 goes beta with extensions, stacked tabs

Re: It's not hypocritical

Do you think there's a reason for that, perhaps?

Get out the bar, your plane's leaving

Re: That is if there is anyone left alive from ground staff

"Doing this in a building the size of the Gatwick departure lounge should be enough to unglue the back of your retina after a few months of constant exposure (if not earlier)."

Got a source for that?

Wiseguy ticket scalpers used botnets to outwit Captchas

Re: Legality

In some jurisdictions selling a ticket for more than its face value or a nominal percentage above its face value - scalping - is illegal.

The terms of sale for some events limit the number of tickets a person can buy. Buying up hundreds of them is quite obviously a breach of this part of the customer's contract with the promoter.

Etc. etc. etc.

LightSquared lights up first bird

Cheapest satellite they could find too by the looks of it

Now, I'm no telecommunications engineer, but 400 kilobits/second doesn't seem to be a lot of bandwidth....

Social levelling with the iPad

Hole in one

"What other uber-desirable toy is so ridiculously classless"

Ten... budget Android smartphones

I'm off to buy ten smartphones

ta-ra!

Call of Duty: Black Ops

It's answered in the article.

Eight to ten hours. I usually wait until I believe the price is reasonable before buying any COD game because their single player campaigns are almost criminally short.

This is one of the greatest disappointments for this kind of game. When the game reverts to single player only in a few years because the servers have been shut down, will all the reviewers be revising their scores down to account for the fact?

Rocks, hard places and Congo minerals

References

"We can however tell where coltan comes from, as a result of this project. (Ignore their estimate that 50 per cent of the world's Ta comes from DRC: it's more like eight per cent.)"

So we're being told to believe one piece of information from a given source, but without any references to the contrary, we're also being told in the same breath to ignore another piece of information from the same source. Hmm.

Oz journo pokes PARIS

@The Beer Monster

""while sipping some of their best brews."

Now there's your first problem ..."

It would be an unusual situation if a random sample didn't have a "best"...

That said, we've got good beer, just like the UK, USA and any number of other countries have good beer. And just like the UK, USA and any number of other countries, most people choose to drink the bad stuff.

While we're tossing beery hand grenades, the best bitter I've tasted actually came from the USA.

(Never fear, your joke still got a chuckle out of me.)

I've never seen Playmobil in Australia

Perhaps we could use a cheap Chinese Duplo knockoff

Apple shrinks Mac Mini price

"they're just too expensive for what you get."

Apple? Never.

Ten... bedside iPod docks

What am I going to do with ten bedsde ipod docks?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Two-year wait for Windows 8, MS blurts

Almost

You can knock the appearance back down to Win2k, but many parts of the interface have changed. They seem to have tried to simplify things, which annoys me as it makes a lot of things I used to like to be able to do more difficult or even impossible. They also renamed a bunch of stuff so you can't find what you're looking for and don't know what you're looking at.

There are certainly improvements to some of the things it does, but they don't outweigh the annoyances IMO.

US raygun jumbo fluffs another test missile-blast attempt

If that were true...

...the laser itself would melt in the course of firing.

Benoit Mandelbrot, father of fractals, dies at 85

I would love to see his coffin

To be honest I didn't even realise he was still alive.

Thanks for all the pretty pictures Benoit (oh and all the useful ideas too).

Microsoft to stake Office 2010 beta on Halloween

Correction

There's an app for that.™

Ubuntu 10.10: date with destiny missed

Does VNC work with Compiz yet?

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Ten... iPhone 4 cases

Wowzers

What am I going to do with ten iPhone 4 cases?

Google open sources JPEG assassin

Re-encoding PNGs?

"Google has tested the format by re-encoding 1,000,000 existing web images, mostly JPEGs, GIFs, and PNGs, and it saw a 39 per cent reduction in average file size."

Well it wouldn't surprise me if applying lossy compression to 24bit PNGs resulted in a reduction in file size. It would surprise me if it didn't.

How about you give us something unambiguous Google?

ZoneAlarm slammed for scarewarey marketing

Me too

At the same time as ZA was spamming me with this garbage, Avast! was reminding me of talk like a pirate day.

AVG went to hell around version 8. Its previous behaviour on opening a directory full of potential threat vectors (e.g. a directory containing hundreds of assorted installers) was to block access to the files while it scanned them. As of version 8 it seemed to start blocking access to the entire directory, and in some cases caused explorer.exe to stop working while it was scanning the directory contents. Nuts to that.

Go to hell ZA. Time to look for a new firewall.

Nikon points D7000 camera at high-end enthusiasts

Ugh.

That's probably a bit of an oversimplification, since the D### series are more than just mid level.

Also, they haven't rolled the D### in to the new D#### series. I don't know what I was thinking...

Lack of 25p and 30p is a "bonus"?

Must be some strange definition of bonus with which I'm unfamiliar.

No, it wasn't.

It was D# (professional level), D### (mid level), D## (entry level). Now they've rolled entry and mid into D####.

Why not?

Because it would cost twice as much. Full frame sensors aren't cheap.

And before someone trots out Moore's Law to "prove" that they will quickly become orders of magnitude cheaper than they are today, no matter what you do to the size of a transistor, a full frame sensor is still 36mm x 24mm.

Ain't Competition Grand?

Also speaking as a Canon user, this should give them a kick up the arse. This does look likely to occupy a price point above the 60D however. I have a feeling the 60D will in time dispell some of the initial, and I believe irrational, disappointment, but I'd be seriously looking at the D7000 if I weren't wedded to Canon.

Now pardon me while I go out and buy that 7D I've been eyeing off for so long.

Budget DSLR Cameras

APS-C vs Four Thirds

The imaging area of four thirds is 17.3 mm x 13.0 mm = 224.9 mm².

The imaging area of Sony style APS-C sensors is 23.6 mm x 15.8 mm = 372.9 mm², or 66% larger than 4/3. Even if you're only talking linear dimensions it's still 29% on average. The maths isn't that hard.

My thumbnail's bigger than four thirds, and I just trimmed it.

Steve Jobs lectures devs, dodges antitrust action

Half a loaf is better than one?

That seems to be a bit of an overly optimistic assessment of the flash situation. Unless it's loaf in the sense of "pinching off a loaf"...

Godly Aussie MP accused of being online 'smut' junkie

It's fine

It's left to the intelligent reader to finish the proverb in their head.

State vs Federal Politics

Here is an article about a NSW state MLC, and inexplicably there are two entirely unrelated paragraphs added regarding the federal government. Who are these politicians with highly moral agendas to which you refer?

"Aussie gov is clearly on a Mad Witchhunt"?

I have no idea where you got that from. This is state politics, the federal "Aussie gov" is not involved and doesn't even care.

It's scandalous because of the hypocrisy of an ultra-right wing bible thumping parliamentarian, who spends his time trying to ban everything that might make people happy because it's "impure," caught looking at porn.

Oh but it's okay because it's for "research" purposes. Right.

Texan cooks up deep-fried Guinness

With any luck...

...it will result in Guinness finally being fit for human consumption.

AMD to dump ATI brand

Yeah

"ATi brand prior to its AMD take-over was more synonymous to me of crappy drivers support."

Changing the name from ATi to AMD isn't going to change that. I wish it would, but I guess it was unreasonable of me to expect the AA and AF on my new 5850 to, you know, reliably work.

Oz greenies rattle politico cage with robocalls

Conceded

I suppose I shouldn't have conflated "I've mentioned this on the odd occasion" with "you've never got it right."

No worries, I hope.