Answers fron a Pentax DSLR owner

1. That's about it.. There's a focus indicator should you need it though Pentax DSLRs tend to have pretty good viewfinders and you can always buy third party screens with microprism/split prism focusing aids.

2. Pentax M lenses stop down to meter and stop down to shoot on modern cameras so you don't get fully auto exposure but you don't need to bother fiddling with the aperture ring that's only for screw-mount lenses if you want to be really old school.

Or you could buy a Canon and sell me the 85mm lens (I already have the pancake!). Seriously, old Pentax glass fetches a good price these days since it's both high quality and very usable. Your lenses have probably doubled or tripled their value in the last few years.

And I can't wait

for the ads that will tactfully explain just how rubbish LCD really is.

Where else

would you put the three (count 'em*) vertical stabilisers? So, stability, stability and stability - pretty useful in something as inherently unstable as a helicopter.

*You can't actually in the article photograph but they're there.

Dammit

My favourite film that doesn't exist. Though if it did I'd really hope that it didn't feature the the talented miss Lohan.

Just looked at it

and I see what you mean. The man has an uncanny ability to predict 1995 Though for some reason he failed to foresee the flashing GIF.

Not So Quick

The Catholic Church has over many years shown an institutional tolerance of child abuse in its ranks that goes far beyond mere bad judgement. Time and time again the response of the hierarchy to the discovery of a paedophile priest was to move him to a new area where his crimes were unknown thus materially facilitating his continuing criminal behaviour. In my book that's 'institutional child abuse' as Christoph put it. Will Catholics be angered by the charge. I damn well hope so. Any Catholic who isn't angry and demanding an account from their leaders stands accused of utter hypocrisy.

As for walking away from the Catholic Church. Yes you can. There's even a formal procedure for it. http://www.smh.com.au/world/losing-my-religion-20100723-10oq6.html

Actually

it was an incredibly lame attempt at humour/trollery as indicated by the presence of a smiley. If you didn't see it you didn't miss anything.

Give a damn?

The British people just tossed out a government largely because of this sort of high-handed illiberal arrogance. (It obviously wasn't because of any love for the Tories.) If Kevin Rudd doesn't want to go the same way as Gordon Brown he'd be well advised to bin this nonsense immediately.

I don't think it's that easy

If by space you mean low Earth orbit you'll still have a cloud of radioactive material raining down on the planet. On the other hand, if you launch from a safe distance you're faced with the problem of getting what is unavoidably a massive vehicle to that point using chemical propulsion. That's not a trivial thing to do with current tech (and budgets). There are a variety of nuclear space propulsion technologies that are promising and potentially realisable in the medium term but the Orion drive isn't one of them.

Multiple atmospheric nuclear explosions

per launch. I'm broadly pro-nuclear but I'm not crazy. Project Orion was cool, perhaps, in a mad scientist sort of way but not safe, clean or indeed in any way cheap.

+1 from me

But to be far I always thought that the C of E was pretty queasy about that sort of thing - not really the done thing in polite society and all that. No, for the S&M deal you really have to go Catholic. A lifetime of guilt and fear really adds a certain je ne sais quoi to the sexual experience.

It's been done

with Section 31 in DS9. Not to mention that the original series had a pretty distrustful attitude to government in general in that just about every second episode seemed to be a utopian libertarian parable.

In general I think the principle should be: "Star Trek has already done that". Which pretty much is the problem.

(Oh, and there was Insurrection but I try to forget that.)

Did you actually read the article?

The police are using a law intended to prevent the secret recording of private conversations to prevent the entirely legal practice of recording in public places. Read the linked article if you are in doubt. The charges aren't holding up in court. (Or to be precise, according to the court, secret recording in public falls under the law - overt recording is entirely legal.)

You forgot

4. God exists, and cares about humans' daily lives but isn't particularly impressed by quaint medieval superstitions.

No one is for porn

You're new here aren't you?

Why not?

as long as they give Baldrick one to.*'

*For services to cunning plans.

Is this a clue?

amanfromMars makes almost complete sense when commenting on a drug story.

Doesn't look mad

Though I'd be pretty pissed* if my evil creator failed to endow me with a mouth.

Obligatory copy of the collected works of Harlan Ellison in the pocket.

Not sure I buy that argument.

I make a cup of brewed coffee with approximately one cup of boiling water. I use the same for a cup of instant but that doesn't take into account the water and energy used in the processing - unless freeze drying has somehow become a carbon-neutral process. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, I'm inclined to think that the relatively small differences in the figures can be put down to differences in reporting methodologies. Or perhaps the difference is merely due to economies of scale derived from the popularity of instant coffee in which case we'd have an argument for switching to brewed. Maybe someone who has read the article can enlighten me about the source of the figures?

Seconded

And while they're at it, telephone books as well. When are those damn things going to die?

re:@Francis Boyle

Hence the "pretty much" - I'll be first in line to buy an ARM-based netbook.

"possessing hoax devices"

That'd be the over sized dildo in his pocket. Or just about anything that the cop thought might be something that it wasn't in fact. If I'm carrying a box and you think there might be a bomb inside does that make it a "hoax device"?