Nearly two years after Konica Minolta transferred its camera division over to Sony, and over a year after Sony's first DSLR (the A100), today is the day that the curtain is finally lifted on the long-awaited 'high end' Alpha digital SLR (in principle the replacement for the Konica Minolta 7D). The new model sports an impressive specification including magnesium alloy construction, 12MP CMOS sensor (with on-chip A/D conversion), 5fps shooting and a wealth of features and customization options, though interestingly (given the recent spate of announcements) no live view option. There's also a couple of new lenses and a new vertical shooting grip. We've had a pre-production A700 for a couple of weeks in order to produce a detailed hands-on preview, available now.

kernel panic attack writes "Surely the late Stanley Kubrick is somewhere smiling at this one. Forbes.com has a story about a B-52 Bomber that mistakenly flew 6-nuclear tipped cruise missles across several states last week. The 3-hour flight took the plane from Minot Air Force Base, N.D, to Barksdale Air Force Base, La., on Aug. 30. The incident was so serious that President Bush and Defense Secretary Robert Gates were quickly informed and Gates has asked for daily briefings on the Air Force probe, said Defense Department press secretary Geoff Morrell."

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It's been amusing watching all of the ridiculous PR-generating gimmicks from the original dot com bubble come back to life over the last couple years from new companies who are either using the same playbook or too new at the game to know that it's been done before. For example, remember the online travel startup TravelZoo? In order to enter the already overcrowded online travel market and still get some traction, the company promised shares of stock to early users. While there were plenty of questions about the legality of this, it appears that the company played by the rules and didn't violate any kind of securities law (which seems surprising, since offering any kind of shares in a private company usually requires an awful lot of very specific hoops that you need to jump through) -- and it even paid off for some users of the site who were able to make some money. Unfortunately, the gimmick ended up costing Travelzoo a lot more than it expected. Either way, there's some random new company out there that's trying to do something similar, promising stock to users for performing certain actions within their site. Again, this should raise a number of legal questions, but the site's founders insist that it's okay because they're not actually issuing shares, just allocating them to be issued at the point of a liquidity event. It's not clear that a securities regulator would feel the same way about it. Publicly offering any kind of equity tends to require some very, very careful steps for any company to take, and you'd have to image that the potential risks from violating securities law could be a lot greater than any brief burst of (non-product-related) publicity this kind of gimmick generates.

• Xeni on CNN International re: Apple's announcements

• Atlas Glugged – Would you kindly look at this scene from Bioshock rendered in LEGO?

• Axel Fail – Adding a laser to spinning top? Bad. Making the top play the theme from Beverly Hills Cop? Way worse.

• Who Blows the Blowers? – Breathalyzer software tested, found to be pretty awful.

• Wachowski Siblings – Matrix co-creator Larry Wachowski rumored to complete sex change, now "Lana"

• 2k Games Continues to Bungle Bioshock Launch

• Apple iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store, iPod Nano, Classic, and Touch Announced

• Apple "Beat Goes On" Event Sabbatical

• MADA Caimes Guitar Body Made from Hemp

• SLP Survival Knife with Flashlight and Firestarter

• Doggie Dooley Turns Pet Waste into Lawn Food

• Video: Yamaha's Grid Sequencer "Tenori On" Launches in London

• Venturi Fetish Almost on the Street

• Spy Sunglasses Take Another Stab at Hidden Video

• SteriPEN Reviewed in the Field (Verdict: Still Alive!)

• Foleo Folded: Palm Kills Ill-Conceived Notebook Before Birth

• Getting Warmer: Using Heat to Guide via GPS

• Eva Solo Smiley Bowl

• Messiah Darklite DVD Remote for Playstation 3

• Morning Tech Deals Highlights

eldavojohn writes "Further evidence for the asteroid mass extinction theory has been discovered as a break in the main asteroid belt of our solar system. From the article, "A joint U.S.-Czech team from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and Charles University in Prague suggests that the parent object of asteroid (298) Baptistina disrupted when it was hit by another large asteroid, creating numerous large fragments that would later create the Chicxulub crater on the Yucatan Peninsula as well as the prominent Tycho crater found on the Moon.""

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Fears of a credit crunch have put a chill on fresh private equity activity, while several pending deals are thought to be in trouble. But there are still signs of life in some parts of the industry. There continues to be strong interest in medium-sized media deals, as funds that specialize in this area continue to raise money and make moves. Considering the challenges facing many media companies, it makes sense that private equity investors would think there's an opportunity to pick up assets at a bargain, reformulating them into something of more value. Obviously, the private equity industry isn't going to grind to a halt. Deals that are predicated on nothing more than cheap credit will become rare, but investors will always be on the hunt for undervalued companies that can be turned around.

jcatcw writes "Computerworld reports, "Network Appliance Inc. today announced that it has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Sun Microsystems Inc. seeking unspecified compensatory damages and an injunction that would prohibit Sun from developing or distributing products based on its ZFS file system technology. The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court in Lufkin, Texas, charges that the Sun ZFS technology infringes on seven NetApp patents pertaining to data processing systems and related software.""

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Earlier this year, we pointed out that a member of the Green Party up in Canada was apparently suing a ton of websites just for allowing comments about him that he did not like or find to be true. There were some really bizarre aspects to the case -- which seemed to highlight those of us in the US should be happy about section 230 of the CDA protecting service providers from the actions of their users. Canada doesn't have similar protections, and this guy sued Yahoo, Wikipedia, MySpace and many others, not because of anything those sites did, but because he didn't like messages posted by users of those sites. In fact, the guy seemed rather quick on the lawsuit trigger, leading many to accuse him of doing this to hide criticism, rather than to fend off actually libelous statements.

While many of those cases are still in process, Michael Geist (who is apparently also being sued by this guy) lets us know that the British Columbia Supreme Court dismissed (with costs) the libel lawsuit the guy had filed against Yahoo, noting that it was not at all clear that it had jurisdiction over the case, since Yahoo was in the US and the guy had presented no evidence that the supposedly defamatory postings were "accessed, downloaded, and read by someone in British Columbia." Of course, there appear to be plenty of other reasons why this case should have been thrown out, but the court didn't even bother to get into them in dismissing the case for no evidence that it was the proper jurisdiction. There are still plenty of other such cases to go through, though -- so I'm sure we'll be hearing more.

AdamWill writes "The first release candidate of Mandriva Linux 2008, codenamed Galilee, is now available. The release notes are also available via the wiki. A guide to major new features (some of which are not yet implemented in this release candidate), and the detailed technical specifications are also available. This release candidate is available as a three CD or one DVD Free edition (containing no non-free software or drivers) for the x86-32 and x86-64 architectures, with a traditional installer, and as a mini-CD edition for both x86-32 and x86-64 architectures. A One combined live / install CD edition will be released in the near future (problems with unionfs prevented the One edition from being release at the same time as the other editions)."

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narramissic writes "Microsoft is tying its Windows Live services directly to Vista — a move that should sound vaguely familiar, as it is precisely what the company did to make IE ubiquitous among Internet users. 'A new unified installer for Windows Live services will help users download Wednesday's updates of photo-sharing, mail, instant messaging, online safety and other services, the company said on its Windows Live Wire blog. The new installer also will automatically update those services on Windows Vista and XP going forward.'"

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I'm coming to Beijing, China next week and I'll be stopping in at the Beijing Bookworm to give a talk on China, the Information Economy and copyright -- and I'll be reading a little never-before-seen new fiction while I'm there. Hope to see you!

When: Wednesday 12th September 7.30pm
Where: The Bookworm, Building 4, Nan Sanlitun Road, Chao Yang District, Beijing, 100000, P.R. China, (010) 6586 9507, books@beijingbookworm.com

Link

On Gaming With Baby, photos of a baby mobile converted to a Super Mario mobile with "an old mobile, 550 cord, some card stock, a printer, and a general sense of boredom." Link (via Gamelife)

Becky Stern's paintings recreate "particularly attractive" Web-based CAPTCHAs in acrylic. Link (via Craft)

The Homeless World Cup is pretty much what it sounds like: homeless people all over the world organize soccer/football/futeball teams, then come together for a long championship, with thousands of people attending some of the best football you'll see all year. The act of organizing a football team and participating it appears to be tonic for many of the problems facing homeless people, with more than 70 percent of the participants getting off the streets in the process of forming and honing their teams. The Cup is now sponsoring street-soccer leagues for homeless people all over the world as a way of making the event work all year round. Link

Mayer Brenner sez,

A four-volume fantasy series I wrote (The Dance of Gods) was published by DAW between 1987 and 1992. While the books acquired a small group of ardent devotees, they did not, shall we say, distinguish themselves in the marketplace. The books themselves, however, were in many respects more suited to how the world of fantasy has evolved today than the world they faced on initial publication. My hope now is to land them some fresh attention that may, with luck, get them back into print. I've been posting the books on my website where I'm making them available under Creative Content license as a free download. Since Cory, in particular, has posted a number of BoingBoing items on published SFF writers taking this same approach (e.g. Lew Shiner), I'm hoping my venture may warrant your notice as well.

The stories take an approach to magic more suited to engineers or programmers than mystics; more procedure-based than object-oriented, perhaps, but communing with nature is usually the last thing on these practitioners' minds. For that matter, I'm not sure the combination of magic-code hackers, molecular nanotech, and network-mediated consensual reality of the gods is something that could ever be summarized on a back-of-the-book blurb...

One of the most recent blurbs they've received, however, is:

"Ya gotta love a series with a hero named 'Maximillian the Vaguely Disreputable'. READ THIS SERIES, shouts your FAQmaker, it's fast and furious, and fun, and I want the author to make enough money that he keeps writing fantasies." - Amy Sheldon, The Recommended Fantasy Author List

Link (Thanks, Mayer!)

Apple refreshed its iPod line today, announcing the long-expected touchscreen iPod among other things. The event was pretty wide-ranging, with a lot to chew on. The biggest early news was the announcement that iPhone owners will be able to create ringtones from songs they've purchased from the iTunes Music Store... for an additional 99 cents on top of the cost of the downloaded track. Perhaps this is an attempt by Apple to throw a bone to disgruntled record companies, but it's likely to call attention to legions of mobile handsets other than the iPhone that will let user set MP3s and other types of audio files as ringtones for free. Apple also sliced the price of the 8GB iPhone by $200, to $399 -- indicating that demand has slowed as demand among diehard Mac fans and other early adopters has been filled. The price cut is probably also a reaction to the iPod Touch, which appears to be an iPhone without any phone, and a similar 8GB model of it has been priced at $299. This may prove to be an attractive alternative to the iPhone for many users, since it has a fairly similar feature set, outside cellular connectivity, including WiFi web browsing -- but comes at a lower upfront cost, plus without the need for a long-term contract with AT&T.

Perhaps the most curious announcement, though, was news of an Apple partnership with Starbucks. iPhone and iPod Touch users will eventually see an extra icon on their screen when they're within range of a WiFi-enabled Starbucks. The application it leads to will allow them to see what songs are playing in the store, and buy them from the iTMS, and they can also access the iTMS without having to pay usage fees for the hotspot. On the face of it, it's a pretty underwhelming offering, just like all of Starbucks' previous attempts at digital music downloads, and the fact that Steve Jobs claimed Apple had been working on it for two years is hardly reassuring. Despite Jobs' contention that the service is "very cool", it's hard to see it selling more iPods, or making much money on its own.

Kurtz'sKompund writes to mention that by announcing new 802.11n-compliant products Cisco has reversed their previous claims that the 802.11n standard was not ready for business use. "The Aironet 1250 access point can be used on its own, or as a thin access point connecting to Cisco's wireless switches - an approach that appears to duck the architectural issues which have split other Wi-Fi players. The AP, due next month, is capable of a theoretical rate of 300 Mbit/s (actual throughput probably around 100 Mbit/s) compared with todays 802.11g access points, and will cost $1299."

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eldavojohn writes "Despite complaints that political bloggers should be subject to campaign finance laws since they are donating huge amounts of money in the form of advertising and media services to candidates, the FEC will not regulate political blogging. From the FEC statement: 'While the complaint asserts that DailyKos advocates for the election of Democrats for federal office, the commission has repeatedly stated that an entity that would otherwise qualify for the media exemption does not lose its eligibility because it features news or commentary lacking objectivity or expressly advocates in its editorial the election or defeat of a federal candidate.'"

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