Here's a tip: you should probably leave that handy-dandy laser pointer at home when heading off to vacation in New South Wales. As of today, the Australian state has placed high-powered hand lasers, including the infamous "star pointers," on the list of prohibited weapons, and anyone caught carrying such a device without a permit could face up to 14 years in the slammer. The move comes after an outbreak of laser pointer attacks on airplane pilots, which have left them temporarily blinded and could have caused some pretty catastrophic consequences. Looks like those Aussie kids will have to find some other gizmos to carry out their high school hijinks, huh?

[Via Switched]

We haven't heard too many specifics when it comes to performance of actual WiMAX rollouts (and let's be real, we're all kind of waiting for LTE at this point, right?), but Garth Freeman, CEO of Buzz Broadband, apparently shuttered the company's Australian WiMAX rollout in Hervey Bay, publicly declaring that for his company and customers the technology "failed miserably". Apparently beyond about a mile from the base station non-line of sight performance was "non-existent", regular indoor use produced latencies as high as 1000ms even just 400m away, and the company had to scrap its network for TD-CDMA service on 1.9GHz just to make sure customers weren't completely left in the cold. Maybe they should have checked for an errant satellite, eh mate?

[Via Slashdot]

We've been waiting for Dell to pop a Penryn chip inside one of its laptops -- so far it's been HP and Toshiba sitting pretty with some of the few Penryn laptop offerings in existence -- but we didn't think it'd come for free. Dell is pushing Penryn on consumers with an upgrade to the existing XPS M1330 line, which is a far sight smaller than what HP and Toshiba intro'd Penryn in, but the best news is that if you build out the AUD$2,000 model (which includes 4GB of RAM and other perks) you get a free "upgarde" [sic] to the Core 2 Duo T9300 processor, at least for today. As you might've guessed from that currency, this deal is only in Australia so far, but new Dell products and deals usually start there and end up in the States whenever the international date line swings around.

[Thanks, Rupert]

As Hitachi continues to streamline operations, we get word that it is pulling out of the consumer electronics and whitegoods market in Australia. Announced over the weekend, Hitachi will no longer sell their appliances or flat-panel TVs, camcorders, and other CE-class goods in the land down under. ACs, industrial, and electronic goods will still be available. The move brings along 40 job cuts from its Sydney HQ. Hitachi claims that the Australian market is just too small and too competitive to warrant the effort. A sentiment backed by Sharp Australia's deputy managing director, Denis Kerr, who claims that Australia is under, "a siege mentality that has forced pricing to ridiculous levels that cannot be sustained." He surmises that if the trend continues, "Brand names are going to withdraw from the market place.'' Of course, all this leaves us wondering... who's next?

[Thanks, Dzx]

Look, we're all about making fun of a nanny state trying to get us to drop our earbuds for street crossing, but we're also against stupidity and what Australian police call a problem of "epidemic proportions": teenagers dying from crossing the street while listening to an iPod. NSW Police commissioned these ads that we'd say make their point quite nicely -- and remind us of a contest submission from a while back. Obviously it's not the iPods doing these kids in, rather fast-moving hunks of metal and a near-idiotic lack of attentiveness, but if you're the absent minded type, perhaps unplugging your ears for street crossings would be a good habit to get into. Or you could, you know, look before you leap.

While 250Mbps isn't likely to get the drool flowin' quite as quickly as a 40Gbps connection in one's home, it's still nothing to scoff at. And best of all, the technology is quite a ways beyond the drawing board. Reportedly, University of Melbourne's Dr. John Papandriopoulos has patented his SCALE and SCAPE methods for "dramatically reducing the interference which slows down data transmission in typical DSL networks." 'Course, the tidbit you're interested in comes when we find that these techniques can potentially deliver speeds of up to 250-megabits per second through existing telecommunications networks. The only changes that would be necessary to facilitate such sensational speeds are new modems for end users and "operational system changes" for providers. No word on when this technology will actually be put to good use (read: installed in our homes), but the inventor himself is headed to the US soon to take a new position within a startup company founded by "Stanford University Professor John Cioffi, the so-called father of DSL." Bring the goods with you, Doc.

[Thanks, Bram]

CSIRO and aggravation tend to go hand in hand, so it's no real shock to learn that the organization is playing hard ball in a recent push to get 802.11n closer to ratification. Reportedly, CSIRO "refused to provide a letter of assurance to the IEEE working group developing the much-delayed 802.11n WiFi standard," and it cited legal discord between it and Microsoft, Intel, Dell, HP, Netgear, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Nintendo and 3Com as the primary holdup. The group's senior vice-president of licensing, Denis Redfern, was quoted as saying that "where litigation is involved, CSIRO will continue to reserve its rights in relation to licensing," so it looks like an official 802.11n standard is still that far off from being founded.

HP has started selling its first pre-loaded Linux computers, although it's arguably a rather backwater offering. You see, the HP dx2250 is HP's first pre-loaded Linux machine, but it's only available in Australia, and only in this iteration. The desktop machine runs 1.6GHz AMD Semprons up to the 2.8Ghz AMD Athlon 64 X2, comes with 2GB of RAM, HDD up to 250GB, and CD drives up to Multi-Format burners. You'll have to pay around $500 for the pre-installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Desktop version too: this ain't no Dellbuntu deal.

[Via The Inquirer]

They may have had to wait a bit longer, but Australian gamers can now save a considerable chunk of change on a new Xbox 360 just like the rest of us, with the Core model now even able to boast the same price tag as the Wii. That puts it at A$399.95 (down from A$429), while the 20GB Xbox 360 Pro drops all the way from A$649 to A$579.95 (or $486US at the current exchange rate). According to Gamespot, Xbox regional director for Australia and New Zealand David McLean also confirmed that the HDMI-equipped Xboxes would be making their way down under as well, as would the Elite and Halo 3 Special Edition varieties of Xboxen, although he's apparently not quite ready to get specific about prices or release dates for those just yet.

The good news is that the official Windows Mobile 6 Professional update for the Treo 750 is just around the corner; the bad news, though, is that you probably can't have it yet unless you're lucky enough to live in one particular corner of the world. Following countless incognito shots of WM6-sporting 750s in the wild, an imminent official announcement was pretty much a foregone conclusion -- though we admittedly never suspected Australia would be the first to get the hookup. Specifically, customers of the Australian branch of Hutchison 3 will be able to download the update free of charge starting mid-month, with "other customers" following on in September. Whether "other customers" includes AT&T is unclear, but we're keeping our fingers tightly crossed.

[Via istartedsomething]

In today's edition of How Your Office is Slowly Killing You, a study emerging from Queensland University of Technology suggests that laser printers can emit clouds of ultra-fine particles that compare to "cigarette smoke and motor vehicle emissions." Reportedly, 13 out of 40 models tested were deemed "high emitters" of particles from the toner, and while office photocopiers failed to produce similar results, concentrations of microscopic particles near laser printers were found to be "five times higher than outdoor levels often produced by traffic" in a given investigation. Currently, no efforts have been made to actually study the chemistry of the emissions, but considering that such fine objects could easily sink "to the very lowest reaches of the lungs," we'd say that's reason enough to request an airtight office a few floors underground.

[Image courtesy of Gripguard]

Those already giddy about their 2008 trip to Down Under should now pick up the phone and do whatever it takes to get on one of Qantas' forthcoming A380s or revamped 747-400s, as both planes will reportedly feature in-flight WiFi and laptop power. As if that weren't enough, the new A380s will even dole out power sockets to those in economy class, and while the in-flight entertainment system may be preferred by your offspring, we know you'll greatly appreciate the internet access and seat-mounted USB / Ethernet ports. Currently, Qantas has yet to divulge exactly how much these luxuries will run you per flight, and while there's still a few months remaining before any passengers are faced with such comforts while flying Qantas, we can't help but yearn for a first-class ticket complete with a 17-inch widescreen LCD. Hit the read link for a few more snapshots and the full rundown of extras.

Although the idea of teleporting individuals from one place to another in order to sidestep the headache of rush hour traffic has been around for quite some time, a team of Australian physicists are busy making it work (on a smaller scale, of course). Granted, they don't fully expect their teleportation scheme to be used on humans in the near future, but there's always hope, right? Anyway, the team has developed a so-called "simple way to transport atoms," which involves bringing the atoms to almost absolute zero, beaming them with two lasers, and using fiber optics to transport them to any other place at the speed of light where they "enter a second condensate" and reconstruct. We'll keep you posted on when human trialing (hopefully) begins.

It's practically a foregone conclusion that the price drops we North Americans saw on Sony's PlayStation 3 would hit other markets eventually, but the managing director of Sony Computer Entertainment in Australia may have revealed exactly when that drop is coming. According to a blurb at SmartHouse News, Michael Ephraim has apparently stated that a "PAL market announcement will be made on July 12th regarding price cuts to the PAL market PS3." More specifically, consoles sold in Australia "could be cut by as much as 17-percent," which would purportedly lower that model to AUD$829, and gamers in the UK could see the PS3 lowered to a much more respectable £350 if the percentage discount carries over. Only time will tell, eh?

[Via PS3Fanboy]