What has dynamic range got to do with noise?

Ah, I disregarded the effects of magnification. But doesn't magnification have any effect in your second scenario (last paragraph) or is it included in the formula?

If you put a 50mm lens in front of a tiny sensor, it functions as a telephoto lens. The resultant photos would be so different in framing that comparing their DOF isn't really meaningful. I think the parent assumed that you make the framing similar by changing distance to subject and then compare the DOF.

But yes, I think technically sensor size itself doesn't affect DOF.

I think pretty much everything you said is true, but,

a) nobody forces you to use a low-end camera;

b) you can change the focus screen if you want to;

c) even on (new) low-end cameras, live view addresses the manual focus problem quite nicely.

"Film cameras can be very simple and are generally much more rugged than digital cameras."

I'll give you simple, but general ruggedness is a bs argument. You buy what you need; the existence of plastic DSLRs doesn't make the rugged models any less rugged.

"Many are all-mechanical designs that don't require any batteries, others only need a battery for the light meter. That's very useful when you're travelling, especially to remote locations."

Spare batteries and memory cards take up way less space than an equivalent amount of film rolls. Also, I read an article about two guys who skied across the Antarctic a year or two ago, and they were using a DSLR (though their battery set-up was pretty interesting).

"And film offers a huge amount of variability in appearance. [...] You might be able to imitate many of these effects in Photoshop and the like (or maybe not), but it's not the same."

I contest that you can do a lot more in Photoshop than in a darkroom, especially if you don't limit yourself to trying to imitate the quirks of specific film types.

Yet no medium format digital back has any high ISO performance to speak of, i.e. they're worse at it than entry level crop DSLRs.

It's not that simple.

Jab Comix is commercial, US based and the characters are obviously underaged (despite their disclaimer which claims otherwise). And there are many just like it.

Maybe if you RTFA'd sometimes you wouldn't need to make shitty uninformed posts like this. Just a thought.

No, what Microsoft pushed was what they had already implemented in Office 2007. What they haven't (yet) implemented are the changes ISO made (and continues to make) to the original.

To be pedantic, the original OOXML is also a standard, just not an ISO standard. In addition, it forms a part of the ISO standard: the problem is that it's the legacy part, not the one that new products are supposed to use.

No it didn't. Did you even read the previous articles? And besides, Office 2011 is just a Mac port of Office 2010: nobody sane expected it to have new features.

Who should "make" them do it? Standards aren't legally binding and standards organizations aren't enforcers. And ISO routinely kill standards when they become obsolete. OOXML is a quite new standard, the industry uses it, and they're working on the next draft so clearly it's not obsolete yet.

They did implement first. ISO just didn't agree to standardize the existing implementation as is.

You'd lose that bet. No idea what's the deal with Win 7, though.

If they stopped to take photos over his wall, yes. Likely even if they just stopped and stared. Staring through someone's window, even if you do it from your own house, could be illegal too in some cases. The laws are specifically targeted against peeping toms, paparazzis and the like.

K-lite just uses ffmpeg. Di-AVC also seems to beat CoreAVC but it's going to be payware too. DivX is free; just make sure you don't install any other crap from their installer. You only want their AVC filter, not the divx codec and certainly not their media player, etc.