This twaddle from London's crappiest newspaper proves that when it comes to half-baked conspiracy theories, you just can't whack the right wing press.

Haha, that is just great IM drivel. Stories like this do little for the reputation of IM but they do make me laugh.

A 0.5 watt laser, oooo scary!! It's hardly star wars is it fgs. If you were really close to a plane taking off and if it was a really clear day and if you could steadily aim it at the pilot and if the co pilot and pilot stared really hard at the light they might be a bit dazzled. Crikey.

"500+ milliwatt"

WHAT?!!?! You'd be lucky to set fire to paper with that power level!

they must have meant 500 Watt. And how fucking stupid do they think we are???? I place a million pounds its a fucking diode laser stack (which is what they use for "industrial use"). Its a piece of shit! you find loads of them lying around in our department just gathering dust. you dont need a licence to buy a friggin diode laser!! any manufacture will sell them to you, if the idiots didn't use a forged check it would have been a legitmate business transaction (and yes 500Watt diode stacks are *very* common and cheap to manufacture, you can buy a decent one for less than £10K). Quick search on google and dozens of manufacturers pop up:

 http://www.laserline.de/en/produkte/diodenlasermodule.html
 http://www.ldai.com/

FFS its not a military grade fiber laser, we're talking about a diode stack!! which has an MSquare of ooohhhh 500!!! or 5,000 in some cases (MSquare is a measure of "how good the beam quality" of a laser is. MSquare of 1 is a kick ass laser. 5,000 is nothing more than a glorfied lightbulb, so MSquare 5,000 with 500W would only be marginally better than 5 lightbulbs next to each other!  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser note: pictures have been blatently doctored)

This is just more FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt). "Ohhhh, i have. . . a 'laser'. I shall put my 'laser' on the moon, and then i shall hold the world to random for 1 million dollars!!".

And incidently how dumb are the people who brought [/stole] this laser?! what the fuck are they going to do with it? most of these diodes operate in the infra-red and you need vast amounts of cooling to operate this things or they burn up in milliseconds.

just more FUD for the unwashed masses (sigh)

Anybody bother to click the link or try searching for this 'story' elsewhere?
No, thought not.

The evening std link is a hard link to an error page.

can anyone confirm that this was in the evening std?

it sounds like an utterly made up story to me - and is the name nick supposed to be the guardian crime correspondant??

Is this a, a real press report and not an April Fool? b/ the same Nick Hopkins who used to be Guardian crime correspondent? If so, i always thought he wrote shite and only ever put the police's side of any story.