Communication lasers (those used to transmit data over short distances like within a star system) are used regularly in SF over shorter distances (like a few dozen km) as weapons.
Within those shorter distances, the beam is still powerful enough (read: not yet attenuated/diffracted so much) that it can cut through the hull of another ship (or melt the power-supply of a General Products hull)

And ever since I've been The Champ...

Kudos

Your irradiated corpse will now be eaten by a grue

There, FTFY

It's better than giving them the hose, again

It's a good thing, then, that he developed the Oscillation Overthruster, without which he might not be able to get into the ship.
Hopefully John Lithgow isn't up there, though, as he could put a damper on things.

My own receiver isn't even really high-end (around the $1,000 range)
It's built-in speaker configuration detects and warns of phase variance, has you put it's microphone in multiple "listening" spots around the room, and calculates all of them to give you what it thinks is "best".

It's basically becoming part of the norm for non-one-stop-shop/stereo-in-a-box audio equipment nowadays.

So Jane says...

No more than the ICs on the motherboard or video card you submerged

[Start] => Run => cmd.exe
>ftp ftp.mozilla.org

A native CLI FTP app has been included in Windows since (iirc) Win95.

Hyperwave radio, just like hyperspace transportation, was not instantaneous.
Hyperwave just bridged the distance between points A and B in real-space, to a much shorter distance in hyperspace, wherein hw radio transmission was still limited to light-speed.

When Nessus was sitting outside the Fleet of Worlds' gravity well, talking to his cohorts on Earth, there was a transport-delay of about an hour in the conversation (granted that was over, what was it, some 30 light years?)

There was also still the need for hw relay/buoys, as the signal attenuated (just as in normal space) over increasingly large distances.

Three days? But I want to kill someone now!

Like Bacon

That costs you time though (running back and forth between towns).
Some games even intentionally do that (i.e. have fluctuating vendor prices based on supply/demand). If everyone hangs around 1 town, because hunting is good outside of it, NPCs start selling for higher values, and buying for less.

The problem here was that people were buying an item from one vendor, then selling it back to the same vendor for more than they originally paid for it.

Yes, a dev screwed up somewhere in a config entry, but the players should know better. This isn't the first time something like that has happened in a game, and in previous cases, banhammers fell without prejudice.

The problem with reversing it themselves becomes very large scale if any player-player interaction is involved (and, umm, this is an MMO, it's all about P-P interactions).
Player A exploits loophole to illegitimately gain 1 million gold
Player A buys 100k weapon from Player B-1, 100k chest-armor from Player B-2, and 100k ring from Player B-3

Player B-1 uses that 100k that he got from a legitimate sale of a legitimately [farmed/crafted/bought] item, and buys 50k worth of consumables
Player B-2 uses that 100k along with 900k that was all made using legitimate means to buy 1m item legitimately Etc, etc... the list goes on
Realistically, Players B-1 and B-2 have no idea that the money from A was fake/illegal (and in digital world, they have no way of knowing), so they can't be penalized and have their new consumables or big-ticket item removed.
Player A should lose his 3 items, yeah
But, if this were the other way around, and Player A bought 10 items from vendor for 100k each with that 1m that he made, and quickly turned around and sold it to other players for 90k each, or crafted it with other legitimate items for sale for 200k each, you can't really break up the amounts now (as half of that 200k-each is legitimate).

Now, go one-step further, and say Player A shunted that 1m gold into powerlevelling a craft.
The benefits of the higher crafter levels will net him huge, legitimate (arguably), returns throughout the game, especially early-on when other don't necessarily have crafting levelled so high.
Can they simply "delete" the "profits" of their actions? Not without re-rolling their toon, or choosing to never use that skilled craft again.

Back-rolling exploited vendors is a very, very labor intensive process. This has happened in almost every MMO at least once, and also in many single-player games.
Were I ArenaNet, I'd just ban the players who exploited, too. They've all been around the block a couple of times, they know better, and it's not worth the time I pay my devs for to back out something like that.

The players who exploited can always just create a new account (for which they have to buy a new license to the game, one-time) if they want to play again. This not only backs out the problem caused by them exploiting, but it also sets precedent that any breach of the ToS will have a monetary value attached to it to resolve, and that monetary value is capped (at the cost of rebuying the game).