It's not illegal to use weapons that blind, it just cannot be their primary purpose to do so. Like, a nuke can probably blind someone. This laser is ostensibly designed for non-human targets.

Mod parent -1 Subtle brag.

If you want any capital to operate with, you need security in the profitability of producing it. Patents are this security, and so are always necessary unless you want to throw money away. So no, you don't want to leave out steps that will quickly leave your company bankrupt. And all business sectors have codes, standards, and regulations by which you need to abide.

There are a hundred steps in between the lab and the open market. You need a lot of funding, development and approval of patents, the approval from applicable government agencies, prototyping, mass production, marketing, and then if all that is successful, market penetration. This doesn't happen in a year. Hopefully it's highly profitable too, or its time on the market will be short-lived.

Correction: anything elements above Iron are only made during a supernova.

Galaxy hopping is not as improbable as you would think. It's a matter of developing better propulsion systems, something I'm sure we'll do. You might have heard it said that at 1g constant acceleration, you could reach Andromeda in under 40 years, ship-time. Man would need to master antimatter and suspended animation, but even today that doesn't seem like magic.

Time to break the EU into several different countries.

That would put its potential tax liability at $201B. 4.4% seems more likely.

There was indeed a "red crucifix" supernova found recently around 775 -- seems obviously the cause.

Like someone else said, what 4K TV's won't be able to upscale, and at least as well as a microchip crammed into a tiny cable jack? It's not like a fixed-ratio bicubic filter is serious signal processing for the TV maker.

There's no way upscaling to looks any better than HD, this isn't CSI.

>>What sort of physical conditions (pressure, temperature) would have to exist to produce carbon from a mix of hydrogen and oxygen? ;) Giuliani: 911 KPa.