Mislabeling was honestly my first thought too - I was stunned that a 1W laser could be had for only $80 or so. Not sure what the threshold is for burning/mw, but I got a decent red mark on my hand from 1-2 sec of exposure to a (supposedly) ~800mw one in the markets. They were lithium-powered, as far as I could tell - standard 123A.

As for my ~100mw blue one, I'm pretty sure it's the full output (or at least close) - the observed luminance matches pretty close to the specs for a similar laser on the wickedlasers.com site. I was hitting buildings in downtown Shanghai from a river cruise with relative ease.

I was in China a few months back, and these were being sold for 150RMB for a 500mw ($15) 400-500 RMB (about $70-$80) for a 1000mw version, and about 700 RMB for a 2000mw.

The salesmen in the markets demonstrated them by lighting matches with the 1000mw green ones from several feet away. Amazing. I bought a 100mw blue one for the equivalent of $9, hoping I'd be less likely to blind myself with that.

True, but it's ATT. I've grown to be a little gun-shy.

After reading this, I decided to go check my ATT account, and I was able to downgrade just fine from the 1500 text plan for $15 to the 1000 text plan for $10. So...if you want it, better go and get it before they update their site. iMessage is about to dramatically lower my billed texts anyway.

Doesn't seem to me that this is about the "internet" at all. Its about economics. For the ICANN. Say there are 10,000 international corporations who will pay to immortalize their brand name as a TLD. 10,000 corporations x $185,000 application fee per corporation = $1,850,000,000, or nearly 2 billion USD. Personally, I'd royally screw the internet for $2 billion. It appears ICANN would too.

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