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http://www.wickedlasers.com/

The article is about a crybaby pilot who was annoyed and turned around to stop and pout

As I said to jedidiah, here's a class 4 hand-held laser that you can import into the UK. According to wikipedia, a class 4 laser "can burn the skin, or cause devastating and permanent eye damage as a result of direct, diffuse or indirect beam viewing".

Would you like to volunteer to have one fired at you to prove what crybabies UK pilots are?

So pilots in the UK wetting themselves over lasers doesn't impress me so much.

Here's a class 4 hand-held laser that you can import into the UK. According to wikipedia, a class 4 laser "can burn the skin, or cause devastating and permanent eye damage as a result of direct, diffuse or indirect beam viewing".

Would you like to volunteer to have one fired at you to prove how wussy UK pilots are?

Actually a 1 or 2 Watt laser would be ideal. If you hit the camera it's perma-fried. Good luck flying your drone back home blind asshole.

You'd think they'd have just put polarized glass in the cockpit by now if it were that big of a deal. Oh wait... that's right, it's not that big of a deal.

If it were as simple as polarized glass they might actually go that route. Unfortunately for everyone, it is much more complicated than that. You need specific lenses to protect from specific wavelengths (of which there are many).

[...] hold a laser on a cockpit window for more than a tenth of a second. If a pilot is unable to land a plane after a flash of light that brief, we'd better start making lightening illegal because it's a hell of a lot brighter [...]

With high powered lasers (that are surprisingly easy to come by) a fraction of a second is all it takes to cause serious and often permanent eye injury.

Yes, as a matter of fact, they are:

The Spyder 3 Arctic Blue

Have fun...

I think it's mostly idiots with something like this: http://www.wickedlasers.com/ A $5 red laser diode is probably not going to be noticed.

Harm? well Helicopter pilots have been forced to land, and some have been temporarily blinded.

As for the rest of your argument, let me introduce you to my little friend:
http://www.wickedlasers.com/ar...

No all lasers are .005 watt pointers.

That's why he's in trouble. High strength magnets are not a toy.

They certainly are a toy. By the way, there are other adult toys kids should not have access to --- such as hunting rifles used in hunting sports.

Firecrackers, BDSM gear, high powered laser pointers, racing cars, four wheelers/ATVs, diving boards, dirt bikes, soldering irons, CNC tools, wood carving and arc welding tools, and the list of adult toys/hobbyist products goes on and on; of adult toys that nobody should allow their kids (or kids) unfettered access to, aside from exceptional situations --- very responsible kids who first understand the dangers and are supervised, and known to be very careful and responsible.

If the military don't behave now that they're in power again,
the Egyptians will get

http://www.wickedlasers.com/arctic .. and do actual damage ..

-f

Nope, just mail order that mofo. These guys sell 1W+ blue lasers:

Wicked Lasers -- any colour, any power, get em before they're gone.

That's a badass laser... 1w laser for "personal" use

Green lasers are the most expensive, not the least. Compare: http://www.wickedlasers.com/arctic $400 for 1.25 W vs http://www.wickedlasers.com/krypton $1000 for 750mW.

Green lasers are the most expensive, not the least. Compare: http://www.wickedlasers.com/arctic $400 for 1.25 W vs http://www.wickedlasers.com/krypton $1000 for 750mW.

Can we use this?

New York Penal - Article 125 - 125.15 Manslaughter in the Second Degree

  125.15 Manslaughter in the second degree.
        A person is guilty of manslaughter in the second degree when:
        1. He recklessly causes the death of another person

ref

I mention NY because there's a bunch of busy airports with lots of fat, juicy laser targets in holding or on approach/final.

And yeah, I'm fine with very publically charging a couple of little pricks waving green lasers at aircraft with 150-500 counts of Attempted 2nd Degree Manslaughter; maybe make the punishment a $10 fine per charge in this case but make good goddamn sure they carry every count around on their record. Three. Hundred. Felony. Convictions. Yep, utterly obliterate their lives and make fucking sure the entire world knows it ain't worth it - with shit like the Wicked Lasers Arctic 1.25W blue laser available, it's only a matter of time until some fucktard with $400 to blow decides to shine one of THOSE at a Heavy on final into JFK (over Queens). I don't care if s/he just thinks "it would be funny", strict liability. Light a plane = intent to kill every soul onboard.

Or the harder crims start using them as AAA against police choppers..that one should be punishable by summary execution, maybe rig up a Hellfire to ride the beam..

Well looking at Wicked Laser's web site, their most powerful handheld laser ( 1,250mW), Spyder Arctic has a beam shape of 2 X 5 mm, and a divergence of 1.5mRad, so at 1Km, the beam would be about 3X7.5m, add in a little more or particular splatter would be enough dispertion to still make PV detection highly possible. The PV cell can easily be embeded into the frame of the glasses surrounding the lens, or even embed then into the shutter itself with difficulty. For that matter, the first polarizing filter and the lcd shutter could be mounted on the planes windows and the second polarizing filter can be on the lenses of the flight crews glasses.

"A ______ is to a public microphone as a 1W laser from http://www.wickedlasers.com/ is to a traffic camera."

-- Terry

hah, mod -1 boring, this baby can burn your eyes out with a reflection in a raindrop http://www.wickedlasers.com/lasers/Spyder_III_Pro_Arctic_Series-96-37.html 1W laser :D

Willing to repeat that sentiment a few times aloud as someone points a 1W laser at your chest?
http://www.wickedlasers.com/lasers/Spyder_III_Pro_Arctic_Series-96-37.html

So because one company makes a 1 W laser, one should ban 5 mW laser pointers?

I'm sorry, I think you are reading way too far and not
at all as intended... into my statement.

I am the LEAST likely to want to "pass legislation to
protect the people" person out there.

I was simply responding to a serious over generalization
that lasers can only 'potentially' damage someone's eyes.
That "Shining lasers at people isn't dangerous."

Since 'burning' lasers have been around in compact form
for over a decade.

-AI

Willing to repeat that sentiment a few times aloud as someone points a 1W laser at your chest?
http://www.wickedlasers.com/lasers/Spyder_III_Pro_Arctic_Series-96-37.html

So because one company makes a 1 W laser, one should ban 5 mW laser pointers?

Shining lasers at people isn't dangerous. Shining them at people's eyes can be. Big difference. Much like the difference between blowing hot air at your feet and hot air at your eyes.

Willing to repeat that sentiment a few times aloud as someone points a 1W laser at your chest?
http://www.wickedlasers.com/lasers/Spyder_III_Pro_Arctic_Series-96-37.html

-AI

At least these are still MODERATELY cost-prohibitive for most random morons: http://www.wickedlasers.com/lasers/S3_Krypton_Series-113-63.html

Isn't it possible to burn out the sensor?

Yes... given the proper equipment.

http://www.wickedlasers.com/lasers/Spyder_III_Pro_Arctic_Series-96-37.html

Ahh, to have that given equipment.

-AI

On this page you'll find the following text just above the video:

Warning: This laser's brightness is potentially hazardous to pilots' vision and satellite sensors. NEVER point it at an aircraft or a satellite. The S3 Krypton is too powerful to be used as a laser pointer or a gunsight. Never point it at another person, an animal or a vehicle.

So it's there. But not in the manual.

And what hobby requires the use of 1W laser??

Amateur astronomy for use as a guide laser. Despite the price, I may have to pick one of these up for aiming my radiotelescope. It also might work for killing bugs. Might not be powerful enough for that though.

I would add avoiding *scattered* light to the list of warnings. (It has a BRH Class 4 warning label, which does include that wording.) A bit safer perhaps than other wavelengths because your eye responds with very high sensitivity to 532nm green (so you're not in *quite* as much danger as you would be from short-wavelength blue or, far worse, UV), but you definitely want to be wearing 532nm notch filter glasses with side shields as even looking at the beam spot on a white (and non-specularly-reflecting) surface could give cause fairly rapid eye damage. (And you can't control who's staring at the beam spot in most cases.) Note: The beam spot of my 40mW DPSS laser is significantly brighter than I'm comfortable looking at for long..

(Wicked also has pretty emphatic warnings in the manual about never aiming it at satellites. Me, I wouldn't want to be the guy who gets sued by or faces criminal charges from the operators of a commercial or government LEO satellite whose sensors are damaged by one of these. Goes at least double for whoever tries to show off to the ISS crew .. not a good idea.)

One of these should do the trick.

The lasers aren't red, they're most likely green or blue. Output powers are not a measly 5mW, but upwards of 1W. http://www.wickedlasers.com/lasers/Spyder_III_Pro_Arctic_Series-96-37.html Burns tape and other things. Range of 6.7km +, definitely causes blindness at short ranges, and flash blindness at long distances. Output power can be 200-300 mW for the same affect, which can be bought for 100$. When the beam hits the window it scatters and illuminates everything, try it in your car. If your ok with your next pilot, not seeing anything during landing, your not very smart.

In short, none of these have been verified, and there's a quite high possibility that the pilots are either lying, having harmed themselves, or were suffering from psychosomatic injuries.

Let's look at the first example. The pilot was 5 miles away from the airport when "struck". As you know, during approach, you can't really see much of the ground closer to you than the airport, but OK let's be generous and say 2 miles minimum distance to any visible ground object.

This 200 mW green laser (which almost certainly was far more powerful than what the kid had, but let's be generous again) has a no-harm distance of 100 m. The minimum distance the pilot was away was THIRTY-TWO times that. The power diminishes by a factor of a square of the distance, so at that range, it's less than a thousandth of the strength needed to cause damage.
Never mind the utter infeasibility of being able to keep the laser on the cockpit glass for more than a fraction of a second, and the dampening effect of the cockpit glass itself.

Again, there are alternative explanations (see my first sentence) which I find far more plausible.

Sure, you can get startled by the eerie light from a laser, but if they really were that damaging at that distance, every soldier would have been outfitted with a laser pointer a long time ago.

80 mW isn't unusually high powered for a stargazing aid.
This one, for example, is 100-200 mW.

The problem is not actually blinding pilots, it is that at large enough distances a green laser is a rather distracting giant green spot, which makes it quite hard to see other things, like the runway.
See Wicked Lasers' "Photonic Disruptor."

Just panning it slowly across a crowd could be good enough.

From the specs of one of the lasers:

http://www.wickedlasers.com/lasers/Spyder_III_Pro_Arctic_Series-96-37.html

You can get a spot that's about 16cm in diameter at about 200 metres which can cause damage after 250 milliseconds of exposure.

Given this example, I'm sure it is not difficult to build a hand-held laser that's better suited for mass blinding.

I'm curious if the "more than 100 times the world's highest output value" means that we will soon see a 100W version of the WickedLasers Spyder III...

http://www.wickedlasers.com/lasers/Spyder_III_Pro_Arctic_Series-96-37.html

While I think this is heavy handed of Lucasfilm Ltd, I looked up the actual product on their website. The pic in TFA is rather close up and doesn't truly show how close this laser resembles a lightsaber. Check out the other pics here: http://www.wickedlasers.com/lasers/Spyder_III_Pro_Arctic_Series-96-37.html

As much as I hate to admit it, it does look way too similar to a lightsaber.

I dunno, it sort of looks like a flashlight to me. And lightsabers look like flashlights too. That's why twelve year olds have been having "lightsaber battles" with flashlights for the past 30 years. Just because they both look like the same duck doesn't mean the first aper has been aped. You can take just about any cylindrically shaped object with a few surface projections and say it looks like a lightsaber hilt, because the lightsaber hilt is vague and simple. It would be one thing if they were marking these thinks as "Space Battle Light Blazers" or something even remotely close to any Lucasfilm owned trademarks, but as it is marketed as the spyder III pro arctic laser this is just ridiculous trolling. Kingman Group would, however, have a better shot at suing over use of the name Spyder.

Why, because it's an irregular cylinder and can be held in the hand? Lightsaber. Pro Arctic Laser. Not the same thing. Heck, there isn't even a single lightsaber design. What do they have to do -- make it into a dodecahedron?

While I think this is heavy handed of Lucasfilm Ltd, I looked up the actual product on their website. The pic in TFA is rather close up and doesn't truly show how close this laser resembles a lightsaber. Check out the other pics here: http://www.wickedlasers.com/lasers/Spyder_III_Pro_Arctic_Series-96-37.html

As much as I hate to admit it, it does look way too similar to a lightsaber.

Agreed, if that pic is legit then it does look a lot like one.

Part of me says "so what." Your options for something portable are somewhat limited...

• Either go with a gun-shaped device, even something sci-fi where it's an isoceles triangle and you hold the short end.
• Or you go with some sort of flash light device. But not TOO much like a flash light, else you pick up the wrong tool in a power outage and screw up someone's retina.

If a wand device, for anything expensive you probably want something with a good solid grip and construction so you don't drop/break the thing. Dropping a $50 laser pointer is no big deal, they're light and simple. Something more complex, you probably want that extra heft.

Really, all Lucas had was a cool looking hilt that shot a beam of light. A stylized flash light. Until the prequels, there were only 3 or 4 distinct models of handles. Who knows how many there are now (besides the BMF).

On the other hand, yeh the whole picture does resemble one. If the thing was called a "photon sword" or something the lawyers would probably mess their pants.

Lucas Lightsabre: http://blog.movieset.com/special/own-a-piece-of-film-history

Wicked Laser: http://www.wickedlasers.com/lasers/S3_Spyder_Arctic-96-37.html

If all it takes is a light coming out of a cylinder, then Maglight would have a very good case against Lucas...

It falls plumb between trademark and copyright stools, but take a look at the uncropped picture of the laser. Ask 12 good men and true if it's not blindingly (ho ho) obvious that this device has been deliberately designed to look like a lightsaber, and I think you'll get an answer in the affirmative.

Whether that's actionable or not is a more nuanced question, but can we please be honest about the design remit at work here. This is a lightsaber clone, with enough small differences that they can make a fight of it, grabbing more publicity all the way.

Slashdotted, here's another one... http://www.crunchgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/The-Skin-Melting-Spyder-III-Pro-Arctic-Laser-Is-a-Real-Life-Lightsaber.jpeg

Even if it was specifically meant to look like a "lightsaber" it can be argued that the shape is the most practical for handling and mounting and if there wasn't a beam of fucking light coming out of it it could be mistaken for a dozen other things.

Right... the iPad looks nothing like the PADDs. The kindle on the other hand looks much more similar to a PADD. Before reading the full summary, I went to http://www.wickedlasers.com/ to take a look. First thing that came to mind when I saw the Arctic series: "Lightsaber"

It falls plumb between trademark and copyright stools, but take a look at the uncropped picture of the laser. Ask 12 good men and true if it's not blindingly (ho ho) obvious that this device has been deliberately designed to look like a lightsaber, and I think you'll get an answer in the affirmative.

Whether that's actionable or not is a more nuanced question, but can we please be honest about the design remit at work here. This is a lightsaber clone, with enough small differences that they can make a fight of it, grabbing more publicity all the way.

beam shape of a laser is primarily related to the shape and size of the lasing cavity. Since diode lasers are so small, they tend to have fairly high divergence. Interestingly, if you expand the beam at the source, it reduces the spread proportionately. Actually, the wickedlasers folks have a chart on their web site: (doesn't include the laser we're discussing her, probably because it's new, but gives you an idea).
http://www.wickedlasers.com/laser-tech/laser_beam_comparison.html

You're apparently looking at the wrong one. The 1W blue for $198 is the Spider III Pro Arctic. It's the headline item on their top page, and is listed under "Blue Lasers" under "2010 Pro Series" in the left pane.

I've always wondered how effective a high powered laser like this would be against a pursuing car. I mean obviously you wouldn't want to risk it over a speeding ticket, but say you had a dead hooker and half a kilo in your car. Do they get photos the moment you pass the radar gun, or do they get the license number later? High power lasers capable of burning skin are pretty easy to come by, and much easier to aim then a firearm while driving. The lensing might be tricky, the laser linked to above has a lens that allows it to cover a larger area at a distance giving you better coverage. Its also not available in the US, though honestly for distance work like this I would want something at least 2x-3x more powerful if lensed.

Yeah, that's like what I was thinking too: mobs of villagers looking for werewolves or somesuch, carring torches and pitchforks.
Torches like this? ;) http://www.wickedlasers.com/lasers/The_Torch-74-41.html

Buy them a nice Laser Pointer...

http://www.wickedlasers.com/index.php

Baseball Bat 1, Helicopter 0.

Chucking some sand at it would probably work better; nothing like sand in the air intake to choke an engine. Also carrying a small bag of sand in your pocket is less conspicuous than carrying a baseball bat all day. While it might work at more than baseball bat range, it would still be limited to a couple of meters.

A longer range method would be using one of those nice green laser pointers to saturate its visual detectors so it crashes into a wall. The higher powered green lasers from http://www.wickedlasers.com/ might even do permanent damage to the detectors. Hell, everyone can carry a laser pointer and claim it's for their job. I carry a green one :)

I would expect a non-lethal weapon would not violate the intent of "innocent passage." The trouble I find is that any allowance we afford the merchant ships we must also afford the pirate ships. This means the pirates would be able to use non-lethal weapons to commandeer a target vessel, just as the target vessel would be able to use them to defend against such an attack.

Still, I would expect something like this dazzling device would be highly effective, especially mounted on a tranquilizer gun.

I for one welcome our new robot overflying predators.
What could possibly go wrong?

http://www.wickedlasers.com/

Tried the maker's website...."can't connect to DB 1Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (11)"

Seems like something got cooked...