I was in a 99 cent store today to pick up something for an office lunch and at the check out stand they were selling a small laser pointer for, you guessed it 99 cents. It's made in china and really cheaply constructed, but for 99 cents I couldn't buy the batteries for the one I have that died. 99 cents!!! It's a Class IIIA laser and I can put a spot on the hill which is about 500 feet across my yard. I bought my first laser pointer about 25 years ago and paid something like $100 for it. A close friend of my Dad's was Dr. Charles Townes, the inventor of the laser/maser, who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964 for it. I'm guessing that the one that I bought for 99 cents today is more powerful than the one he got for the Nobel Prize.
Just a ramble, I bought a 1 Gb flash drive about 4 years ago for something like $25; a month ago, I bought a 4 Gb flash for about $6.
