Probably not as many as we’d like to think. I recently got to run a few days of tests at Lawrence Livermore National Labs with an absurdly massive laser. At one point we needed to bring in a small speaker for an audio test. It took the lab techs and managers about two hours and a couple phone calls to some higher ups to make sure it was ok and wouldn’t damage anything. There’s so much red tape and procedure in the way that I don’t think there’s an opportunity to just fuck around. The laser has irreplaceable parts that people aren’t willing to jeopardize. Newer or smaller lasers are going to be more relaxed. This one is old enough to be my father, and it’s LLNL’s second biggest single laser iirc. And they are the lab using lasers for fusion, so they have big lasers.

Yeah, I have a couple over 800MB PNGs that I can only get Gimp to open properly. I need to look into pyramidal TIFFs.

And if there’s ever a brand integration, he’ll spout their marketing drivel uncritically and try to pass it off as science. I can’t trust him anymore.