Now, for electric cars to put them out of business, they'd have to be a relevant percentage of total vehicles - and overall, that will certainly take time. But the case becomes different in specialty markets. Different states and localities will (and already do) offer different EV incentives, and the natural use case for EVs varies between locations (urban/suburban/rural, mild vs. hot vs. cold climate, terrain, geography (isolated islands or areas without good road connects to the outside world, for example), areas with different driver profiles, and so forth). So an overall EV adoption rate of 1% might actually be 10%, 20% or more in certain areas. That could well be enough to start driving gas stations out of business in such areas, creating a potential contageon effect.

That said, business owners aren't stupid, and one expects them to adapt. For example, where appropriate one would expect gas stations to respond to increasing EV penetration by adding rapid charge stations. Electricity is cheap, but if someone needs a rapid charge (for a road trip or whatnot), they'll pay the going rate, even if it's similar to the cost of gasoline per unit distance traveled. They're not just going to say "meh, I'll just plug into a wall socket and wait overnight". So if you have an existing gas station with all of its capital costs of installing tanks and pumps already paid for, one would expect them to keep selling gasoline even as an increasing percentage of their customers switch over to electricity. Maybe they'll find it cheaper to remove broken pumps than fix them. Maybe they'll eventually hit a point where it's no longer cost effective to maintain their fuel tanks and have to stop selling gasoline altogether. But neither of these things are a "suddenly going out of business because EVs just showed up" scenario.

(Of course, there's a counter to what I just wrote, which is that - given that only a small percentage of EV charging will ever be fast charging - you're looking at a smaller potential market)

I'm an anesthesiologist. I put people to sleep for cardiac surgery. My hospital does around 400-500 hearts a year... and we don't kill any dogs.

What hospital is that? I'll want to avoid it if I ever need heart surgery.

Seriously: How does your cardiac unit's mortality and morbidity rate stack up against those of hospitals where practice surgery on live animal, models, at least where the surgeon is new to the procedure, is more common?

So, he says it was over his yard, the kids say it was over their yard, the neighbor says it was over their yard. Does anyone, including the drone owners, dispute that? One would have a hard time arguing it wasn't over their yard.

That seems like something provable. He only fired one shot, correct? And we know where the drone crashed, and where he was, so we can probably determine if that's a false statement. It doesn't seem like it. He must have shot up in the air, because he hit the drone, and the drone was in the air. And it crashed in a field near his house, not in a neighbor's yard, so the statement that he did not fire over his neighbor's fence does not seem false on the face of it. I wonder if his neighbor actually saw the shot, too.

As for warning about a falling drone, don't know. And we don't know if it was necessary. We'd need a better look at his neighborhood, and the reasonable assumptions one could make (or not make out) about the trajectory of a crashing drone. It depends on how populated his neighborhood is. But nothing in the article indicated any possibility of it hitting someone while crashing. Possible, sure, but you'd think that issue would have been explored if it existed.

The article says he was charged under the Kentucky Revised Statutes with "wanton endangerment in the first degree" and "criminal mischief." Here's the wanton endangerment statute:

Do you think he exhibited "extreme indifference to the value of human life" and created "a substantial danger of death or serious physical injury?" Clearly not from the shotgun blast. As every hunter and student of simple physics in this thread has already said, there's no danger from falling pellets. And if the direction of the blast checks out (not at anyone, not over his neighbor's fence, etc) then the blast itself did not create any danger to human life.

So how about the falling drone? If he shot the drone down in a crowded area, where it would almost certainly hit someone, then yes. That does not appear to be the case, though. Nothing from the story indicates there was any significant risk of it crashing into someone. If that had been the case, you'd think they'd put it in the story. Obviously that needs to be confirmed, but I think it's likely. If no reasonable person could believe the drone had a reasonable chance of crashing into someone, then I don't see how you can convict him of wanton endangerment.

So how about criminal mischief?

I'm assuming it's in the first degree, as the value of the drone was over $1,000.

Well he did intentionally destroy property causing loss of more than $1,000. So the question is did he have a right to do so, or any reasonable ground to believe he has such a right? He clearly believes so. He believes he has the right to destroy a spy camera hovering in his backyard. Whether or not that's reasonable is up to a jury. But in Kentucky? Own backyard? Father? Kids who could either be injured if the drone crashes on its own, or by the drone pilot intentionally, or at the very least be spying on them taking pictures? I'd bet a Kentucky jury of his peers would agree that Meredith had reasonable grounds to destroy a spy camera on his property. You own your airspace up to 300ft per the FAA, and there are Supreme Court decisions that agree you have property rights over your airspace.

I hope he takes it to a jury. I'd like to see what they say. I bet he will, too. He believes he's right, and I bet a defense attorney would love this case, if not just for the news spotlight alone.

There has been public outcry. People are talking about it. Laws are getting passed. Opinions are changing. Snowden is in exile for now but I don't think he'll stay that way forever.

The US declared war on Germany on 12/11/41. It took two and a half years to land at Normandy. It's still 1943 and you're declaring Hitler victorious.

Do they have a good reason to be firing the weapon?

"Justification" is a thing. You can argue in front of the jury that yes, you broke the law against firing weapons in city limits, but you were justified in doing so because reasons, and they may or may not agree with you.

So, are the neighbors just randomly firing their guns in their air for shits and giggles? If so, he would not respond favorably. If they're firing their shotguns in the air to defend their property and privacy from flying surveillance devices, he'd probably tell his daughter to go inside for a bit while he goes and helps his neighbors deal with a nuisance.

Somebody else in the comments had a good idea...garden hose on full blast. Consider it a warning shot. Yes, I think Meredith was justified in what he did, but I like the hose idea, as you're less likely to wind up arrested.

I'm an anesthesiologist. I put people to sleep for cardiac surgery. My hospital does around 400-500 hearts a year... and we don't kill any dogs.

So maybe I'm not up to date, or things are/were different in research hospitals.

My personal info was based on stories told by my mother, in about the '60s, when she was a special duty RN at the University of Michigan hospital, often handling cardiac recovery.

My favorite was the one where the UofMich hospital cafeteria, which had been purely open seating, established separate rooms for the staff to eat after an incident where patients' families overheard, and were traumatized by, a cardiac surgeon's response to a question. Asked how his operations the previous day had gone (referring to his experimental and/or practice surgery on a collie and another dog), he said "The blonde lived but the old bitch died."

The kids and adopted dogs story was from my wife. The surgeon in question was Dr. Albert Starr in (at least) the '60s through '80s. He was at St. Vincent's and also flew, with his team, to operate at a number of other west coast hospitals, university and otherwise.

I agree with twistedcubic. RMS, what questions should we be asking/proposing?

A possible solution would be better simulations so that a student can learn by doing. I think it is a very different than working on a cadaver or simulated patient using conventional methods.

You obviously aren't familiar with surgical departments or you wouldn't have missed practice surgeries on live animals.

For instance: a typical cardiac surgeon, shortly before EACH operation on a human patient, does a practice operation of the same procedure on a live dog.

One pediatric cardiac surgeon was much beloved by his patents and their families, because (with parental permission) he would let the kid adopt the practice dog, rather than sending it to be destroyed. The kid would wake up from surgery with the new puppy beside him, with the same bandages, etc. (and a day or so farther along in recovery). The dog having been through the same procedure and having helped save the kid's life even before they met made for very strong owner/pet bonds. (There's always a live, healthy, practice dog. If the dog dies (or is severely damaged) the assumption is that the procedure failed. You DON'T do a procedure on a human if it just killed a dog. You analyze, adjust the procedure, and repeat until success.)

Getting skills up does NOT require, or usually involve, a lot of practice on JUST advanced simulations, cadavers or, live patients. The live patients are just the last step, when the skills are already finely honed, and the animal models provide immediate feedback, real situations, and automatically correct modelling of mammalian life processes.

Would have been nice if the police had confiscated the media card from the drone.

Bullets? Yes. Shotgun pellets? I doubt that's ever happened. They're too light and they spread too far. They're supposed to be shot in the air.

There's a risk of falling drone debris (which would be on him, as it was above him when he shot it, and I would assume he'd have told his kids to get out of the way), but there's zero chance of danger to anyone from the shotgun discharge.

Completely agree. You don't have to be able to bang out an OS, but man, if everybody just knew how to grep through some files or automatically run an SQL query, dump the results into an Excel file and email it to somebody, the world would be a better place.

Pick your poison. Get robbed by your coworkers or get robbed by your boss. You're still getting robbed. But I bet your coworkers will rob you less, given that they're being robbed by the same process.

Resistance was futile!

Why don't publishers put the ads in a section of the page that can allow the rest of the page to load and render before the ad loads and renders?

Because you could stop the loading once the content you wanted was rendered, thus skipping the ad.

So the pages are set up so the ad loads and renders first.