Maybe we can apply the same thing to language, including - especially - the dangerous mis-use of apostrophes near crowds of people. Punctuation should only be used by licensed people certified in the language being used. We could avoid so many horrible, fatal collisions between plural and possessive traffic. Think of the children.

Those "flyaways" are grossly over-reported. Every noob who does something stupid with a machine that happens to have the very widely used Naza on board immediately throws their crash into that same causative bucket. It's ridiculous. Can't tell you how many "DJI Flyaway" videos I've watched that clearly show gross operator error, sloppy builds, GoPros with the WiFi turned on, uncalibrated compass modules, take-offs before the GPS head count is high enough, no home point set, landing gear caught in the grass, flight controller on a hexa set up for a quad ("OMG, it's the Naza flip of death!") and so on. To say nothing of smoked ESCs, never-maintained bearings, and flying right in front of the radome on a utility tower ... if it weren't all so bad for the hobby and the industry in general, it would be funny. But it's not. Because of clowns like the guy in question here.

My personal bet: he outflew his probably badly maintained LiPo until it went over the volate cliff, and the rig dropped like a rock.

This is factually incorrect. If you're out of range, the bird falls back on another kind of control that you exerted before you even took off (a GPS-based return-to-home waypoint and associated climb/travel/descend procedures - all things the operator controls). Never mind that the pro-level RF gear one would use with a "real" bird for RCAP isn't WiFi at all, and doesn't resemble WiFi in any way that matters.

Well, that's not entirely clear just this moment. In the now-headed-into-appeals area of Huerta v Pirker, it kinda looks like the FAA doesn't actually have any formal, properly constructed rules in place. Guidance only. Their distinction between recreational and commercial use of the very same RC machines used by the same people in the same place at the very same time is pretty ridiculous - and the administrative law judge handling round one of that case agreed. But the case is still baking.

So, if you dropped your camera drone on someone's head in the US right now, and weren't flying next to an airport or beyond line of site or over 400' ... then the trouble you're in is roughly the same as if you'd hit the same person in the head with a lawn dart or a football. Good ol' fashioned reckless endangerment, having nothing to do with the FAA pe se.

I don't buy that excuse for a second. But let's say, for the sake of argument, that he's right. That means he was using cheeseball home entertainment mall kiosk grade equipment. Nobody doing for-real media coverage of a sporting event and intending to fly over people's heads is going to be using anything that could possibly be so easily "taken over." If nothing else, the drone should have a good enough flight controller to allow it to realize that something is swamping the RF control side, and have it climb to a previously identified altitude, and maneuver back over the spot from which it took off, then to make a nice gentle decent and landing. This is vanilla COTS stuff, now, with even inexpensive FCs. The good ones - which any pro should be using, and which cost more like $1k - are really good at high speed frequency hopping and only paying attention to the controller to which they're bound.

Basically, this clown sounds completely negligent.

There is no context in which that phrase can be used - earnestly, ironically, sarcastically, ignorantly, juvenilely, ham-fistedly, or otherwise - in which the person saying it can ever, ever tell someone else they've failed.

Understanding what happened could be worth a lot more than $50m, or twice that.

Major issue with the airframe, or propulsion? Very important to understand that. There are a lot more of them flying around.

A third party's influence and/or an attempt to steal the plane? Whether that ended in a crash or a successful theft, we need to know everything we can about who, what, why, to what end. If it was stolen and landed (extremely, very unlikely), gotta know where and why. If it went in the drink during an attempt, still have to understand what the game plan was.

Suicide? Hiding in regular traffic, then flying low and into the most remote, deepest water possible in the interests of never finding the plane - the better to make sure family collects on insurance money? Would be good to know, and will remind airlines to get harder about knowing their pilots and the pilots' current circumstances.

Regardless, the navy assets out looking are using the whole thing as an excellent training exercise. Lots of smart people have had to whip up new ways to think about what happened, using only traces of satellite/comms data.

If we can take their small sample and methodology as meaningful, and presume that you mean that Hawaiians all get up early and go right into the sun... then the point is that whatever lifestyle things make a lot of Hawaiians fat would be even worse if they all rolled out of the cot in their mom's basement and stayed there until lunchtime.

No. It's mis-use of the apostrophe that will be our undoing.

If, that is, people who say "I could care less" don't cause the world to explode, first.

But this particular kind of use of it absolutely dwarfs everything else. Streaming media is a huge payload.

And, come on now, tell the whole story. For AT&T to be able to deliver Netflix's data all the way to the home routers of their customers, they also have to maintain arrangements with other carriers to handle that data as it comes in from Netflix. Those peering arrangements are not free, just like maintaining that last mile to their end user customers isn't free.

Meanwhile, the guy who buys bandwidth and uses it for a less Netflix/YouTube-centric array of connections absolutely is going to be asked to contribute to his neighbor's entertainment costs if the GP has his way and AT&T raises their rates across the board to deal with the behavior of a subset of users and remote content sources.

How is that not fair? External networks like Netflix are hugely disproportionate users of ISP's infrastructure. Who should be "blamed" for that flood of traffic if not hte ? If those specific sources of traffic, on the other side of a peering relationship, weren't there, this wouldn't be an issue. A handful of traffic sources are burning up the lion's share of the bandwidth, and making money off of their customers while doing so. Why should an AT&T customer who doesn't drink from the Netflix firehose have to subsidize the people that do? Let Netflix and AT&T work out those costs, and let the people who actually consume the traffic pay the tab in the form of slightly higher prices for the entertainment they want from Netflix. Expecting their neighbors pay for it, instead, is pretty jerky.

Really? You don't think there's much of a difference between knowing it was a mechanical failure (or fire, etc) and knowing it was a deliberate criminal act? If the problem was related to payload or the aircraft's infrastructure or maintenance, you don't think it's vital for all of the other people flying on that same equipment to know what went wrong? If this was done by the pilot(s) at the behest of some organization or state, or otherwise in the service of some agenda, you don't think that's meaningful, in the context of trying to prevent it from happening again? Glad you're so relaxed about it. You probably don't do much business overseas, or ship expensive things that are central to your mission, or have relatives that fly on that equipment or in that part of the world, so that's probably why the death of hundreds and the loss of a huge, expensive aircraft is a yawner to you.

I'm still trying to figure out what the Trilateral Commission, the Rothschilds, the Masons, and George Soros hope to gain by tricking people into being so actively bad at understanding the difference between the plural and possessive uses of the apostrophe. There must be some money in it, somewhere.

No, true capitalism involves you deciding, for yourself, what you want to do with the money you've made. That might very well include giving it to your wife or kids, as part of what you intended all along as you worked 100 hour weeks growing a business.

To follow your logic, a successful parent shouldn't be allowed to send their kid to a better engineering school (which because of staff and facilities, costs more), because that's not a "clean" slate for the college student compared to everyone else. But since plenty of parents are lazy wastes of oxygen, the only way to even the slate for you would be to make sure that no kid gets a better childhood or education than what the kid with the worst possible parents get. There! That way everything would be "fair" for you.

Yeah, I can tell you've never had a single conversation in your life with a family farmer. Or someone who's launched a business that's modestly successful. You need to get out more. Oh, wait. That might make you more worldly than someone else's kid, and that wouldn't be fair.

No, you deliberately answered the wrong aspect of the question in order to avoid addressing the fact that you can't run a society that is plagued by a small but toxic fringe of awful people and groups without telling them everything you're doing to stop them, minute by minute. You know this, but you're pretending you're too dumb to grasp it. Why, I can't imagine. You're a transparency puritan troll, I guess.