Except in this case he managed to check off a number of 'safe' boxes. The described fence would stop the ammunition of choice from the weapon, and the ammunition fired at a relatively high angle would come down safely as well.

That being said, I don't want regular gunfire just because of the noise.

I would have told the drone owners that they can take their broken drone or they can press charges for destruction of property in exchange for the homeowner pressing trespassing/peeping charges on them.

This reminds me of the last drone I read about being taken out by gunfire. It was some PETA people using a quadracoptor to harass some hunters - it was really an obscenely loud whiny thing, and their goal was to scare game and such.

They complained to the cops that had shown up that their drone had been shot. The cops looked at them like 'so what'?

The PETA types tried 'but that was dangerous!' Keep in mind that, unlike this case, said hunters were in an area where firearm use was legal.

Given that the drone operator was there to 'photograph a friend's house', I'm taking it as that he's not local. I could park a van a block or so away, launch the drone from the roof, and never be seen in person operating it.

And you're ignoring all the personal experiences posted in this thread by people who have actually been peppered by falling shot why? You even acknowledge that people 'felt it' but our sense of touch is sensitive - I can feel a sheet of paper falling onto me, it's going to take quite a bit more force to actually hurt me.

Now, it's certainly not identical, but I'm reminded of the Mythbuster's 'penny off the Empire State Building' where they determined that a falling penny from that height(assuming it didn't get blown back onto the building like most do), would only sting a bit when it hits.

And a penny is less aerodynamic but much more massive than a birdshot BB. A number of the finer grades look almost like sand.

And a source on the differences between rifle rounds and birdshot.
AK round: 124 grains, TV 265 fps, 23 ft-lbs of force
5.56 round: 62 grains, 245fps, 8 ft-lbs
9mm: 115 gr, 195 fps, 10 ftlbs
00 buck: 54 grains, 130fps, 2 ft-lbs (it's TV is much lower than the rifle round because a sphere is less aerodynamic than the cone of a bullet)
#8 birdshot: 1.3gr, 76 fps, 1 ft-lb (Too low for writer's ballistic calculator).

That's with the more aerodynamic spin stabilized projectiles fired from rifled barrels(even handguns today are rifled). Unless he was stupid enough to shoot the drone with a slug or buckshot, the projectiles reach terminal velocity very rapidly compared to a rifle and *fall* at a velocity that will limit damage.

If he fired it at an angle much above 30 degrees the pellets are only dangerous on the upward part of the parabola.

Even buckshot is only dangerous a bit further, and slugs have the longest range but are still relatively short-ranged compared to a rifle round.

You should have seen the ad campaign last election season. I live in a state of less than a million people, that's nominally 'conservative', but had a democratic senator. That campaign was intense.

How intense? Think about the hassle of $200 worth of political advertising between the two of them, per registered voter.

Because of the auction system and the amount/value of those political ads, if the saw that your IP was from our state, you saw nothing else. And many of them were full video ads.

Now, this might sound 'mean', but we already do it. We have professionals at it. Actuaries. They have tables and you plug the numbers in and it spits out an estimate.

Please note that I said 'approximately'. It's impossible to determine 'exactly' how much damage coal plant X does, partially because it's dependent upon population density, the amount of power it produces, the dominant winds, rain patterns, etc...

What we can do is figure out a pretty close estimate on how much damage ALL the coal plants cause via the various pollutants, then look at Plant X, determine what it's producing via sampling, then charge for it.

If it lacks a certain control against mercury emission, for example, it's costs per kWh are going to be substantially increased because it has to pay for it.

I tend to blame slow ad servers more. With as many ad servers, tracking sites, and other crap revenue-generation webpages want to load on my computer, the odds that one of them is offline, slow, or frozen is fairly high. So I end up waiting for it to time out - until I block it and my computer doesn't even try.

Hell, one site I hit had FOUR auto-play videos on it - 2 of them the same ad that played at slightly different times, indicating that it wasn't even nice enough to pull it from the same location. Then it had the video about the article, AND a general news site feed.

The site was so horribly unusable that I could only conclude that the designers didn't view it without ad-blockers themselves.

Sequential loading, but also consider that many will delay the page showing until the ad is served or times out.

If the website is hitting 20 different ad servers & trackers, what are the odds that at least ONE of them is in a less than ideal routing location for your computer, not available, slow, or delayed?

I mean, blocking all the google, facebook, twitter, and such tracking & 'share this!' code sped up webpages quite well.

Why the hell would I want to share random posts on an internet forum, such as this, on facebook or whatever?

Normally they're looking at 'fantasy'. They're paying more than they want for the number of responses they get.

Like I was trying to point out earlier, paper, magazine, television, and radio ad responses are harder to measure than computer ad 'click-through'. Some of the examinations I've seen has the experts pointing out that there is reason to believe that the 'estimated' response for traditional media advertising has been vastly over-estimated.

Basically, they were backtracking to try to figure out why computer ads were doing so 'poorly' compared to existing media using various metrics, when they realized that computer ads aren't less effective according to traditional metrics, but are lousy by the enhanced metrics. Then they started looking into traditional advertising, and started finding the same things - advertising not as effective as believed.

This probably is part of what led to the even more advertising, but that has the problem that it's actively driving viewers away from traditional media.

Like I said - higher mis-click rate. Making the close buttons tiny only pisses users off more, but ad servers 'encourage' that because they're paid more by the click, as you say. But that just pisses users off. I think the ad people are 'okay' with it because hunting for the close button helps.

Oh, and I've seen a number on my phone lately where they put the close button on the left side, not the right where you expect it.

My response to sites that ask me to disable ad-block is to point them to ad-block approved ads. I don't mind those.

I think the advertisers are stuck between a rock and a hard place. The metrics show that their ads have lousy response rates, so they make them more obtrusive, which increases their click-through rates, yes. But then those buying the advertising eventually look at 'completion rates', and find that the obtrusive ads have lower completion rates - IE somebody actually buying the product/service, signing up, whatever. Most of the increase is from a higher mis-click rate where the user is hitting close or back as quickly as they can.

Thing is, earlier advertising was much more nebulous about it's benefit. It's hard to tell how much soda any given soda commercial sells, whether it's worth it, etc... What metrics they do have shows that as the number of ads increase, the response rates fall - viewers become immune. And we're very immune at this point.

Hell, at this point aliens might find that we're 'utterly' immune to their propaganda due to the barrage we face every day.

Last time I did a reinstall and browsed a bit before installing ad-block(have to experience what the proles do occasionally, right?), I can best describe it as being driven to install it.

It wasn't just the annoyance of huge ads taking up 3/4 of their front page. It was the incredible load times as well. 100ms? Try a couple seconds on some of the pages I tried.

Note: I hate how easy the 'back' button is on my tablet.

The data isn't hidden, it flows into fewer columns, making the remaining ones wider.

As for looking at the site, you just have to accept that the cell phone view is substantially different than on a computer. It happens.

And there's typically nothing that interesting in the right columns...

It's not that they 'don't care'. It's that people value their time, and it takes time to fiddle with a USB plug. Just making it so it wasn't keyed would have helped, after that you just have the issue of the clutter of the cable.

With a wireless charger in the base of the monitor, I can toss my phone where any alerts are visible, just grab it(with more charge than it would have otherwise) when I go to leave, etc...