Let's name other things that could deliver bombs: RC cars, normal cars, those little foam gliders you get from the dollar store, a Frisbee, and tennis balls. So what point were you trying to make?

Ummm... I was responding to a comment that was basically saying rotary wing is useless because fixed wing exists. You appear to be unable to read context of a discussion before picking your own nits. So, kindly GFY

I'm guessing your entire comment was written sarcastically because I could not do anything but laugh as I read it. I sure hope so at least, otherwise I am truly worried about you. I also like how Tea Party is the new hip insult. Do you know what the Tea Party is, or do you just suggest anyone you don't like must be a member? Not a thing in my comments would have suggested any sort of alignment with the ideals of the Tea Party, so I must assume you are also just an idiot. The final hilarious part of your comment is you suggesting that I am defending Facebook or something, despite me not mentioning the company even once in my post. Actually, come to think of it, I am not convinced you read either my post or the one i was responding to. That makes more sense to me.

Step 1) Google warthox. Step 2) Watch videos Step 3) Stand (or sit, I don't care) corrected. I can hit almost 20 mph with my $40 Chinese micro quad, hitting 50 is relatively trivial for a more expensive/powerful machine. Efficiency begins to matter less when you are trying to potentially save a life, especially when your aircraft is unmanned and expendable.

I offer a challenge: fly a fixed wing aircraft to a man in water. Stop the plane, throw down life preservers, and stay exactly above the swimmer with a beacon light to guide rescue swimmers in. I bet at the beginning of the second sentence fuel efficiency stops mattering as you fall out of the sky and the quad copter begins laughing maniacally. Rotary wing aircraft exist, and are used because despite the small disadvantages they also offer one huge advantage as well. There is a reason rotary wing is used over fixed wing in rescue operations, and it isn't because they forgot to ask your opinion.

I'm not really scared for my privacy at all, whoever is wiretapping me has the most boring job ever. I am active on RCGroups, somewhat active here, and spend a lot of time looking at tower hobbies, xheli, nitroplanes, banggood, and tmart. I call and text my parents, my fiancee, and various people from work. I almost exclusively email people from work, and I travel to and from Syracuse as needed for medical treatment for my son. Hopefully I just saved the FBI some time and resources. There's little they couldn't just find on my Facebook if they wanted to know any of that. I understand why other would be concerned about privacy but I quite simply couldn't care less. I don't believe government invading my privacy has made me safer or anything, but it truly has no effect on my life.

You're not wrong, but losing a $1,000 quadcopter, to me, is preferable to losing either the man in the water or sending out a manned helicopter. It will work better than sitting there going "I hope that guy doesn't drown."

I find this hilarious. I am picturing some 1's and 0's threatening some other 1's and 0's.

*DRONES No more /. before coffee :(

They're going to kill us all (but not from drowning apparently). I'm scared, civil liberties, Obama, predator, privacy etc. Am I /. correctly?

Are you stupid or just stupid? You're saying because less kids are kidnapped now nobody should worry about their kid being kidnapped. Less people die of dysentery then they used to, I think I'll go ahead and stick with clean water though. If your child gets kidnapped statistics don't mean a damn thing. To anyone with a life worth living there are more important things than "keeping democracy intact" by going on angry diatribes over the internet. Hell, even us "mindless parent[s]" are smart enough to realize you can't keep a democracy intact when you live in a republic. Some more of us are even active members of our communities, maybe even local governments, and I promise you that does a lot more good for the country than going on brainless rants about how mindless parents are for caring about their children when there are legitimate fears like The Man spying on your every move. Also, since you are stupid: the comment you were originally replying to was sarcasm. If you're not intelligent enough to recognize obvious sarcasm then maybe the comments section of Slashdot isn't the best place for you. Judging by how twisted you got your panties over this the best place for you is likely either to stay in your mom's basement, or a straight jacket.

I suspect they continue to hold shears. Where do people that are holding shears come into this article in the first place?

There's actually, AFAIK, companies doing this to avoid this "law." Basically you pay a guy for unrelated consulting services, he then flies just because he wants to and gives you the video. By law there is nothing wrong with that, as the flight was for fun and not for commercial purposes and is unrelated to a separate business contract.

I know yelling "slashvertisement" is cool, but is any JavaScript demo that runs good on Chrome an advertisement to you? It seems to me like it just means chrome renders these demos better than other browsers. To the best of my knowledge this is a competition that happens yearly and always gets some tech coverage because seeing what you can do in small amounts of code is pretty cool to people interested in code. It isn't exactly like Slashdot reaches out of your monitor and shoves articles into your eyeballs, you have to actually click on the links to see the content. What you actually seem to be complaining about is that you don't possess the mental capacity to not click on something you don't want to see.

Let's see: Have you seen the people the power companies hire to hang off the side of a helicopter to inspect high voltage lines? What if you could do that from the ground? These helicopters crash and kill people, an rc craft crashes and wastes a few thousand dollars and zero lives. Have you heard of searches for missing people get called off because of nightfall or weather? RC helis are much cheaper, batteries much quicker to replace, and the pilots are never in dangerous situations. Ever seen any bush pilots? Imagine if an RC aircraft can he called upon in the middle of the night to deliver life saving medications to a remote town without risking a single human life. Just because some remotely piloted aircraft are used in the field of battle does not mean they are killing machines, or that operators are trained to kill. There are a lot of technologies that were "perfected" on the battlefield that have great civilian uses. Also, you are a fucking moron, asshat.