Here's the joke: Homeopathy.

You're right. You're definitely on to something there. And while we're making sure that a professional real estate photographer with his reputation on the line is not to be trusted with a three and a half pound quadcopter, we should be even MORE restrictive of the OTHER dangerous stuff that's moving around our homes and communities. Like, pre-occupied 19 year olds driving cars. Like large dogs on cheap leashes. Like idiots on mountain bikes hopping curbs and cutting through read lights. Definitely start with the Evil Drones, but please don't stop there! There are so many dangers! Oh, definitely don't forget steak knives and riding lawnmowers.

Never mind the tiny number of people shooting a few real estate stills from treetop level. How do you know that the many, many thousands of people who are flying around for fun are being safe? But the FAA (so far) is honoring congress's mandate that hobbyists be left alone, even though they just said that hobbyists flying FPV style are no longer allowed. Regardless, the hobby drone market has hundreds of thousands of customers. There might be a few hundred people shooting real estate. Can you explain why you think it's a good thing to hurt them, but not to care about all sorts of reckless hobby newbies (just search on YouTube)? Please be specific.

How do you know that your neighor, who just had a ready-to-fly quad dropped off by UPS and who's in the air 30 minutes later, is safe? Really. How do you know? And why do you think that people who are doing it professionally, with their businesses and reputations on the line, are more dangerous than a 12 year old kid next door who's on his third quad having crashed the first two in spectacular fashion? How do you know? Please be specific. Because the FAA thinkks the 12 year old kid is fine, but the person who takes great care to avoid endangering their real estate business liability coverage while shooting the occasional photo should be stopped. An odd thing for you to support.

If by that you mean that clearly written words in the English language have no actual meaning, then sure, I guess. If you mean that the Constitution, and the countless supporting documents and correspondence written to, between and about its authors and the large groups of representatives that agreed on its purpose and amendments to it were just setting us with something that had no actual meaning, then sure. But that's BS, and you know it.

The Constitution makes no such distinctions between one tool and the next. But of course the people who wrote it were very clear that there were some tools that some people would - given a period of power in the congress - try to deny to the public, and so they added amendment that explicitly reminded the government that it cannot act in those areas. The Constitution is built around the concept that the government's powers over what you may or may not do it inherently limited to the things that are enumerated therein, and generally prohibited otherwise, with the states having all such other authority. This isn't a matter of "perspective," and it isn't true for certain tools, and false for other tools. If you think that "drones" (but not, say, chain saws) should be singled out for capricious bans by the federal government despite laws recently passed by the congress explicitly to the contrary, then you're completely missing the point.

Semantic games like that show how completely unserious you are.

A matter decided upon, legislatively. at the municipal, county, and (rarely) state level. Not by capricious extra-legal, counter-constitutional fiat from a political appointee of the White House, as in the case at hand.

Because the FAA, by federal statute (passed by congress, which is made up of representatives of all of the states), is granted that regulatory authority. There is legal precedence for their authority over everything that flies in the air, right down to an inch above the ground. Which doesn't mean that their position on this stuff isn't incredibly absurd. But it's their turf.

Why should the FAA, which is part of the Obama administration, feel any urge whatsoever to enforce or obey laws passed by congress? We have ample precedent of him using the pen and phone about which he so regularly boasts to simply do what he wants anyway, even in direct contradiction of plain language in the laws he swore to uphold. Any expectation that the chief executive of the administration will be asking his immediate (appointed, by him) subordinate (the Secretary of Transportation) to instruct HIS subordinate (Huerta, the director of the FAA) to actually comply with the law, is laughable. The administration takes laws (like their own favorite, the ACA), and completely ignores hard-wired dates and other requirements as it suits them for political leverage with the portion of the voters to whom they pander. Happily, that particular instance is about to be challenged in a civil suit coming out of congress - that's very good news.

We just need another suit, along the same lines, requiring the administration's law breaking at the agency level in the FAA to be discussed in the bright sunshine of court. Something you'd think that the "most transparent administration in history" would applaud, right? Yeah.

You have your entire concept of liberty, and of the constitution, exactly backwards.

Should every new concept, innovation, invention, tool, technique, strategy, and technology be prohibited by default? What the hell is wrong with you? If I come up with a clever new way of slicing deli meat, should I be prohibited from using it or showing someone else how to use it until I've sufficiently begged an un-elected, un-accountable agency bureaucrat to allow me to use it?

And in the case at hand, picture two people standing right next to each other. Each has their hands on the controls of a 4-pound plastic quadcopter carrying a GoPro. Each takes off, sends the little machine up to 45 feet above the same house. Each of them use the device to record the condition of the houses's gutters, sparing somebody a couple hours of putting up a dangerous extension ladder a dozen times. Each of them get the job done in minutes, and land their little quad back down in the driveway right next to each other. You think that one of those two people should be banned from what the both just did, but the other should not. Why? Be very specific.

Or to the rooftop mail room chute in a large office building that might contain hundreds of Amazon business customers. If you're picturing suburban doorstep delivery to un-prepared recipients, you're imagining the wrong scenario.

Even better.

These will appeal to those who think they need to spend more money than they need to. As a previous poster pointed out, go to the music store (musical instruments) and go to the recording section and buy a DAC (they are really analog to digital / digital to analog converters depending on what direction you are talking about, but most just call them DACs). They have smaller ones for less money than these with equal bitrates and resolution to anything on this list for less money. They are good enough for recording music, they can be used for playback via their output channels. They won't be as small as the easy to lose thumb drive sized gizmos for a thousand quid, but more like the black box sized from the list. But at most you'll pay $US250.00 and some are half that price. In my reply to that other poster, I pointed out a product from MOTU (they make good stuff). The added benefit to these is most come with some decent recording software too, if you don't already have that.

That's true. But at least now western companies get scrutinized a lot more and are less able to get away with shit. The Chinese companies don't have anyone at home who give a shit about where they get the ore and what they do to get it. And they try to avoid any western reporting often with the help from the politicians there. So western media haven't been been reporting what the Chinese do or haven't been able to. I have talked to people who have or currently work in mining in Africa and anyone could ask them about things like Chinese refining operations using crap loads of mercury and just pumping it out into rivers or hidden tailing ponds hastily built. I just talked to a guy over coffee last Sunday, who flies into Guinea periodically on mining related business (mind you he's taking a pass until the Ebola outbreak is taken care of).

FWIW, I don't fret about what my ancestors did. I can't help that and don't subscribe to the idea that I have to pay for their sins or indiscretions other than to have to live with the world they left like everyone else. I worry about what we can do now, and even though western companies try to get away with whatever they can, face it, we do rein them in far, far better than the Chinese do with their "companies" (quotes because really, they are just another arm of the government when they want them to be).

but have the best-quality DACs and filtering that you can find

For Example:
MOTU
Good enough for a single computer
The thing with this is, I don't think you will have enough outputs for surround sound, but you will get very, very good sound at least in stereo.

Yeah, except that we've been using energy from powerful nuclear generation reactors for decades, and if all of that effort had gone instead into the incredibly inefficient solar technology of the day, we'd have had to burn a huge pile of coal or volume of natural gas to make up for the enormous shortfall. You seem to think that time travel is available, and that somehow even somewhat better, but still very inefficient solar tools available today could have been magically manufactured decades ago, and in enormous grids blanketing (where, exactly?). And of course you're probably also suggesting the use of the same time travel machine to send back the scientists who are only just now - despite the availability of huge amounts of capital, decades more accumulated research, and more - figuring out how to make batteries and other storage devices that kind of, sort of make sense relative to things like powering homes, let alone whole cities.

It's a shame that you're wasting all of that energy on such an angry rant when you don't have the patience to educate yourself a bit. The enormous swaths of chopped-down rainforest aren't being allowed to grow back. They're being used to inefficiently provide lumber (once) and then provide development and farming land - activities that in turn also produce more CO2, not that you actually care.

Which has nothing whatsoever to do with the the fact that their enormous and rapidly growing population is completely overtaking their ability to produce energy, clean water, and enough farmable land to keep up. Hence their steady importation of oil and food from everywhere else.

How is it that you think lying is helping whatever point you're trying to make? The UN has recently pointed out that sub-Saharan Africa has an exploding population, and that the population on that continent will likely quadruple before the century is out. Africa's population is the fastest growing in the world. You know this, everyone else knows this. So the fact that you're pretending it's otherwise, and lead your post with "moron" and "racist" ... well, I guess I should know better than to feed an obvious troll. I've always found that the ones who start their posts by screeching "racist!" are themselves the ones with the race problem. You certainly seem that way.

Hilarious. You're the one fantasizing about population trends that are the opposite of what the UN reports, that imagines time-traveling to solve energy issues, and who sees everyone who doesn't play along with your imagined alternate reality to be morons and racists. Print your post out, on paper, and set it aside someplace safe there in your mom's basement. You'll still be there in ten years, so make an appointment with yourself to read it again, and compare it to each of the next ten years' worth of UN population reports. Not that you'll have the intellectual integrity to actually do that.

Nothing we could have done in the last 100 years would have made a bit of difference with respect to what you mention.

Well, except possibly for doing something to reduce eastern population booms by a few billion people. The couple hundred million people in the west with the economic latitude to pursue the type of stuff laid out in TFA won't make a bit of change, relative to four billion people digging coal in China, sprouting up on the subcontinent, overgrazing in Africa, and plowing down rainforest in Central and South America.

You want any of this to change? Stop having so many babies in places that can't afford them.

I guess you must be reading the Chinese news releases.