There is no risk angle that "drone" brings in here.

Um yeah there is. RC helicopters are fearsomely hard to fly. Drones are trivial to fly. As a result there are now many, many more drones in the air and that massiely increases the risk. They're also flown by much less experienced people which further increases the risk. AND they can be flown BVR which they can be flown into troublesome areas more easily. That increases the risk even further.

Drone is not a "scare word" but that doesn't mean that the drones do not come with increased risks.

Just like with lasers in cockpits. sure in the 80s, someone coud have bought a $15,000 lab laser and invested time to learn how to operate it and shone it at an aircraft. Funily enough no one did until cheap, integrated lasers you could buy ready to operate came available.

This does not mean technology is evil, but making potentially dangerous tech more easily available does increase the risk.

But commercial aircraft have prima donnas for jet engines.

Of course they do. the A10 engine is a rather rough, inefficient thing designed ot deal with foreign objects. A modern jet airliner has an engine with an astonishingly high pressure ratio, which requires very exotic materials and very fine tolerances. They're designed for maximum fuel efficiency, low maintainance and not shedding blades into the cabin whe na birdstrike happens.

It's the high pressure ratio that makes them prima-donna engines, but that and the low maitainance is what makes moderately cheap flights possible.

But anyway, I think it's a pertinent question to ask why "drones" attract "idiots" where the RC aircraft folk have themselves well in hand.

RC things used t obe expensive and hard to fly. As a result of an investment of time and money the operators were somewhat thoughtful, and enthusiastic about flying for its own sake. Now any yahoo can buy a quadcopter with a camera mount and go look at interesting stuff for a few hundred bucks. No knowledge required.

the risk has increased simply due to proliferation

Proliferation and ease which go hand in hand.

I had a few goes at flying an RC helicopter when they were very much part of the RC crowd and available from model shops only, not every random toy store. I also tried flying an early (and also building) an early quadcopter when they were basically the domain of university research groups and rich hobbyists.

My god those things were hard to fly. The quad copter was much easier but still very, very hard and took hours before I could hover the thing, provided it stayed within about 45 degrees of pointing forward relative to me. The helos were much, much harder due to much less linear coupling between the various controls and a substantially higher power to weight ration (early quads were quite marginal).

The reason this matters is you didn't get any random yahoo flying them. You had to be quite seriously dedicated in terms of time and reasonably in terms of money (a new helo could be had for £100 or so, but learning to fly could easily eat up that much in spare parts). Oh and be mechanically adept enough to fix the bugger when you wiped out and wrecked some important part again.

Basically this raised the barrier to entry to really dedicated people.

They generaly fall into the category of "know what they're doing" and have more of a feel for aircrft in generl due to the time spent and I would say are less likely to do something stupid. I think in part this is also because many people also joined local clubs because getting advice on these things was very useful.

Secondly, thwasn't much you could do except fly them aroud and watch. The modern style with a high res camera and remote video link is a new phenomenon and makes people willing and able to fly these things further away.

The combination of cheap, accessible to any yahoo and also interesting for more than flying to its own sake all add up.

I think you may have interpreted the AC. I *think* he was pointing out that the GP's post about rational drone operators fails to take into acconut that they are not in fact rational.

Anyway re: birds.

Geese tend to like airorts, due to the grass.

I'd hazard a guess that RC/Drone fliers ALSO like airports, probably more than geese due to the planes. I mean you have to be a bit of a plane nerd to fly those a lot and big planes are cool.

Another problem is that quads in particular have 4 large motors made out of chunks of hard metal. While birds and geese in particular (grass is tough to grind up) hold a bunch of stones in their gizzard, the drone will have a LOT of large, hard parts.

On the plus side, drones don't tend to flock.

Herons and large raptors have also been ingested into engines.

Aparently a Ruppell's Vulture wsa ingested at 37,000 feet and presumably at a cruising speed of about 600 mph. Given their weight of 8kg that must have come as an astonishing shock to the pilot.

Well, the fact is that mainstream textbooks which deal with radiative heat transfer (I have at least 3 of them, maybe 4 if I look around) show Spencer's conclusion about his little gedankeneksperiment to be quite wrong.

As I have stated to that person (I prefer not to mention names in this case) many times: I do not deny that there may be a greenhouse effect of some sort, but if there is, it doesn't work via the simple back-radiation mechanism that is usually given as the explanation. That explanation violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics. (Latour's original written explanation was rather short and rough; one could wish he had been more thorough. Then there might have been less controversy about it.)

Nevertheless I did not merely echo his statements but took the trouble to research the subject myself. My textbooks do agree with Latour about his main point, which is that direct warming of a surface via back-radiation from a cooler atmosphere is impossible, just as Spencer's warming of the only heat source by a cooler passive plate is impossible.

I've been all over this topic with many people. Some compare the back-radiation concept to an insulator such as a blanket (100% incorrect), or even worse, a reflector. Also 100% incorrect, but worse because there seems to be more of an intuitive connection... which is quite false. Most people just don't really understand radiative heat transfer. So much is clear. One person tried to tell me that IR reflection from the underside of a cloud was proof of back-radiation.

Sigh. It has been an uphill battle.

In the interest of goodwill I would warn you about trying to argue with this person. I have documented proof that (a) he doesn't argue honestly, (b) he will personally hound and harass people, especially if they prove him wrong. He doesn't seem to be able to accept being wrong.

For example: he insisted on debating Roy Spencer's radiation experiment. I agreed to do so only on the condition that it was understood that I was debating only Spencer's experiment, not global warming.

When I showed him that the mainstream physics, textbook solutions to the temperatures in Spencer's experiment disagreed with his (and Spencer's) conclusions, he hasn't ceased demanding that I solve it a different way of his own devising, which doesn't appear in any textbook on radiative heat transfer, anywhere.

He is still doing so, when the whim strikes him; he did it again just a few days ago. And as you can see, even though I told him in no uncertain terms that we were debating only Spencer's experiment (his agreement can still be seen here on Slashdot), he insists that I am a "Sky Dragon Slayer", simply because I stated that Pierre Latour's radiation physics were correct. (For the record, I have never read the "Sky Dragon" books.)

I do assert that there is no solidly demonstrated cause for concern over CO2. This person conflates that position of mine, with my use of textbook physics to refute Spencer, as somehow proving I am a Sky Dragon Slayer.

If you insist on arguing with him, prepare to have your words repeated -- for years -- out of context and in distorted and misleading ways. I suppose it's possible that it's some kind of personal vendetta against just me, but I suspect an actual personality flaw.

CEASE misreprenting my position and my words.

We had an agreement: when we discussed Spencer's "back radiation" experiment, I made it abundantly clear that we were discussion ONLY Spencer's experiment, not "greenhouse warming".

Since then, you have consistently, improperly, and dishonestly misrepresented argument as including "global warming" even after repeated statements that I did not make that argument, and in fact you agreed that you understood this before we had our long discussion of Spencer's experiment..

If you cannot represent my position correctly and honestly (and you have repeatedly demonstrated your unwillingness to do so), then don't try to tell other people what my arguments are. Quotes taken out of context from 5 years ago also count against you, not for you.

CEASE misrepresenting my words. You have been warned repeatedly.

Public Service Announcement

Readers: It is my policy to not respond to this person, and I want other people to understand why. There are records right here on Slashdot, in black and white, showing him to have violated clear agreements he made, and to have rather blatantly misrepresented the words of others, in order to try to bulldoze away dissent.

When I have solid, unimpeachable evidence that someone is willing to lie and be a hypocrite, and commits other unethical acts I will not mention here. It would serve no genuine purpose. He started harassing me when I challenged his incorrect answer to a physics problem several years ago, and as you can see he has not yet ceased. When I showed him that textbooks on the subject contradicted his answer, he merely doubled down on what I consider to be continued harassment.

(He also knows that the Venus argument is a prime example of circular reasoning: greenhouse gas theory says that is the reason Venus is hot, therefore Venus proves greenhouse gas theory on Earth. It's a ludicrous argument.)

Those are examples of why I do not reply directly to this person. Whenever I have, he merely doubled down on the nonsense, misrepresentation, and what I consider to be harassment. So it would serve no purpose.

End of PSA. Have a nice day.

I would also note that almost no one here is actually a scientist, much less a Nobel prize winner.

There are plenty of scientists here. And I don't need t obe a Nobel prize winner to know that for instance ESP does not exist (unlike Brian Josephsson). You don't need to have a Nobel prize to know when a prizewinner is talking crap.

Yes it is, but that still doesn't make it like china.

There are no such rules in writing.

There is one single, immutable rule which there is no way of breaking in a book worth reading: don't waste the reader's time.

The remaining rules of writing are strictly optional. However, a good first order approximation is that you aren't good enough to break them. Rare, sufficiently skilled writers can break all sorts of rules and still write a good book.

I'm not a writer (I certainly am not good enough to break the rules), but I've been learning about it for interest's sake. It gives one a whole knew appreciation of some works when the author has successfully broken the rules and written a good book.

Mostly the rules are more technical. Few people want to read massive wodges of exposition, hackneyed characters speaking in "accents" and featuring a massive mary-sue POV character.

What we need is someone who will do for SF what Tolkien did for fantasy.

Alien elf songs?

Second, most writers still use the novel format, which is around 400 years old in it's current format. This is different from older western forms, which tended to be more spoken word, such as Beowulf You can still buy 400 year old novels such Don Quixote. I would suspect that if one were doing something new, then moving from the novel format, or at least messing with it as Kurt Vonnegut did, would be the minimal requirement.

Another interesting one to read if you can is "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman" from 1769. Or at least look at. I failed to get more than about 1/4 of the way through.

The entire thing makes a complete mockery of the concept of "postmodern" since it did that first hundreds of years earlier and only about 50 years after the novel format realy settled out in its current form (not a series of letters, short stories or poetry). It's also packed full of pop culture references (I mean really stuffed---it's impossible to read without the footnotes which explain what the hell was current in terms of slang, memes and so on circa 1769).

Despite being next to unreadable, many of the things---zanyness, kind of random humour, pop culture refrecing, bizarre, random pictures---are things many people think of as recent but aren't and feel really familiar.

For more entertainment, read the commentary about the book from when it was written. By all accounts it was as almost as unreadable then as it was then. However some people latched on to it as the height of sophistication, so people argued about whether it was good or a total crock.

Basically you could transplant the entire thing to now and it wouldn't make the slightest bit of difference.

Because there is a right well to tell fictional stories?

You are implying that there is no right or wrong way, but then say this:

If your express something using cultural references nobody has ever used before, maybe you're doing it wrong.

So clearly there are wrong ways of doing it. Every bad book is the wrong way of doing it.

Nah not really. Under 10% of internet subscribers have chosen to not opt out. Most people would never know if the filters went to crap.