Except they've tried three more times since then, and had either technical problems or had their attempt thwarted at the last moment. It doesn't matter if they also turn their attention to having western-looking jihaddis freshly back from the ISIS Olympics attacking a London shopping mall TOO, they haven't given up on using portable bombs in airplanes to try to knock more out of the sky. Why? Because it plays well for the intended audience, which is NOT the west. It's all about being able to claim, "See? We can still do more such martyrdom operations any time we want, that's how capable we are."

You're right. Our entire culture should only be able to be thoughtful about the safety of any one given situation at a time. People who want to fly RC aircraft should shut up and not worry, at all, about how some idiot is generating bad press and given the uninformed silly people media-hyped things to worry about ... they shouldn't even ADDRESS that issue as long as there is even one angry person anywhere roaming the streets ready to kill over an imagined slight. As a nation, we cannot possibly afford to deal with more than one topic at a time. Speaking of which, how do you have time to scold be when there are people with knives near taxis in your area?

The flight controller is ALWAYS flying the thing. And if you were paying attention (which you weren't), you'd note that I was talking about how the flight controller might handle the presence of debris gumming up a motor and overheating an ESC. It happens all the time - insects, dust, leaves, etc. As I also pointed out, this stuff will seem mysterious to smug people who obviously have no experience with this stuff in the real world.

About half again that much by the time you install gimbal, camera, and VTX for downlink. Regardless, shall we do a test where 1300g hits you in the head at 30+mph? No? Huh.

Many people retrofit with CF props. Regardless, the stock props are plenty capable of taking out an eye, or laying open the meat on your face.

Though you can use the same Google you're talking about to see lovely video of hot, instant fires caused by multirotors hitting the pavement from a long fall/dive and having their onboard LiPo rupture internally. They are very energetic. Just what we need - video of Lithium-fueled fire on someone's July 4 picnic blanket, right where their kid had been sitting in a crowd.

Which explains why the FAA gets a steady stream of phoned-in tips from the public, which they use to issue subpoenas and cease & desist letters threatening fines. Or you could read up on the case of the 17 year old out having a nice time flying FPV in a wide-open public area, up until some lady started to quite literally beat him up for doing so. She gave a shit, enough to commit assault over it. Tip of the iceberg.

Spoken like someone who has never actually built and or operated one.

More likely than a direct hit on the drone by a shell (likely to make the drone drop straight out of the sky, probably in multiple pieces) is the prospect of some debris getting into one or more of the brushless motors. This could cause the motor to overheat, or cause the ESC talking to it to get things wrong. The flight controller can get confused by this, and you could end up with a high battery drain, and the machine doing a nice tilt to one side, with the remaining props spinning way up to try to maintain lift ... presto. From a few hundred feet, the drone could go into a high speed dive at an angle that could very quickly close the distance between the fireworks range (over the water) and the people on the ground. How'd you like 1500g of high-speed hardware coming at your head at, say, 35mph, in the dark, complete with high-speed spinning carbon fiber knives and a flammable LiPo battery onboard.

Beyond all of that, this is about public perception. The complete tool who did this is practically begging to have members of the public pile onto the FAA's existing effort to, in practice, shut down this entire hobby and almost every attempt to put these tools to work in research and business. Gee, thanks.

Because that's the faction that runs the man who runs the US senate and who runs the man who runs the executive branch of the government.

Get shelved by Democrats, you mean. Ask Harry Reid (who sets the legislative agenda in the Senate) about his priorities, if he can articulate them in a complete, unmuddled sentence that doesn't include assertions about how his party has no rich donors, etc.

If this were the House, the tone of the comments here would be all about specifically named anti-science conservatives, not "politicians." Why aren't we naming the anti-science liberals behind this cut?

That's more than a feeling, that's a fact.

And they would scrawl "you can't cash this" on the paycheck you won't be getting, since signing your employment contract in good faith is, you know, part of setting things up so they'll give you money.

'nuff said.

... Google threw an epic bitch fit over the NSA reading data off of their unprotected, unencrypted WAN connections.

So you really, honestly believe that if he'd answered the questions that the Swedish investigators wanted to ask, that he'd have been sent from Sweden, via some flavor of rendition, right to Gitmo? Assange's nearly Jobs-like reality distortion field is definitely getting to you. Or, you're just trolling in the interests of ... what, exactly?

According to the British Medical Bulletin, people racing mountain bikes experience 4 serious injuries per 100 hours of riding.

Shareholders also get paid by watching their shares become more valuable over time. They can sell them down the road, as they see fit. I don't get any Starbucks dividends, either - but what I own there is worth about 1000% more than when I bought. At some point, I'll cash it out, pay the long term capital gains taxes, and get one big ol' dividend for having owned a sliver of the company along the way. I don't feel the least bit troubled by the lack of a dividend in that stock.