Huh. My 2000 GMC 3/4 ton pickup would like to run you over. Still runs fine, only mild rust despite spending 14 years in a 'precipitating marine environment. Yep, it's had various bits replaced but that's how a piece of equipment runs for 20 years.

Give me $2500 dollars and I will send you a nice breakfast.

At least in the US, public nudity should be considered a violation of the Geneva Convention, the Smoot-Hawley Act, general concepts of decency and a Crime Against Nature.

There is a reason that cultures uniformly (pun intended, I suppose) develop social norms that include clothing.

This might not have been a 'five pound drone'. The most annoying part of the reporting on this incident has been a lack of clear description of what sort of device it actually was. According to the Ars article it was flying 800+ feet above ground at an altitude of 11,000 feet above sea level. That implies a class of UAV more sophisticated that the $1000 Phantoms. TFA implied that this was a professional class drone which could have weighed in the 10 kg range.

That sort of object hurts when you ingest them.

Except that most of the forest fires happen on Federal land. Especially in the western US, the Federal government owns huge tracts of land. If you don't do anything then you are liable for damages when problems on your property start interfering with others. The government does have some immunity to suits like this but has been successfully sued for damages caused by forest fires.

People are starting to think along your lines but old bad habits die hard, especially when you have to pay for them yourself.

(Flooded area...Jetpack Guy flies in near house with a family of 4 on top of it, as the flood waters rise...)

Jetpack guy sees problem, calls in real helicopter.....

All of your scenarios imply that Mr. Jetpack has to save the day by him / her self. Real rescues are a team sport.

That said, it isn't a compelling sort of thing to own. Expensive, likely cranky of maintenance and training. Limited range. More useful to get a bunch of cheap drones and running around looking for people to help.

No, it just means that Skynet is more patient than you are.

Then don't host adverts. You are a business, even if you aren't trying to make a 'profit'. TANSTAAFL.

But you aren't going to get anywhere near a forest fire in a little battery powered drone. Watch the big heavy helicopters bounce around over the flames. A drone is going to go tits up rapidly in any updraft. After you lose your thousand dollar toy you might think of a less expensive stupid hobby next time - like buying a boat.

A drone sitting over the firefighters or behind them is going to be completely out of the flight line. No danger to anybody since all of the firefighters are wearing hard hats anyway.

And hopefully, the pros with the $20 000 drones that have the range and altitude to get in the way are smart enough to read the NOTAMs and have some common sense. Yes, there will be exceptions, but you can't make stupid illegal. Adding more anti stupid regulations is rarely successful.

You mean Kaylee isn't going to be the mechanic?

Then I'm not interested.

The rest of America hates you.

It's Obama's fault.

Yep. Different failure rates shouldn't make a whole lot of difference. You should be able to restore your system and data today, tomorrow, next year. It will fail sooner or later. Murphy was an optimist.

Depends on the trouble. I have about 30 GB of data that I 'need' - tax stuff, professional documentation, etc. I have a couple of terabytes of stuff that I like to keep around - mostly my pictures / videos and family stuff. If I lost it all I'd be sad but in no way financially or legally discomforted. And it really isn't hard to backup terabytes of stuff these days.

Totally amazing when you think about it. I recall the first 5 MEGABYTE hard disk that I saw. You could see all those files scrolling down the 80 x 25 CP/M screen. We were just floored. Five entire megabytes.....

That is one major advantage to OS X. You can make a drive image and boot off of it. Helps for migration testing and backups. It really frosts me that Microsoft hasn't figured out how to do that yet. I can keep a 128 GB flash drive in my bike bag and restore my laptop anywhere in the world I can get a new HD. Pretty damned convenient.

This. Other than a brief bit of annoyance and the fact that I would have to take my attention off the latest Slashdot thread, I don't really care what any individual hard drive is doing. And if I'm worrying about the primary data drive, the NAS, the external off site hard drives AND Dropbox going out, well, sucks to be me.