He doesn't have to go anywhere. All he had to do was not break the law in the first place.

For lack of available fuel? For lack of refrigeration in the warehouses that used to store the food they deliver? For lack of whole chunks of the supply chain upstream from their knife's-edge just-in-time delivery infrastructure? Because roads would be blocked or at least hosed up for lack of traffic control? Because people would be truck-jacking anything that looked valuable?

The entire infrastructure that brings food to people right before they actually need it is incredibly fragile. The trucks, needing fuel, communications, functioning computer-controlled drive trains, and managed roadways, are just one part of it.

The numbre of survivalist-type people is completely, utterly eclipsed by the number of people who have no clue about (or interest in) being sensible in an emergency. Look at New Orleans, where people living below sea level had days of warning, and couldn't be bothered to fill up a few jugs of drinking water or move their fleet of school buses into a useful place. And they're used to big storms down there! Now imagine lower Manhattan suddenly without any power or comms or viable transportation for weeks or more. Or the suburbs around DC. Yeah.

You're so cute, there.

Even more cute!

They other guy in the conversation was a KGB agent, has said publicly that he thinks the end of the Soviet Union was a huge tragedy, and is slowly but surely trying to build that empire back up again - and once again, using force.

That "phone in" show was completely scripted. You utterly embarrass yourself pretending otherwise. For you to go to that much trouble with the charade suggests that you're every bit the shill/puppet that Snowden was during that little bit of theater. You're not fooling anybody, so please stop trying.

No, by "we" he means all of us who think that. Thinking that doling out the huge amount of information he stole, and then wandering his way through one totalitarian country before setting up shop in another is a bad thing and indicative of his muddled world view ... that's not "the government line," that's being realistic. Snowden was and is being handled. His appearance on TV with Putin couldn't have looked more scripted, or more set up to allow Putin to answer in the dismissive, oily way that he did - all while sending the Useful Idiots that think Snowden is a clear-headed hero a nice little pat on the head.

So rather than address the issue linked to, you're just going to slip into typical lefty ad hominem in order to avoid the substance of the matter? Yup, that's what you did.

No, the numbers have turned out AT ALL. Because we haven't been given actual numbers. The numbers we got don't tell us who's paid (thus making time spent filling in an online form into an actual money-changes-hands transaction that actually insures somebody), and don't tell us how many people in that mix were the ones who had their insurance cancelled on them (roughly 6-million, so far).

So, actually, the numbers turned out pretty much right where critics said they would: abysmally low.

I think you don't understand what the word "right" means.

Should people also have a right to housing, clothing, food, climate control, utilities, and the rest, without concern for cost? Does everyone have that right? Because if you don't have those things, you could die. Just like you could by not having a "right" to the services of a podiatrist when you have achy feet.

If everyone has a right to the labor of professional medical people, and everyone has a right to the medicines, supplies, facilities, and multi-million dollar test equipment ... how does that work? We all have the right to assemble, the right to free speech, etc. The constitution protects us from government interference in such things. If we have a right to a little bit of the waking hours of a nutritionist, or the right to something that a bunch of people working in the pharma industry spent their week making, does that mean that everyone should get those things for free? Who pays? How can it be a "right" if you have to force your neighbor, on penalty of losing their wages or their home, to provide it to you? That's your idea of a right? Get a grip.

Maybe we can apply the same thing to language, including - especially - the dangerous mis-use of apostrophes near crowds of people. Punctuation should only be used by licensed people certified in the language being used. We could avoid so many horrible, fatal collisions between plural and possessive traffic. Think of the children.

Those "flyaways" are grossly over-reported. Every noob who does something stupid with a machine that happens to have the very widely used Naza on board immediately throws their crash into that same causative bucket. It's ridiculous. Can't tell you how many "DJI Flyaway" videos I've watched that clearly show gross operator error, sloppy builds, GoPros with the WiFi turned on, uncalibrated compass modules, take-offs before the GPS head count is high enough, no home point set, landing gear caught in the grass, flight controller on a hexa set up for a quad ("OMG, it's the Naza flip of death!") and so on. To say nothing of smoked ESCs, never-maintained bearings, and flying right in front of the radome on a utility tower ... if it weren't all so bad for the hobby and the industry in general, it would be funny. But it's not. Because of clowns like the guy in question here.

My personal bet: he outflew his probably badly maintained LiPo until it went over the volate cliff, and the rig dropped like a rock.

This is factually incorrect. If you're out of range, the bird falls back on another kind of control that you exerted before you even took off (a GPS-based return-to-home waypoint and associated climb/travel/descend procedures - all things the operator controls). Never mind that the pro-level RF gear one would use with a "real" bird for RCAP isn't WiFi at all, and doesn't resemble WiFi in any way that matters.

Well, that's not entirely clear just this moment. In the now-headed-into-appeals area of Huerta v Pirker, it kinda looks like the FAA doesn't actually have any formal, properly constructed rules in place. Guidance only. Their distinction between recreational and commercial use of the very same RC machines used by the same people in the same place at the very same time is pretty ridiculous - and the administrative law judge handling round one of that case agreed. But the case is still baking.

So, if you dropped your camera drone on someone's head in the US right now, and weren't flying next to an airport or beyond line of site or over 400' ... then the trouble you're in is roughly the same as if you'd hit the same person in the head with a lawn dart or a football. Good ol' fashioned reckless endangerment, having nothing to do with the FAA pe se.

I don't buy that excuse for a second. But let's say, for the sake of argument, that he's right. That means he was using cheeseball home entertainment mall kiosk grade equipment. Nobody doing for-real media coverage of a sporting event and intending to fly over people's heads is going to be using anything that could possibly be so easily "taken over." If nothing else, the drone should have a good enough flight controller to allow it to realize that something is swamping the RF control side, and have it climb to a previously identified altitude, and maneuver back over the spot from which it took off, then to make a nice gentle decent and landing. This is vanilla COTS stuff, now, with even inexpensive FCs. The good ones - which any pro should be using, and which cost more like $1k - are really good at high speed frequency hopping and only paying attention to the controller to which they're bound.

Basically, this clown sounds completely negligent.

There is no context in which that phrase can be used - earnestly, ironically, sarcastically, ignorantly, juvenilely, ham-fistedly, or otherwise - in which the person saying it can ever, ever tell someone else they've failed.

Understanding what happened could be worth a lot more than $50m, or twice that.

Major issue with the airframe, or propulsion? Very important to understand that. There are a lot more of them flying around.

A third party's influence and/or an attempt to steal the plane? Whether that ended in a crash or a successful theft, we need to know everything we can about who, what, why, to what end. If it was stolen and landed (extremely, very unlikely), gotta know where and why. If it went in the drink during an attempt, still have to understand what the game plan was.

Suicide? Hiding in regular traffic, then flying low and into the most remote, deepest water possible in the interests of never finding the plane - the better to make sure family collects on insurance money? Would be good to know, and will remind airlines to get harder about knowing their pilots and the pilots' current circumstances.

Regardless, the navy assets out looking are using the whole thing as an excellent training exercise. Lots of smart people have had to whip up new ways to think about what happened, using only traces of satellite/comms data.

If we can take their small sample and methodology as meaningful, and presume that you mean that Hawaiians all get up early and go right into the sun... then the point is that whatever lifestyle things make a lot of Hawaiians fat would be even worse if they all rolled out of the cot in their mom's basement and stayed there until lunchtime.