I think you've missed the point.

I think I nailed the point. YOU claim that YOU cannot find people to hire for a position that YOU cannot identify or even characterize. Is it programming? Is it networking?

There is no glut of competent workers.

Any yet YOU cannot characterize the position that YOU claim YOU have open except:

I'm not even looking for particular skills or experience. Just people who are genuinely into technology.

So you will train people who are not currently qualified ... but there isn't anyone who is qualified.

Not all businesses allow you to post jobs to Slashdot, although I suppose I could lobby to change that internally.

If you're running the ad on Dice or someplace then post a LINK to that posting.

You are quick to claim that you cannot find qualified people (even though you'd train someone who was not qualified) but rather reticent to post any information about the opening you claim to have.

That's suspicious.

You're statement about narrowing my search is also part of the problem with this industry. A good engineer can work on almost anything.

No. A good automotive engineer CANNOT design a bridge as well as a good civil engineer. And neither of those are electrical engineers.

And someone looking for a programmer would NOT have any problem stating that AND what language(s).

I've been trying to hire developers for multiple high-compensation positions in NYC.

So post it here.

Truly smart/capable/motivated people are not looking for jobs. They are already employed.

Yes. Usually. So you have to offer them something MORE than they have at their current job to make them willing to take a risk on a new job.

I'm not even looking for particular skills or experience. Just people who are genuinely into technology.

Yeah. You might want to re-evaluate your criteria.

At least narrow it down to whether you're looking for a programmer or a CCIE. Is this about writing drivers? Or programming EPROM chips? Or iPhone games? Or encryption? SatNav?

God made humans rational beings.

Telling people who collect stamps they're idiots could be a hobby.

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.

Actually the reason for that is not as nefarious as you think, and its the same reason for outsourcing construction, operation, commissioning, maintenance and many of the other activities various companies outsource.

The idea is simple. The companies make their money by getting shit out of the ground and selling it. Their value lies in the exploration rights and their proven reserves. Everything else is technical details. Most upstream oil companies are staffed with geophysicists, geologists, and anyone capable of holding a divining rod, as well as a few project managers to hold the whole thing together. They then borrow shitloads from the bank and sink even more shitloads into 3rd parties who will build, maintain and run the equipment. Then they can reap massive profits without having to actually have the expertise to do anything. Ever wonder why BP's oil spill involved a platform owned by someone other than BP, run by someone other than BP, drilling a hole which was cemented by someone other than BP, yet the profits of the operation (were it to have been successful) would have gone to none other than BP?

The entire industry is like that. Wastewater isn't complicated but there are plenty of specialist contractors who are willing to do it for you, so why waste the time and resources to doing it yourself, when you can focus on other things while also partially shifting liability.

Where can I find such a democracy?

Ahhh you must be one of those, "He mentioned guns so he must thing it should all be illegal, I better rebuff" types.

No, couldn't be further from the truth, you misunderstood what I was trying to say. I was saying that compared to getting killed by falling drones the above list is far more dangerous to the general health of people, and THEY ARE ALL LEGAL.

So everyone needs to take a deep breath, get some perspective and realise that getting killed by a flying drone is about likely as a terrorist attack. You should worry more about driving to a ski slope than dying on it.

I do. It's the I don't fly planes because they may crash, and there are possibly terrorists in my basement right now crowd are afraid they may end up on a TV show called "Truly bizarre ways unlucky people die".

They are probably posting the negative comments from their phones while driving down the highway, speeding of course because the government sets those speed limits to collect fines and safety has nothing to do with it.

More importantly we could all get killed by terrorists! Won't someone think of the children!!!!!

You have one of the most extreme cases of alarmism I've seen. I think we need to address your points individually in turn:

1. Flight controller may get confused and attempt to fly the thing. Or more realistically what happens when you lose a prop is the thing flips and splats straight down. Try it one day, or just jump on youtube and watch what happens when a quad suffers complete motor failure. They definitely don't come down at a nice angle, but simply fall out of the sky tumbling as they go.

2. The Phantom 2 is 1kg, this doesn't change anything but I thought I'd point it out since it'll significantly reduce the damage.

3. The Phantom 2 does not have carbon fibre blades. This is quite significant because plastic doesn't hurt when you get hit by it (spoken from experience).

4. It's night time, I think we'll be able to see the bright thing with 6 red and 6 green bright LEDs tumbling towards us, especially since we'll be looking right in its general direction.

5. LiPos aren't bombs. They burn well but they won't kill you, even if they catch fire while they are in your pocket, or on your lap (Google this if you want examples).

6. The public couldn't give a shit. They don't care about you, the drone or the FAA. What they will say is "awesome video" and hit share on Facebook. You know, kind of like everyone doing it right now. (Seriously like 6 people posted this on their wall in the past few days).

Now I wonder how many people die on the way to fireworks in car accidents, or die looking at fireworks while driving, or die getting hit by fireworks (this actually happened at one show I was at, my friend got a lovely payout and a great scar to tell war stories about). But more importantly shouldn't we be focusing on the terrorists? I mean all those people just standing there, in the dark, very little security, lots of people with backpacks. Think about it.

hmmm Twice the size and twice the price. Ever consider that not every problem needs $135 thrown at it? That's what made the RPi so popular to begin with.

It's very good to options, even if they may not impress you specifically.

Funny I think the same thing about people with cars and guns. Yet somehow as a species we're content with the massive injury and death rate from those activities but a petrified from the highly remote chance that we may get killed by a terrorist, attacked by a shark, or hit by a falling drone.

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.

Ha! I knew the denialists would come swarming out of the woodwork on this one.

Consider the stem cell paper that we're talking about here. It was published in January and immediately started going down in flames. Here we are six months later, watching scientists gleefully kick the cold corpse of the authors' reputations. And you're still wondering who keeps the reviewers and editors of a scientific journal honest?

Peer review isn't some kind of certification of a paper's truth. It can't reliably weed out misconduct, experimental error, or statistical bad luck. It's just supposed to reduce the frequency of fiascos like this one by examining the reasoning and methods as described in the paper. It doesn't have to be perfect; in fact it's preferable for it to let the occasional clunker through onto the slaughterhouse floor than to squelch dissenting views or innovation.

That's why climate change denialists still get published today, even the ones who disbelieve climate change because it contravenes their view of the Bible. Peer review allows them to keep tugging at the loose threads of the AGW consensus while preventing them from publishing papers making embarrassingly broad claims for which they don't have evidence that has any chance of convincing someone familiar with the past fifty years of furious scientific debate.

Here's what I think is the confounding factor (there always is one): I'd be wondering, "Does that button REALLY deliver a shock, or is it some kind of sham social psychology experiment prop? I bet it's a prop. If it isn't, it won't deliver THAT bad a shock. If it is, I wonder what the researchers will do when I push it?"

The confounding factor is curiosity. They'd have to do *two* sessions with the overly curious.