All the needed energy comes from the motor turning the rotor. If it hits a metal ball even a carbon fiber rotor it's done for and brittle hard plastic rotor is more likely.

Actually your comment confirms this would totally take out a drone. The hard plastic rotors are very brittle and dropping a bb while holding the drone in your hand the rotor would break itself on contact with the steel bb. Even if it didn't crack it would bend and be ruined. The motor behind the rotor supplies all the force needed and the thing spins at such high rpm that the rotors circle can effectively be considered a solid target. As brittle as clays are, they are both smaller and tougher than a quad copter.

The drones are ultralight and use algorithms combined with gyros to try to maintain position. Especially in the hands of a new pilot, the drone would actually be moving around to and fro all over the place. The "hover" essentially would amount to a 9ft in diameter circle in which the 20" in diameter drone moves. If your 10ft diameter cloud of pellets makes contact with that 9ft diameter circle (on the way up or falling back down) that drone is going to crash. The impressive damage would be from the crash of course.

Overrated. Killing a buck requires the shot to hit with a significant amount of force. One BB tossed into the air that contacts a rotor at the peak of it's ascent and therefore with no force of it's own would be enough for the weak hard plastic high rpm rotor to break itself on.

He likely got a cloud of pellets around the drone, and got one or two rotors. Even bending one would completely destabilize flight and the crash would cause all the damage.

He'd be better off with the bird shot. Any rotor impact with a pellet is going to drop a quad copter and the thing will be bouncing around to and fro in the air to improve the chance of it hitting your pellets. If the shot is more or less straight up you even get a second chance when the pellets come back down. Bird shot would make for a nice little cloud floating in the vicinity of the copter.

People are so used to thinking in terms of the power the shot will have when it hits the target. In this case it just needs to reach it's elevation. The hard propellers will crack on impact and the real damage to the craft occurs when it crashes.

"They'll bounce off a goose, or a duck."

Exactly, which is what is throwing off the term effective range here. This is a consumer quadcopter. Pretty much anything bouncing off it is going to drop it, especially if it hits one of the rotors. Bird shot that missed on the way up and hit on the way down would still have enough force to drop one. You could toss a BB at one casually from across the living room and if you hit it, you'd crash it.

Ducks and Geese are far more stable than these drones. Bird shot would be a nice little cloud at this range and it's more than likely a few of the pellets would hit the thing either on the way up or down. In fact, if the shot hit a sweet spot where it was moving low the drone which is going to be drifting around like crazy probably would drive into that cloud and make sure you didn't miss.

Go ahead, toss a handful of bb's into the air and have a friend fly a quad copter through the falling cloud, see if it stays up or undamaged.

"servicable" to most shooters means able to drop an animal. Tossing a dime at a drone from 10m would drop one if you hit it because it would lose flight stability.

Bird shot would be more effective against a target this weak. It'd make for a nice light cloud and would twice the opportunity since even the minimal force of the terminal velocity of the pellets coming back down would probably be enough to crash a consumer quad copter.

Still I'd say damages are owed. If you blow up my car rather than having it towed when I leave it in your drive way you still legally owe me damages. If I move out and leave my stuff at your place and you leave the window open causing it to get rained on and destroyed I can sue you for damages and win in most places.

Why exactly should it be legal to destroy my harmless RC toy?

Have you ever played with a drone like this? You don't have to blow the thing up, smacking it with one finger in a casual swing is enough to crash one. It's hard enough to keep them up without any one trying to impact them.

At 200 ft your shot would be a nice little cloud and any of those pellets hitting the drone would be enough to take it down.

Think a target about 8x the size of a clay and far far more fragile. The actual body isn't more fragile but the flight stability is.

I don't want people to shoot down my drone. If someone parks in your driveway and you blow up their car you still owe them damages.

But how tall are the tallest buildings? If you can legally build that high on your property than you should own the air that high. It should make no difference if I build a fifth story on my house or build a floating platform that hovers stationary over my house at the same height.

If I build a 200ft tower to put radio antennas on I might need a permit and to stick some lights on it. If I build a blimp that uses solar to maintain the same height and position and is equipped with antennas why do I need anything more or less than that?

Yes, they've now added an "Ex" suffix to every system call. You now have to specify an average of 17 flag constants each with a name that averages of 30 upper-case characters, as well as initialize and provide "long pointers" to an average of five large C structures for each request you make to the OS.

He should come home to the United States, and be judged by a jury of his peers — not hide behind the cover of an authoritarian regime. Right now, he's running away from the consequences of his actions.

I received the email about whitehouse.gov's response and, to my mind, Monaco's statement doesn't veer one degree from goal of punishing Snowden as an warning to others, rather than protecting him as a whistleblower.

When Monaco and the rest of the Whitehouse talk about "hid[ing] behind the cover of an authoritarian regime" they all should look in the mirror.

Not necessarily, HP 3Par 20850 scales to 4 PB of SSD (raw, 15+ PB with dedupe) and 3.2 million sub 1ms IOPS, and 75GB/s of throughout but one LUN is still limited to 16TB because not enough customers need more than that it one logical disk to change underlying code.

What's so damned special about relationships? If it's about equality, then tell me, why does a childless married couple pay less in tax than a widow with a child who earns the same as the couple? I'd say the widow's relationship to the child matters to society, the couple's relationship doesn't matter to anyone but them.

Why is it legal to discriminate on the basis of marriage?

Why does any government in a secular country have anything at all to do with marriage?

A large proportion of the time it ends with MS sending patches. On Patch Tuesday the damned thing is useless for an hour sometimes. Other times I have to reboot it to make it usable.

Windows: "Quality? Why make a quality product when crap sells so well?"

That doesn't go very far in the microprocessor world. I worked for Cisco back in the early 00's and even back then tape out costs were approaching $1M for a 5 layer mask, today with sub-wavelength masks and chips using 12+ layers it must be tremendously expensive to spin a chip.