No, most of vistas problems were due to drm. With the release version of vistas playing a music file would reduce reduce network bandwidth by like 80%. This was fixed in a SP but it was available weeks after 7 launched and there was no reason to run vistas.

"Drone props are either hard plastic (ABS) or carbon fiber."

Carbon fiber exist but they don't actually help that much. Smacking a steel ball at high rpm carbon fiber might be worse.

"I've seen people push around drones with their hands and the drone didn't fuck up and explode."

The BODY of a drone sure, but not the high rpm rotor. If you touch the rotor at full blast then ouch. And yes, you are pretty much guaranteed to bend the rotor. On the ground your drone might still fly and a good pilot might be able to compensate and keep flying even but at 200ft a newbie pilot would have no chance to recover from a rotor being anything but perfect. Steel shot of any size is going to be a much harder impact than your soft hand.

"Drones don't tend to explode when they land, but clay pigeons do."

You are acting as if I was referring to the actual structural integrity of the body of the drone vs the clay. A clay doesn't have fragile rotors and a motor which supplies far in excess of the energy required to break those rotors. If you are landing a drone on purpose the ground isn't crashing into the rotors blasting at full rpm. If your drone hits the ground otherwise it may not explode but it definitely breaks. A 200 ft drop would likely be enough to crack the body, especially since the quad likely wouldn't have simply fallen but propelled itself at full speed into the ground.

With a small drone at low rpm you might just bend a rotor and be able to compensate and fly it a bit more around your living room or yard. You don't reach full rpm in these places because they are too small. At high rpm, 200ft in even the most still of outside conditions your rotor touching a little steel ball is end game for certain.

"So switch to bird shot. Figure just over 1.5 oz of lead bb shot in a 12 gauge 3" shell, that's ~80 pellets. Significantly more likely to hit, but at 200 feet, the .56 grams of a pellet is moving at roughly 600 fps between air resistance and gravity, which is just over 9 newtons (2 pounds) of kinetic energy hitting the drone."

This would be my choice for drone dropping. The shot does not need to have any kinetic energy, all the energy required comes from the high rpm rotor (think rpm of a cpu cooler fan but reduce the weight of the plastic to that of a 40mm fan then stretch out the blades several inches). An example of an item that successfully breaks this type of rotor if it makes contact is a a dry leaf. The slower the pellet is traveling when it reaches the elevation of the drone the more likely it is that contact will occur and therefore the drone will go down.

The "hover" on something as light as one of these quads is about a 10ft sphere in still air as the drone is constantly adjusting trying to hold position, over compensating, correcting again etc. The movement in that area would be so rapid and erratic than you can essentially think of the target in this case not as 20" but a 10ft sphere. And honestly, that is giving a first time pilot too much credit.

"Yeah, commercial drones are wimpy, but not /that/ wimpy."

Yes, actually they are. You literally can drop one flicking it with your finger. It isn't uncommon at all for a new pilot to have destroyed his new drone on the first flight. They generally come with your first set of replacement rotors and you quickly learn to keep a stock of them. The rest of the drone is usually a bit more durable. But if you break a rotor at 200ft the crash will destroy the rest of the drone.

It's 200ft not 200 yards. The power to damage the quad comes from the rotor motor and the momentum of the high rpm they spin at not the shot. Think of a computer fan but with longer, thinner, and cheaper blades that are just as hard and therefore brittle. Provided you can get the shot to the quad the 200 ft is only relevant in terms of spread.

It doesn't even have to break the brittle plastic rotors, bending one is enough to crash the quad and a 200ft drop will do a fine job of smashing up a quad.

It is perfectly logical allow. No nation has ever become a democracy in an environment where the few did not need to fear the many. There is absolutely no reason to believe a democracy can remain free while the few do not fear the many. And with our laws as they stand the few most definitely do not fear the many.

First of all, something like surface to air missiles of any notable power and sophistication are outside the reach of most if totally legalized. Only the wealthy who can have whatever they want now and large groups could get them even all the red tape were dropped. Even if people had them 99.999% of people would never use them because they aren't looking to kill someone. If you are mentally ill you can easily cobble together an explosive and a surface to air missile isn't exactly impossible to make.

But I think most people don't understand the state we are in with regard to the second amendment. Fully automatic and explosive devices aren't illegal but they do require federal licensing, and that is expensive. Most people think fully automatic means machine guns and all military rifles (except sniper rifles) qualify as fully automatic. But that isn't true. You can actually modify a civilian arm to fire rapidly like a machine gun trivially without qualifying as a fully automatic weapon.

The ATF rules are actually written in such a way that you can't design any kind of gun that doesn't work the way guns did 100 years ago. A rail gun? That isn't a gun. Make an electronic gun. Not a gun or qualifies as fully automatic. Any of these thing would fall under far more restrictive a classification or be completely outlawed per ATF regulations.

But more recently a number of executive orders have resulted in the ATF reclassifying just about everything one does with an existing gun as no longer being considered "gunsmithing" but now being classified as gun manufacturing. For example, if one puts a scope on an existing rifle that has already been legally manufactured with a serial number according to ATF regulations, that used to be "gunsmithing" which was already silly since it's external but now is manufacturing. Never mind that you started with an existing gun and ended with only one gun and didn't even so much as modify that gun.

This ties together which a second tactic used by the administration. ITAR is a government organization for regulating international military exports and imports. The President was empowered to keep the list of military articles covered and delegated to secretary of state (Hillary Clinton). Military articles specifically excludes items in common civilian use or manufactured for civilian use. Hillary ignored this restriction and updated the list to include shotguns and small rifles and handguns under .50 caliber so the list now effectively includes every firearm. Note the military does not typically use semi-automatic weapons and by far the largest use of arms under .50 caliber is by civilians. All rifles, shotguns, and handguns are considered small arms by the military. Every "gun manufacturer" (anyone who slides on a scope) must now register with ITAR, pay several thousand dollars, and comply with regulations intended for manufacturers contracting with the US Military and building missiles. That is, assuming ITAR would ever approve that registration.

What does all that amount to? It restricts all gun manufacturing and gunsmithing to a few massive manufacturers who contract with the military and can easily be monitored with their sales and inventory tracked electronically. Manufacturers who can be effectively federally regulated by the executive via threats to their lucrative military contracts.

Either that or you have to do it one off by yourself... but nobody is allowed to let you use their tools or help you either.

Agreed. There should be damages. If someone leaves their car on your property and you destroy you are liable for civil damages. You don't have the right to destroy other people's things just because they are in your home or on your land. At least not in any jurisdiction I'm aware of. This is hardly a criminal matter unless he violated some ordinance against discharging a firearm in city limits.

That said, the claim that your property doesn't extend up is ridiculous. The one world trade center is 541m tall. If you can legally build a 541m tall structure on your property (albeit with permits and appropriate lights to signal aircraft at night I'm sure) then you most certainly should be considered to own everything at least 541m up whether you've opted to put something there yet or not.

And provided one has put the same indicator lights on it as a radio tower one should be able to fly something in that air as well. Which isn't what is being debated here but I've been working on a personal project where that could be a relevant factor.

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?