Or Jesus give it up! It's blindingly obvious that you're either a 90 year old who has no idea how modern technology works, or you are a meat-puppet for some giant publishing company.

Why discard the benefits such technology offers unnecessarily if it can be done safely? Surely your not against all uses of drones? What wrong with a little mobile chopper with an IR sensor that can help a farmer monitor the health of their crops. To abandon such a promising technology for so little cause would be almost unprecedented. If you want to hold humanity back you better have a damn good justification.

Everything you say is true. But where was that autoland technology thirty years ago? Where will it be in another 30? We aren't there yet but I don't see any insurmountable obstacles to getting there in the future.

I think the solution is to keep them small, just a couple pounds. They could operate at a very low altitude, at a fairly low speed. If they crashed the potential for damage would be minimal. For larger UAV's there will need to be more of the kind of controls you have in commercial aircraft. With shrinking electronics you can still mount cool shit like IR camera's on a small platform.

Hell why bother with a kinetic strike. Just jam them and they'll crash. If the drone could switch into autonomous mode it would be more difficult. But there is all kinds of potential for spoofing, at least well enough to crash it. If the government ever lost it's marbles and and started to seriously oppress Americans I think they would be surprised at how quickly libertarian geeks would compromise all their systems.

Who do you want to cut a check for raising your kids? Should the government increase its massive debt so we can do it? Should we introduce huge new taxes? I know what you are doing is important (darting glance at book on Malthus) but should we really take actions that will drive the country into the ground and leave no future for your children? And do you want to be a parent or a government contractor?

No technical innovation, of any significance, in demonstrated in the YouTube video above. I look forward to 3D volumetric displays but I won't be looking in their direction.

These document were leaked by Bradley Manning along with the diplomatic cables. (http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/wikileaks-chat/). So this leak isn't any indication of additional security breaches, though they may well exist.

Google fair use.

Fair enough. I guess my point is that we live in a time when editing Wikipedia can do at least as much good as the steps you have previously taken to communicate with the public, given Wikipedia's popularity. And therefore it should not be scorned.

My inexpert opinion is that a lot of this is due to how risk averse and regulated the aerospace industry has become (perhaps necessarily so). There seems to be more innovation among UAV designers where these problems aren't as great.

I reported it and now it's gone. Mistakes get made but they also get corrected.

Only if you look at everything exclusively from the viewpoint of self interest.

Ya, they're only selling commodity hardware for the most part. Why buy anything from a company I now know to be untrustworthy?