uavs

Unless the operator is local, the communication latency for UAVs makes them unsuitable for some types of combat missions.

Well, yes, practically speaking this is a silly idea, like almost everything written about UAVs these days.

Things have advanced a lot since then, and there are thousands of people flying amateur UAVs today.

If it was quiet enough to go undetected then the neighbor would never know or care about the UAVs presence.

Try and think about UAVs in the same way you might think about commercial planes.

This surely played a big role as well, now that consumer market UAVs and flying toys can be produced quite cheaply.

That's going to be hard to beat even by a lot of combat UAVs.

In fact, what are the principal advantages of electric UAVs over gas-powered?

In short, don't fly UAVs around people, or in no-fly zones.

Other missions (recon, bombing, ground support, refueling, etc.) can or are done with UAVs now.

I don't know that it could be done today, but I imagine in the not-to-distant future we'll have effective air-to-air UAVs.

Your garden variety extortionist, mugger or trigger man is boring, but articles about drug trafficking using UAVs or microsubmarines tend to gain traction among tech crowd.

If LightSquared is a threat to UAVs too, our "enemies" might want to buy their old equipment off eBay.

"[...] Someday obstacle avoidance technology in UAVs will be like seatbelts in cars: You simply don’t start going without it!” [2] - Daniel Gurdan, CEO Ascending Technologies GmbH.

"...there is no indication that allowing UAVs of three pounds or less to operate at least 5 miles from airports and at or below 400 feet will pose a significant increase in risk to manned aircraft."

> Don't assume the people around you are happy to have UAVs flying near or above them or their property, When I'm flying in public, I approach people who wander in to what I think of as a "zone" and explain what's going on.