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Comment by nns | Hacker News Reader

Am sure when the first cars hit the road, similar news made it to the newspaper front pages then.

Yup. And the carnage created brought operator licensing, mandatory registration, mandatory & regulated insurance for personal liability in most states and a substantial traffic code + police to enforce said code.

But people have been flying RC forever. It's not like it's a new hobby. AMA has been around for 80 years. It's just a fad right now. Everyone couldn't fly 4 channel airplanes or 6 channel helicopters, but a monkey could fly a quadcopter.

The same guy who gets into RC airplanes and helis is not the same person who gets into quadcopters. From what I've seen the quadcopter community does not feel like the regular RC community. Very reckless bunch of folks from what I've seen, and they're ruining it for all the other RC folks like me who have flown for 20+ years with no problems.

The average IQ of a user is inversely proportional to the popularity of a product. Case in point: laser pointers.

Penis enlargement pills are not popular.

Popular enough to take a chunk of a 26BN market: http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/Health/story?id=814864&page=...

It did, and the auto industry invented the term jay walking and ran a newspaper campaign against them.

Reminds me an NPR story I listened to a few years ago about how the cigarette industry is responsible for furniture needing to be fire retardant (people falling asleep while smoking). The story was about the unknown effects from the chemicals found in the furniture.

edit -- found the story: http://www.npr.org/2012/05/23/153308887/fight-over-flame-ret...

And we got driving licenses, mandatory insurances, traffic rules etc. A lot of this already happened to drones and more will.

> Am sure when the first cars hit the road, similar news made it to the newspaper front pages then.

And they were right beyond their darkest dreams. Thirty-two thousand road deaths in the US in 2013.

And don't forget the similar number of deaths caused by motor-transport related air pollution:

http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014/11/car-emissions-vs-car-...

Funny story, heard Marc Andreessen once saying:

During the early days, whenever a horse cart came in opposite direction to a car, the car owner was supposed to disassemble the car and hide behind a bush before the horse came near.

We have come a long way :)

In some ways, be grateful that it never became law. Just some wishful legislative thinking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_traffic_laws

I also read, maybe when a kid, that in the early days of cars, a hired person had to walk on the road ahead of the car to notify horses and humans that a car was coming, with a flag or something ...

and cars are still one of the most likely ways to die!

Right, I don't get the merit of this argument at all.

In a certain rather large age range, cars are by far the most likely way to die.

Sure, and as a result cars' mechanical safety and operation became regulated.

This. Perfectly agree.

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