A fatal car crash in Hartford, Connecticut, would have been little more than a blip on local news programs but for one thing: The police spotted a drone flying around the accident. With the FAA actively trying to determine how to regulate the civilian use of drones, everything about the accident then became news. But, as an indication of how little the public understands the issues related to drones, news reports got most of it wrong.
The adoption of new technologies is accelerating, and nowhere is the trend more obvious than in mobile computing. It took telephones some 45 years to enter mainstream use in the US. Mobile phones took seven years. Smartphones just four. Today, according to Cisco’s 2013 global mobile data forecast, there are almost as many mobile devices (7 billion) as there are humans on the planet, and online traffic from these devices in 2013 was 18 times greater than the entire Internet in 2000.
