[nakedrobot2]

A couple thoughts here:

1) Great to see Mr. Munoz getting some press for himself since it's been Chris Anderson getting all the attention until now with his involvement in 3d Robotics. A bit sad that it's in the context of Munoz being "a mexican immigrant" rather that merely being "an awesome human" but I guess that's the angle here

2) There is a big rift between the UAV community and the general public regarding terminology. No one - not a single person as far as I can tell - in the community calls them "drones" because it is an ugly word and it's associated with machines that fly to pakistan and murder people. Everyone - every single person - outside the UAV community does call them drones. I see no solution to this except for the fact that if you're a part of that community and you meet someone else who is, and you call it a UAV or multirotor, they know you're "in" which is sort of cool I guess ;-)

[G650]

Really good points.

1) I am a Mexican American so seeing a successful Mexican in tech is really uplifting because there are very few that I can relate with. Definitely an angle that the journalist used so I agree with you. The headline unfortunately caught my attention but hey that's life.

2)Fantastic point on the terminology. This is now filed in my brain for later use. Thanks!

[albemuth]

"If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew"

[desdiv]

No one - not a single person as far as I can tell - in the community calls them "drones"...

It's not entirely unanimous though. A popular UAV community site is called http://diydrones.com/

This is analogous to the euphemism treadmill. Pretty soon "UAV" will become too dangerous sounding and the community will switch to another label.

[nakedrobot2]

Yes you're right, lots of beginners are coming over from "the public" and still call them drones.... And there are a lot more of them than experienced RC folks.... so I'm guessing that maybe the word "drone" will grudgingly be accepted.

Yes, lots of blogs and sites with "drone" in the domain name... part of our google-seo world I think.

[sopooneo]

I have found that to the general public, drone now means either of two distinct things:

1. Any type of multirotor, regardless of how autonomous it is or whether it has a camera transmitting video

2. An autonomous fixed wing military aircraft used to take grainy green videos and drop bombs

Although, actually, the second option would more likely not be the default, and called a "military drone" to clarify.