>>>Some time ago Google had a similar idea using balloons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Loon
>>
>>Have they given up on that ?
>
>The end of the Wiki article "History" section says as of March 2, 2015 a balloon had a 187 day endurance record. So it looks ongoing, at least at some low level.
>
>I imagine they now have world-leading knowledge of certain parts of the Earth's upper atmosphere.

Seems to me that the main advantage of the solar powered idea is that if could maintain position - I assume the balloon option would depend on having enough up there so that one was always 'drifting' in the required area. OTOH, balloons would probably be far cheaper.

>>On Dmitry's concerns: there was recently a news item claiming untraced drones had been seen flying over several French nuclear power stations....
>>The manufacturers of the drone that I've got are now apparently hard-wiring 'no fly zones' into the GPS control....
>
>http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/18/politics/white-house-drone-charges/
>
>As for the GPS no fly zones - seems to me quadcopter drones are modular. Keep the hardware platform, but swap out the flight controls if they don't let you go where you want.

I think the idea is simply to help ordinary fliers to avoid inadvertently flying in controlled airspace - but all models I've seen can simply be flown in 'manual' mode by switching of the GPS guidance. I don't think it would be simple to bypass the guidance system in other ways - on most models all of the navigation logic is integrated into the main control board. Best bet would be to hack the update code to remove some of the no-fly zones. Also occurs to me that they're going to need quite a bit of ROM if they are going to include co-ordinates for all for the worlds controlled airspace :-}

My guess is that we will see a lot more regulation applied to larger devices.