These are in a lot of places where you must get permission/ permits for any kind of commercial drone photography, and at night too, so this will probably not big as a big a nuisance as just normal people tooling around with drones wherever they live.

While a lot of the tech so cheap, the cameras that Reuben uses cost 60K+ plus ;) He was the primary photographer phase one used to launch their new mirrorless/tech camera body.

Not that it probably makes a substantial difference in achievable end product probably.

Fair play, but camera prices are not part of the tech I was talking about. I come from the motion picture world, so a $60K+ camera is also quite cheap. I've used lenses that cost >$60K each, so maybe I'm desensitized to camera prices.

I was talking about cheap electronics to make the LED builds that make for cool blinky blinky things. OSS running on commodity hardware in the form of Arduino/Pi/etc allows for dependably repeatable motion control. For a few hundred dollars, you can make your camera appear to float and run all day on a single LiPo battery charge. You can literally make your camera fly with very affordable drones. You can buy BT/WiFi components so you control all of this with your phone. If you were a hacker 20 years ago, your inner youth would be drooling over this stuff.

I worked on CCD and Later a CMOS chips for particle detection for the ATLAS detector during my undergrad! Well, on FPGA test controllers for them. I think They solved the cross section problem by having lots of layers of these chips in the detector iirc.

A camera I ordered just shipped, so I think they are just eating the cost.

Only if its in your hand. They have ways.

To redirect a UPS shipment after a card has already been charged? Not even in pending - the charge has cleared at this point?

Yes, technically the person or company who is shipping with UPS (or FedEx for that matter) can redirect shipments. Sometimes it's expensive, sometimes not so much. Regular folks receiving do not have as much control.

I've never done it personally but when I worked at Polk Audio way back in the day they had a special application that interfaced with UPS and they could reroute things already in route. I don't know what the limits are, etc, but seems doable.

Having said that I doubt they'll do it once it's out the door.

Your card being charged doesn't really matter. If they wanted to they could totally redirect the package and reverse the charge. Amazon does tons of refunds every day like that, they don't hurt the company's standing with the payment processing companies like chargebacks do.