Actually, the hobby world is trying to move away from the term drone because of the military associations with the word.

In any case, these things do need to be regulated. One of the stories I heard last night was that somebody decided they wanted to see clouds from above, so they flew their drone up above the clouds and looked down on them for a time. They then brought the drone back down through the clouds, whereupon they discovered what the jet stream was: They no longer had any idea where their drone was because it had been blown a long ways off. It eventually ran out of battery life and crashed. Meanwhile, it was largely out of control in the area where jets fly. Bird strikes are bad enough, how about sucking a nearly explosive battery and a bunch of other odds and ends into an engine?

Irresponsible use has yet to kill anybody, that I am aware of (Homer will eventually show up and post a link about somebody using a UAV to drop poop on a car, but it still wasn't deadly, yet). That will change.

One thing I was interested in was the use of Lithium-polymer batteries, which are somewhat more flamable than lithium ion batteries when damaged. Considering that the use I'd be interested in would be in a fire-prone area at a fire-prone time (that is, it's in the west pretty nearly ANY time, these days), I found the possibility of fire kind of intriguing. The likelihood isn't high, it's just that a rare event become somewhat amplified when the consequences get high.