161–170 of 742 posts
Who decided it is a good idea to pass brands / companies specific bills? If DJI is doing nasty things, prohibit the nasty things DJI doing in the law, not the brand. Then condemn DJI if needed. How do this law protect from any DJi competitor doing the same stuff (or even a spinoff company through a complex scheme)?
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Single-use means $20K - $50K, not $2K. What militaries are competing against with the Houthis and in Ukraine, is 20 - 50K drones and right now taking them down with $2MM missiles or a 50K drone taking out a 2MM tank. Dial those numbers up and you can see how the imbalance in cost is unsustainable. They don't need drones to be 2K.
I think the military perspective at this point is that they want drones at all price points. Those 20-50k drones, I assume you mean like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZALA_Lancet and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HESA_Shahed_136 ? The cost estimates for those are quite wide, but in terms of raw materials even those low-cost prices are kind of absurd right? $20,000 for a few motors, batteries, basically a modern smart…
R&D costs makes up the vast majority of the cost of Western weapons systems.
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GDPR is really sensible legislation that largely only applies to companies who should be treating your personal data as sensitive data. I built a GDPR complaint system and was really happy about the security we put in place that we definitely wouldn’t have thought to do without these laws. Things like having someone you can ask and request personal data from at big companies is also an extremely well thought through…
Most people have no problem with the GDPR. It only seems otherwise on this forum and similar echo chambers / bubbles where lots of people made their fortunes with adtech.
On mobile every page load ends up with me spending the first minute or so on page dealing with the half-screen "don't sell my info" cookie dance, followed with the ad-block pop-ups.
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> How is banning DJI drones in the US going to affect how they're being used in the war in Ukraine? It will not. > Or do you mean that banning them in the US will somehow stop them from being used against the US in the future? No. This is about planning for the future. In the event of a war the US wants a large existing base of domestic drone manufacturers. Today, that just does not exist at scale as most are made in…
> This is about planning for the future. In the event of a war the US wants a large existing base of domestic drone manufacturers. Today, that just does not exist at scale as most are made in China. This is similar to efforts to re-shore chip manufacturing. I don't think the US military generally uses off-the-shelf consumer products like the Ukraine military does, so does this actually affect them? They would be gett…
Yes, because if you have no drone manufacturing in your country, you can't just spin on a dime and suddenly have military-grade drone manufacturing. Technology is a lot less about knowing what the atomic weight of cesium is and a lot more about employee A knowing that B knows how to solve instability problems and their contact at company C knows what to do when the blades spin apart. You can't build the massive networks of those relationship by just passing a law today and expecting to have a best-of-class industry tomorrow, no matter how much money you throw at it.
This is so misguided it's breathtaking. Even if one buys into the supposed "harm" it's apparently trying to address, by targeting a specific corporate entity the proposed legislation won't do anything meaningful toward those ends. But it will confuse the market and hurt U.S. hobbyist consumers while being largely unenforceable anyway. It's one of those things that's just so dumb you assume it's only congressional ele…
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While the cheaper 3D printers are mostly chinese, Prusa is still a non-chinese option :)
While this is true and I own a Prusa MK4, they're so behind it's not even funny.
For people wonder how this got there, the blame goes to Rep. Elise Stefanik: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/2864 That bill was tacked onto a big "must pass" defense authorization and may not have survived on its own. Here's an article with some speculation on why Stefanik introduced this bill: https://dronexl.co/2024/06/06/drone-industry-outrage-stefani...
And if you need a backgrounder on Stefanik, she got elected before Trump, decided she preferred staying in DC to her hometown, sold out her previously-stated principles almost immediately when she saw a chance to gain power, and is now doing as much damage to civil liberties as Nixon and McCarthy ever managed: https://theracket.news/p/stop-going-stefanik-committee-fools She doesn't care about whether the bill does so…
I've never seen her. I've never heard from her locally. You can't fucking find Elise. It's all events in the past. There's never been a townhall up in this portion of her region.
Bonus: Her husband is a lobbyist for a leading gun industry trade group. https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/Stefanik-s-husband-K...
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> How is banning DJI drones in the US going to affect how they're being used in the war in Ukraine? It will not. > Or do you mean that banning them in the US will somehow stop them from being used against the US in the future? No. This is about planning for the future. In the event of a war the US wants a large existing base of domestic drone manufacturers. Today, that just does not exist at scale as most are made in…
> This is about planning for the future. In the event of a war the US wants a large existing base of domestic drone manufacturers. Today, that just does not exist at scale as most are made in China. This is similar to efforts to re-shore chip manufacturing. I don't think the US military generally uses off-the-shelf consumer products like the Ukraine military does, so does this actually affect them? They would be gett…
They rather famously switched to an Xbox controller for their rolling drones, and for their submarine controls, because they just work better. For quite a while, military-issued camelbaks still had bright blue caps because the contract to custom build the systems hadn't been settled yet. There are in fact plenty of electronics that they use that are not purpose built, that are bought more or less off the shelf.
All of that said, I still agree that the US military is unlikely to allow off-the-shelf drones at this time. Parts availability is the driver there. Its better to pay a contractor $3k a pop to buy a bunch of a DJI Mavics, spray paint them olive drab, and issue them to each platoon than it is to give every platoon $3k and say "go buy a drone", because then you can buy 6000 of the same replacement rotor or whatever.
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Be thankful that consumer/hobbyist drones haven't been banned entirely already (banning other model aircraft along with them as collateral damage). Especially after all the footage of essentially-hobby-grade drones with familiar open-source flight controller software being turned into very effective weapons of war in Ukraine.
The bans are inevitable. It's only a matter of time before somebody tries to drop a pipe bomb on a politician.
Lots of people want to do this but the place for it is like a DARPA challenge not in the general hobby. If the authorities got wind of it then down come the regulations and no more hobby.