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DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate

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Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate

#381

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

rayiner wrote: post #206
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sicker thing to me is how she (like many) was actually relatively moderate until she completely hitched her wagon onto the Trump train. Another Profile in Cowardice. An overview: https://www.politico.com/newsletters/women-rule/2023/01/06/t... All of these politicians who have these completely transactional relationships, I just find utterly gross. I mean, do they have any actual friends? For example, Trump comple…

Politicians have put aside their personal beefs with Trump in response to their constituents . The republican base doesn’t want foreign wars and tax cuts, they want to kick the illegal immigrants out of the country and curtail foreign trade. Remember when Joe Biden told black voters Romney “wants to put them back in chains?” The Republican base wants their version of that guy, and that’s Trump. For Stefanik, Cruz, et…

I understand that, and I think it's a fair point, but there is also the issue of leadership.

E.g. there are tons of Republican "elites" who know that the whole "stop the steal" stuff and falsehoods around Trump winning in 2020 are complete, total, and utter bullshit. We know this because they've said it! My favorite example is when Liz Cheney wrote in her book that Republican Rep Mark Green said, as he was signing electoral vote objection sheets on Jan 6, "The things we do for The Orange Jesus." (In transparency, Green later denied this).

My point is its one thing to do what your constituents desire. Its another thing to propagate lies and bullshit because you think that will help you gain power, even if your constituents do love those lies and bullshit. I'd also point out that there have been a number of conservative and Republican leaders (not many, but some) who actually have some honor and have called out these lies, which has usually forced them to retire or leave the party.

Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate

#382

Post by aeternum »

deepGem wrote: post #326

DJI's response (a bit dated) https://dronedj.com/2024/03/02/dji-response-drone-ban-us/ The allegations are so subjective that they sound like some middle schooler complaining to their mom. “DJI drones are collecting vast amounts of sensitive data – everything from high-resolution images of critical U.S. infrastructure to facial recognition technology and remote sensors that can measure an individual’s body temperatur…

Unconvincing tbh. Research papers have shown that heartrate can be tracked from cameras with well under 4k resolution. Doing it with DJI's excellent camera tech should be quite easy.

As far as US infrastructure, google street view and bing maps seem to be a bigger information disclosure threat but I guess they do blur out faces.

Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate

#383

Post by mrtksn »

RestlessMind wrote: post #373
mrtksn wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Longevity, happiness, health, leisure, life satisfaction. Companies are there to make these possible, not to maximise the stock trading price. Some achieve that by making EUV lithography machines, others do chemicals or pharmaceuticals. Are you aware that you can use the developer tools in your browser to set the price of the stock or your bank account balance to anything you like? You don't have to crumble your infr…

> Longevity, happiness, health, leisure, life satisfaction Apart from longevity[1], everything else is subjective so do you have any evidence? From what I see based on a quick search, happiness level seems same in US/Canada vs Germany/France. eg. Rankings by this[2] measure: Canada(15), USA(23), Germany(24), France(27). Or scores by this[3] measure: Canada (6.9), USA(6.7), Germany(6.7), France(6.6) [1] Even longevity…

I’m sure Americans are dying healthy and happy at young age. Crunching the numbers until the fit the narrative aside, the chocolates are horrible too.

Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate

#384

Post by FredPret »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #378
FredPret wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The theory is that it leads to worse outcomes for the weaker partner and less-bad outcomes for the stronger one. - People used to think Japan was going to overtake the USA, until a short trade war in the 80's sent Japan on a downward spiral. - The trade war against Russia hurt the West a lot with higher energy and food prices, but it whacked the Russian economy very much harder. - The same thing can be said for the W…

Isn’t the US the weaker partner here?

Struggling to understand in which context the US is the weaker partner.

- GDP [0]

- Total wealth [1]

- Military

- Demographics (US - growing, China - aging and shrinking)

- Soft power

[0] https://tradingeconomics.com/

[1] [https://www.ubs.com/global/en/family-office-uhnw/reports/glo...]

Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate

#385

Post by moduspol »

dji4321234 wrote: post #286
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would have to come from the firmware in the drone looking up what the no-fly zones were. GPS is transmit-only location, it can't write no-fly zone data to a particular drone. The drone would look it up through a connected cell phone using a web service like this: https://tfr.faa.gov/tfr_map_ims/html/ I think (hope) it would be a hard sell to send different data from faa.gov to DJI drone lookups versus other bran…

DJI's no-fly zone database is completely independent from the US government. DJI would have to be compelled to add the US as a no-fly zone, which, if their drones are banned already, seems like a rather difficult thing to compel as there's no carrot at the end of the stick.

I mean, the carrot in the short term would be to raise public opposition to the bill. And possibly reduce support for the politicians pushing for the ban.

I've got a DJI drone and I've always been worried of some OTA software update essentially making the device useless. I've got a separate iPhone 8 that I don't connect to WiFi any more that I use only to control the drone. Though honestly my fear was more that the FAA would add dumber regulations and push them on DJI to enforce, which they seem to have already done quite a bit.

Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate

#386

Post by kube-system »

balls187 wrote: post #371
kube-system wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There aren't ties to the Chinese military, are there? From a practical perspective, it could be at any time. China hasn't embraced the free market the same way the west does, and doesn't give private companies the same degree of autonomy you're used to seeing elsewhere. Broadly speaking, if the Chinese government needs a company within their jurisdiction to cooperate with them, they can enforce cooperation. As an e…

That would be an after the fact justification, which could be used to justify banning any company that operates in China.

Not every company, just the ones with military relevance. But for the purposes of a national security discussion, the situation that is being planned for is not the current-state peacetime -- it is the after the fact contingency.

Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate

#387

Post by dji4321234 »

team_gold wrote: post #336

As someone who has a DJI Mini what are the options for a consumer drone made by a US company? Everything on https://www.diu.mil/blue-uas-cleared-list is either widely different, 15x as expensive, not purchasable by civilians at all, or all of the above. Parret appears to have stopped selling their consumer model entirely. Skydio 2+ seems like the closest thing but it also no longer appears to be for sale either. All…

There's nothing.

Skydio exited the consumer market. Their drones had good autonomy and flight characteristics. However, they struggled with wireless link quality due to the use of consumer WiFi, and had much older, inferior camera sensors compared to even contemporary DJI drones. They were also ridiculously loud and inefficient. Their enterprise drones are comically expensive and loaded with nickel-and-dime cloud features.

Parrot drones struggle with the same issues as Skydio (Skydio actually used a Parrot remote controller for their consumer drones), plus their autonomy isn't nearly as good as even Skydio's, the overall drone behavior is "clunky" (slow boot times, slow connection times, non-responsive flight controls), and even basic flight is more challenging.

The main issues plaguing US consumer drones are imaging sensors and wireless link. LTE and other well-suited long range wireless technologies capable of handling speed differential between the station and access point are locked in a vault of patents. Imaging sensors are legendarily impossible to acquire in low to moderate quantities and image sensor parameters are carefully locked behind a billion levels of NDA (thus why even the Raspberry Pi camera is full of DRM).

Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate

#388

Post by jpgvm »

chme wrote: post #308
henvic wrote: post #28

DJI is, by far, the best drone equipment brand for photography, industrial usage, etc. It's disheartening to witness the US embracing protectionism for high-tech. If the United States does this, it might as well join the European Union's decadence in killing tech startups by stifling the competitiveness of their market...

Most hardware has no reason to require direct internet access or an account with the manufacturer to work. If some device requires internet access, then it cannot be trusted to not transmit personal data, therefore it should be possible to replace the software on that device, so that something that is trusted by the consumer can be installed. While DJI here might create good hardware, their internet and account requi…

> direct internet access or an account with the manufacturer to work

Unfortunately this is required by regulators in many countries. In Thailand you can't fly a drone without a license. You need to obtain the license before activating the drone and provide your information and the license number at time of activation (which is tied to drone serial number).

It sucks but it's the law here.

Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate

#389

Post by permo-w »

wyager wrote: post #364
chme wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't a concrete example of a regulations that hinder innovation.

What do you think the cause is? Unwashed eggs?

any number of reasons: language barriers, existing American firms anti-competing, smaller domestic markets, less centralisation, and, yes, in some cases, regulation, but, when it comes down to it, it's better to have smaller firms that don't (or less frequently) damage society than larger firms than do, even just from the perspective of wealth distribution.

Re: DJI ban passes the House and moves on to the Senate

#390

Post by mrtksn »

RestlessMind wrote: post #380
kube-system wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vacation time.

Pfft. Iran, Burkina Faso, Cambodia and Bahrain beat "Europe" handily on that metric https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b... Let's have those countries as our role model then? /s

The full phrase is "vacation time in Europe".
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