51–58 of 58 posts
Can someone explain why this is an issue now ? Is it ubiquity and reduced cost, or is there some fundamental advance that I am unaware of? From a layman's perspective, I feel like high-performance RC planes and copters have been available in kit form for well over 30 years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is not a sensible idea. First of, people will be able to go around your DRM by patching the firmware, or spoofing the data coming from the GPS. Second, your proposal would require the GPS to be always on. Not every drone needs a GPS, and not every drone needs the battery drain of using a GPS all the time.
But it would prevent some frat guys from doing something stupid. Of course hard-core criminals and the mafia will always have access to dangerous things, but that doesn't mean restricting access for the small-timers and the stupid/drunk is not worthwhile. You can't always win, but you can win 95% of the time.
The blind urge to control and regulate is one of the most destructive force in the economy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, the implications here are very troubling: that security for high government officials is more important than privacy and anonymity for the rest of us. For those of us in the states, how the &*$# did we end up here? Was this value system mentioned anywhere in our founding documents? In any government/civics class that any of us took in school? Who are the people they have making these arguments?
End up where? As one of the richest, most comfortable, most stable countries in the world? The U.S. has always been a deeply conservative place, skeptical of dramatic change or threats to the existing order. Even the American Revolution was conservative--while the French were running around beheading people and switching to 10-day weeks, we decided to keep everything running pretty much the same, with a few tweaks.[1…
I'm frankly shocked people think this way. I feel it requires a robust whitewashing of US activities over the last couple decades.
We have been in more active wars than any other nation over the last decade. Our banks caused a fiscal crisis that bore international financial ruin. Our presidential candidates speak openly about overthrowing foreign governments during public debates. The NSA has set the info era surveillance bar so high that i fear we, as a people, will never be able to reverse it.
I won't even begin to rebuttal a hilariously hypocritical stance the US is taking on domestic vs militaristic drone use. Though, it is much the same stance they have with NSA snooping, so we should not be shocked.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
End up where? As one of the richest, most comfortable, most stable countries in the world? The U.S. has always been a deeply conservative place, skeptical of dramatic change or threats to the existing order. Even the American Revolution was conservative--while the French were running around beheading people and switching to 10-day weeks, we decided to keep everything running pretty much the same, with a few tweaks.[1…
> As one of the richest, most comfortable, most stable countries in the world? I'm frankly shocked people think this way. I feel it requires a robust whitewashing of US activities over the last couple decades. We have been in more active wars than any other nation over the last decade. Our banks caused a fiscal crisis that bore international financial ruin. Our presidential candidates speak openly about overthrowing…
As for the fiscal crisis, in the grand scheme of things it's quite a short blip on a very long streak of prosperity, and it wasn't just U.S. banks involved--their counterparts in Europe were doing the exact same things.
Can someone explain why this is an issue now ? Is it ubiquity and reduced cost, or is there some fundamental advance that I am unaware of? From a layman's perspective, I feel like high-performance RC planes and copters have been available in kit form for well over 30 years.
If you've got people who don't like you, small cheap ways of delivering hurt or death become an issue.
From the title, I thought that the article was going to be about the rise of the surveillance state, and how monitoring/tracking drones would be the next battleground in the War on Privacy. Instead, we get a fearmongering article that stops one step short of suggesting that civilian drone ownership be banned.
Yes, the implications here are very troubling: that security for high government officials is more important than privacy and anonymity for the rest of us. For those of us in the states, how the &*$# did we end up here? Was this value system mentioned anywhere in our founding documents? In any government/civics class that any of us took in school? Who are the people they have making these arguments?
How did you get that from the article?
Doesn't even require explosives. It's more like the laser pointer threat to aircraft; all it needs is for someone to fly a reasonably solid drone into a jet engine on takeoff to achieve a major air disaster. This has come close to happening by accident at least once (drone near Heathrow).
> to fly a reasonably solid drone into a jet engine on takeoff to achieve a major air disaster Any modern turbine engine can swallow vast quantities ice without much of an issue. I think the baseline is in the region of 500 kilos of ice in 1 minute. A small commercial drone won't make much of an impact to an engine that can fly through a hailstorm without burping. Edit: the abuse a modern engine endures for certifica…
Modern engines are designed to contain the damage, and multi-engine jets are designed to be able to maintain control, climb to a safe altitude, and return to the airport with an engine out, so flying a small drone into an engine probably won't cause a major disaster, but it will cause a lot of disruption as the plane declares an emergency and returns to the airport, and cost a lot of money to repair or replace the engine.
One of the suggested videos for that one was interesting. It's a video from a forward facing camera in an F-16 as it gets hit by a bird, which shuts down the engine. The pilot tries for a while to restart, fails, ejects, and the plane crashes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zN_Zl64OQEw
From the title, I thought that the article was going to be about the rise of the surveillance state, and how monitoring/tracking drones would be the next battleground in the War on Privacy. Instead, we get a fearmongering article that stops one step short of suggesting that civilian drone ownership be banned.
Isn't your post a better example of fearmongering? The article says absolutely nothing about banning, or even regulations or laws, beyond those that apply to jamming (e.g. anti-drone). Drones are and will increasingly be used for criminal enterprise. Being rational about how that changes things seems like a pretty reasonable thing to do, just as personal backpack helicopters would probably lead to a rapid rise in rob…
From the second-to-last paragraph of the article. That is why I said "stops one step short of". The one step that the article left unstated was "And since sufficiently advanced firmware is impossible, these should be banned."