Model aircraft operators free to operate commercially in US, rules federal judge

Here is the FAA UAS initiative [1]

In my experience (I don't deal with them directly, just an engineer), FAA is bullish on UAVs, but is obviously very cautious.

This [2] is also a good read.

[1] http://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/uas/

[2] "Integration of Civil UAS in National Airspace System": http://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/uas/media/uas_roadmap_2...

Okay, time to build drones full of atmosphere sensors! The weather forecast is about to get a lot better....this is excellent news for crowdsourcing remote data about the atmosphere. I've been pulling pressure measurements from smartphones for a while, but a core problem is that a lot of weather develops over areas of low smartphone density.

Sending out drone fleets will be a most excellent solution; they're reusable, so you don't have to make 200M of them. They're connected and already carry many required sensors. They're coming down in price and at the start of a thriving commercial ecosystem. Can't wait to start building!

Edit: I wrote about this idea last year: http://www.jacobsheehy.com/2013/03/living-in-the-future-star...

IANAL, but can we get a reading of the actual decision?

As much as I'd like to take this on face value, dronehire.org may have a bias.

I don't think that's a hurdle. I imagine that would be some form of trespassing onto amazon's very expensive property.