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Commercial Drones Taking To the Skies
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from the NY Times:
"A new federal law, signed by the president on Tuesday, compels the Federal Aviation Administration to allow drones to be used for all sorts of commercial endeavors — from selling real estate and dusting crops, to monitoring oil spills and wildlife, even shooting Hollywood films. Local police and emergency services will also be freer to send up their own drones. But while businesses, and drone manufacturers especially, are celebrating the opening of the skies to these unmanned aerial vehicles, the law raises new worries about how much detail the drones will capture about lives down below — and what will be done with that information. Safety concerns like midair collisions and property damage on the ground are also an issue."
The government can spy on you without all those drones. They have planes
Can anyone point me to a good EMP-type device that might work agains these things? I know the cops were experimenting with such a device to stop automobiles in their tracks.
I really don't want to go trough that old SD cliche...I for once, welcome...blahblah ;)
Anyway, I'm actually for these drones, especially since I'm an avid hobbyist builder of all things robotic, so it's natural that it'd be okay to manufacture these as well and allow them to be used for useful purposes.
Maybe this will be spearheading our future with flying vehicles, Müeller and his infamous sky-car didn't get off the ground due to technical issues, maybe due to MAKERS everywhere, we'll now get rid of the final safety bugs in the designs, and make headway for the very real thing.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
While the commercial uses of these UAVs are cool (hunting feral pigs tearing up your crops using an IR camera on a drone and then radioing the location to your brother with a shotgun! That would be something that only a few militaries in the world could do a decade ago...) the real impact is going to be on the complete loss of privacy for just being anywhere outside in public.
I've long thought that the ease by which something can be obtained really does matter. I mean, things like divorce records have always been "public", but for most of history, that meant going to the city offices and having some surly clerk find the records for you in a basement filing cabinet. Which meant that strictly speaking, they were public, but in practice most people would never go to that trouble. With online records, finding out juicy details about your neighbour's divorce can be as easy as clicking a link. So the change in ease of obtaining records really does change the meaning of "public", even if it doesn't change the definition in a strictly legal sense.
It's the same thing with being outside. The advent of huge networks of computerized cameras on the street, on business fronts, and now perhaps on ubiquitous flying unmanned vehicles... it means that while you had no expectation of privacy in public before, in practice it meant that you could generally go places without anybody knowing about it, as long as you didn't just happen to run into somebody that knows you. Before long, an unblinking computer eye will see you everywhere. The idea of going somewhere without anybody knowing about it will be a thing of the past.
Now, is this, overall, a good thing? That I'm not sure about. Good and bad sides to it, I guess. (I'll be very interested to see its impact on strip clubs and massage parlours, though! Especially if divorce lawyers can subpoena the records.)
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
Really... it's already been done.
ROFLMAO!
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
This could revive a long dormant industry.
I see worries in the comments about "the police using them to spy on civilians". They already can.
The only thing a new law like this does is to fix a loophole. UAS and UAV systems can already be used by cops and state govs, by universities (limited), by companies developing experimental aircraft (limited), and for hobby purposes (unregulated, but there are some clear limitations such as flying within range of an airport or above buildings). But you cannot be legally paid to do aerial photography from a UAV/UAS! In other words, you have to pay a pilot to fly a photographer around to legally get aerial pictures. The only other option was using blimps (tethered) and cranes. An entire industry has evolved for erecting collapsible poles to attach cameras because of this rule.
Here are the rules. In it you'll find a letter with the common sense approach for hobbyists, and statements that the FAA will not grant companies any licenses to fly UAS except for experimental aircraft.
Lastly, SHAME ON THE NYT for that last sentence. They just had to jump on the idiot bandwagon and imply a connection between terrorists and photography.
Crop dusting is inherently dangerous to the pilot. It is by definition done only in low population areas. There are no privacy concerns. That is one application where drones are pure win.