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Drone-Based Businesses: Growing In Canada, Grounded In the US
An anonymous reader writes: As small drones become affordable, and as clever people come up with ideas on how to use them, we've been hearing about more and more plans for drone-based business. In the U.S., the Federal Aviation Administration was quick to shut down such ideas in order to give themselves time to regulate the nascent industry. Not so, in Canada. Thanks to a simple permit system, anyone wanting to use a drone for commercial purposes can do so in Canada by simply applying and waiting a few weeks. Around 1,500 of these permits have been granted already, and Canada's private drone industry is flourishing as a result. Drones have been used for agriculture analysis, TV production, real estate photography, law enforcement, and many other tasks.
Are they going to use the drones to keep people from the states from border crossing illegally to Canada where the jobs are?
Where will the Canadians go when we have taken up the service jobs that no one else wants? To the North Pole to fill in for Elf shit work?
Will it be underpaid people from the states assembling these drones? Drones assembling drones? I could drone on and on.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
but there are enough flaws in the human condition that we pretty much need some rules to protect us from each other.
This may be one of those times.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
No, you're completely correct...
The threat from a few terrorists is nothing compared to the threat from an ever expanding government...
The Nazis did the same thing when Hitler was coming to power, he made the Communists into "the enemy" so that no one would complain about his take over.
Our government hasn't gotten that bad... but considering that we're always at war now and that we keep bombing and attacking people, it isn't THAT far off... minus the whole genocide thing...
Sending crack to the mayor/taking pics of the mayor smoking crack, just got a little easier.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
As a researcher in the U.S. at a public university who's developing the use of UAS as an aerial remote sensing platform, having the FAA dragging its feet on coming up with a sensible solution is fueling a growing disservice to our nation's students. It's been recommended that we don't involve students or conduct any testing with our *government funded* grants in the U.S. (so we're doing it outside the country) that employ such technology for fear of being classed a commercial use and risking the hassle of dealing with the regulatory fall-out of attracting FAA attention. And that's even with us performing best-practices that any commercial pilot would be conducting (logs, flight plans, equipment checklists, etc.). Red-tape is killing any edge we might have had in developing and employing this tech. If the government isn't careful we're going to need another trade agreement and subsidies to be competitive by the time the regulations fall in place.
The government can earn money from regulation fees, someone can use regulation to stifle competition . . . so regulation is also about profit . . . for somebody.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Finnish Traffic security official Trafi announced today about new regulations of operating rc-helicopters (multicopters, and such). According to new regulations rc-pilot must keep his copter always within 500 meters range, and below 150 m of altitude. Also flying within highly populated areas is prohibited, with few exceptions. No word on penalty's for breaking the rules yet.
Japan is not. And they don't seem to have problems with commercial use
Have gnu, will travel.
Speaking to Oklahoma City University faculty and students, the justice said Thursday that technology has allowed devices to "listen to your conversations from miles away and through your walls." She added: "We are in that brave new world, and we are capable of being in that Orwellian world, too."
The President Obama appointee also discussed the lack of privacy standards concerning drones.
"There are drones flying over the air randomly that are recording everything that’s happening on what we consider our private property. That type of technology has to stimulate us to think about what is it that we cherish in privacy and how far we want to protect it and from whom. Because people think that it should be protected just against government intrusion, but I don’t like the fact that someone I don’t knowcan pick up, if they’re a private citizen, one of these drones and fly it over my property."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
Basically every idiot in this country would now, gleefully, throw away his rights and sell his immortal soul for the (false) promises of "safety" and "security".
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Screwdrivers can be used for many constructive commercial purposes. They can also be used to break into a house. Do you ban the sale and use of screwdrivers out of fear of house break-ins? Ideally the answer should be based on the net difference in productivity gains from constructive uses minus losses from break-ins. Unfortunately that's not what I'm seeing. Drones are being banned out of paranoia with no consideration for the positive ways they can contribute to the economy and our lives.
We've even got the default state wrong. Absent a clear Constitutional rationale for banning drones, they are (or at least should be) legal to use and operate. "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
(Disclaimer: A friend needed overhead pictures of his rural commercial property at higher-than Google Maps resolution, and asked me to take the pictures. We had to rent a helicopter at $750/hr. Due to the cost, we had to rush and the pictures though usable weren't as ideal as we'd have liked. For the approx $1200 we paid, we could've bought our own drone and tried this as many times as we liked until the pictures were perfect. So the beneficial uses of drones are pretty damn obvious to me.)
Canada is not that sparse, and much like almost everywhere else in the world, the population is dense and situated on the borders ---- with a lot of empty space elsewhere.
I hope the FAA never okays drones in civilian airspace.
Good, brings more business to the Canadian economy if you stay out of it.
Using a drone would be an easy way to deliver an explosive device to someone.
The phrase you are looking for is "cruise missile".
You can deliver much nastier things than explosive devices.
Weaponized anthrax comes immediately to mind. Or VX. Or quite a number of things.
For real nastiness, you'd use something like smallpox. Or a modified influenza.
the real question is 'why does anyone measure time in seconds?' the whole 60 thing is incredibly innaccurate and ultimately annoying to use. wouldnt you rather change the scale so that there are 100 seconds in a minute, 100 minutes in an hour and 10 or 100 hours in a day? obviously the exact time of a day is set due to the rotation of the earth, but any of the time measurement we use up to that point could be changed to something less old-fashioned (ancient sumerian).
if every second was .0864 of the current time of a second, then we could have a day with 100 seconds per minute, 100 minutes per hour and 100 hours per day.
The US is just a wee bit different. When a wonderful new technology becomes available we immediately call moral wizards with pointy hats designed to keep witches from sitting on their heads. Their job is to get new technologies made illegal or somehow prevent them within the US. That gives every nation on Earth a chance to make money except the US. In the US we like to sit around and whine that we are falling behind. Stem cells were like that. genetic therapy and crop creation are like that as well. Once the rest of the world gets all the potential profits locked away then and only then can the US to allow the same thing that all other nations have already gotten up and running. It is rather like we did with computers. We can market computers but design and building were pretty much taken by foreign companies. You see we dare not do anything here in America. That is because we are superior.
You are the one making that argument, so it's your logic.
Heads I win. Tails you lose.
Controlled airspace != civilian airspace.
Drones are pretty commonly used. My friend who does aerial photography tells me that drones are pretty much taking over real estate. Drones are used for investigating animal rights claims, are commonly used in agriculture, are being researched by Amazon as a near-future way to deliver packages...I just don't see drones as something being grounded by over-regulation.
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...it's just flourishing in Iraq and Afghanistan.
There is a logic to it. By voting for one or the other, we legitimize them.
Well, you didn't beat it. But you're one of the few to be in the position of having a moral right to criticize it.
As soon as Amazon, Google and other *big businesses* have their drone business models ready, politicians left and right will be boug* err, lobyied and commercial drones will happen.