To me stuff like this is what proves evolution. There is no one in their right mind who could sit there and convince me that such an obtuse solution to move from point A to point B is "by design", vs. random evolution.
I fail to see how this is an "obtuse solution". I find it very elegant.
He lives in New York, he's always swung from the multitude of high rises.
I'm guessing you're a little younger than I am, because I still remember the original 1960's Spider-man cartoon. He managed to swing across the Hudson River frequently. I recall one episode where he managed to "swing" to Mexico, or Central America even. Even so, not every area in all five boroughs of NY are covered in skyscrapers you know. He lived in a single family house with his aunt.
Is it just me, or does anybody have the feeling that this job is probably the opposite of the title?
Not at all. In fact it's exactly what it sounds like...
On the internal memos where this fantastic new position is code-named "Token Civil Liberties & Privacy Officer". Or just "Token" for short. It's also referred to using the acronym, "LOL".
Although the exact cause of the loss is not known, analysis has uncovered a potential problem with computer time tagging
Upon further analysis it was discovered that while the hardware was designed to run on imperial hours, minutes, and seconds, the software was written using metric time.
The web browser on the iphone was like nothing we had seen before. It actually worked for the vast majority of the web. THAT more then anything else is what drove its adoption. Calling it a toy is just ignorant hyperbole to make your point.
I had an HP iPaq 6315 back in 2004. The browser worked just fine. So I'm not sure what was so new about a browser on the iPhone. But Windows mobile was pretty damn clunky compared to the iPhone.
It would be pretty darned hypocritical of us to indiscriminately bomb people and then say that you shouldn't use A.I. driven robots because it's too impersonal a way to kill people.
It's all in the marketing. The killer robots will send flowers and a card within 30 days.
> A careful reading of the directive finds that it lists some broad and imprecise criteria and requires senior officials to certify that these criteria have been met if systems are intended to target and kill people by machine decision alone. [emphasis mine]
(I think I've seen that movie...) What could possibly go wrong?
I wonder if they'd be running Windows for Killer Robots?
Ray Kurzweil in his book The Singularity Is Near predicts that human beings will soon “transcend biology” and traverse the universe as immortal cyborgs. This has far-reaching implications for space travel: One can imagine cyborgs (with human consciousness) that are able to explore inhabitable planets such as Venus and Jupiter or can travel for centuries to the furthest galaxies.
So what the author is advocating is that we transfer human conciseness into the robots. It's interesting. But then he shows his complete lack of understanding by stating we may be able to explore Venus. It's fairly unlikely we will ever develop suitable materials that can survive for long in that caustic atmosphere. But that pales in comparison to stating that we will ever build anything that can explore Jupiter.
They also fail to recognize that technology may radically change humans in the next century or so.
there are already folks who are willing to be vitrified so that they can be immortal by transplanting their brain into a fresh (robotic) body. The Russian billionaire Dmitry Itskov hopes to do by 2035 or 2045. Cryonics, or the science of preserving human beings, has been endorsed by numerous scientists. This is fringe science, to be sure. But even if one does not believe that we will have fully robotic bodies in the next 20 or 30 years, it is not far-fetched to think that at least some of us might be a combination of robotic and human systems—yes, cyborgs—in 100 years or so.
So this is the big advancement of humans? Transplant our conciseness into a robot/cyborg. Are you even human at that point? That's a different debate. I suppose you can split hairs and as long as the robot body still has the same function as the original. But for it to be able to survive on other planets, like Venus. I have to think the answer is no. It kind of reminds me of the opposite of the original Star Trek episode; "By Any Other Name".
A recent Slate article makes the argument that manned space exploration is not useful and we should concentrate on Robots. The article makes the claim that manned space exploration was never popular and by diverting money to robotic space exploration we can get more bang for the buck.
It was very popular in the 1950's and 1960's. The US and USSR spent a lot of money on it, and the populations of both countries were very proud of what they accomplished. "More bang for the buck" is often times a pretty silly statement. You can buy dozens of Kia econo-box cars for the price of a Panoz GTRA. It would be "more bang for the buck". But it depends on what you are trying to accomplish. Are you looking for a cheap fleet of cars to use for the employees of a company? Or a race car. It all depends on the end goal.
'Most of the arguments in favor of manned space exploration boil down to the following: a) We need to explore space using people since keeping the entire human race on a single piece of rock is a bad strategy, and even if we send robots first, people would have to make the journey eventually; and b) humans can explore much better than robots. Both these arguments are very near-sighted—in large part because they assume that robots aren’t going to get any better. They also fail to recognize that technology may radically change humans in the next century or so.
It's pretty damn near sighted if you believe that having the entire race on one rock is bad, but don't bother to send out anything but robots. It's also very presumptuous to give up on manned space exploration under the assumption that robots will definitely surpass humans in the near future. The author is also pretty damn presumptuous in stating that technology is going to radically change humans in a hundred years, give or take. How much technology do we have and take for granted today that was developed decades ago because of the drive to send a man into space or the moon and return alive? How much tech would we miss out on by no longer pursuing this goal? That seems pretty damn short sighted too.
I didn't read TFA, but how is trying to get the species off this rock a short sighted goal? Are we suddenly going to become immune to global natural disasters through technological advances? What if one of the super-volcanoes erupts? Will we have the tech to stop it? Or "radically change humans" to survive it with society intact?
Granted, we're a long way off from a utopian star trek society, and will probably never see that. But you have to start at some point. Necessity is the mother of invention. Just think of what the world would be like today if we hadn't decided it was necessary to send people into space.
So judging by your subject line you're saying the Soviet Union killed the martians with Mars 2.
Later when their bodies were examined in the laboratories, it was found that they were killed by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared. . . slain, after all man's defenses had failed, by the humblest thing that God in His wisdom put upon this earth.
Well we could send all the telephone sanitisers, hairdressers, and advertising account executives. I would throw in the politicians and lawyers also, but that's just me.
I'd send the politicians and lawyers first. Advertising account executives and MBA's would be next. If that doesn't kill all life on Europa, then we should surrender to our new Jovian overlords.
i love how everyone assumes we're just going to jump on a rocket and head over there, you don't think probes will be sent initially? should we not plan beyond that?
Then why even bother sending people? If the probe doesn't find life are the people still going to go? What is the plan beyond sending some people to be cooked by Jupiter?
they're starting "phase 1" which is research and determining what tech we can use and what we still need to invent. seems to me that's pretty damn reasonable.
What the fuck is reasonable about it? What if a probe does find life. We're going to send a bunch of bacteria/virus laden meat-bags to contaminate the Europan (or is it European, damn that's going to be confusing) biosphere...
To die there. Just how much thought has been given to how this will affect any life that may be there? Part of me thinks the idea of going there would be pretty damn cool. But it's nothing but a childish way to get into the history books at best. At least go somewhere where there is some possibility of surviving.
The goal here seems to be go, plant flag, possibly destroy ecosystem, get in history books and die.
God: Go out into the woods, collect all of the animals in the world by two and make the ark out of cubits. Eighty cubits, forty cubits, thirty cubits.
Noah: Riiiiiight! What's a cubit?
We have four major carriers. Two carriers are on CDMA and two are on GSM. The two GSM carriers use different frequency bands for 3G, which means you need a phone with a pentaband 3G radio to be able to freely switch between those two. LTE is even more complicated.
Basically, this would have been a great suggestion ten years ago, but now the carriers have used technical measures to make the whole "carrier locking" thing moot.
None of that really matters anyhow. It doesn't matter if your phone is CDMA, GSM, OCD, PBJ, PTSD, ADHD, or SOL.
What he really meant was that all phones need to be "unlocked" for the NSA network.
I understood what you meant, and it doesn't work that way. There are a myriad of very complex things that cause these changes. Obviously there's CO2 and methane. But you have volcanic activity, the sunspot cycle (which we continue to learn we don't necessarily understand), and just try to understand relationship of atmospheric temperatures and ocean currents. If you think you have that figured out then you can take a look at the impact of solar vs. cosmic winds. There was a story on/. recently that indicated that the cosmic winds are not as constant as was once believed. So it will have an impact on the heliosphere. I think it was last year that NASA discovered that more heat was bleeding off into space than was previously believed too.
The annual temperatures will be trending in some way or another over damn near any time frame. If you look at last couple of hundred years it's trending up. But it's still not nearly as hot as it's been since homo sapiens has been on this planet. Take a look at this graph Or do a Google search for temperature graphs for the earth yourself. That's where I got this one. Do you see equilibrium?
So what you are saying is that the arctic tundra was actually warm enough to be a swamp at some point? Which means it was considerably warmer on the planet than it is now. How do you know that, that's not supposed to be temperature? Maybe that area should be a swamp.
Not that this is the case. The methane in the arctic is calthrate. You are correct that there is a massive amount of methane there, it just didn't get there they way you are claiming.
I'm really not trying to be mean to you, because we need to stop poisoning ourselves. But posts like yours do not help. Your post is a "deniers" wet dream. It's makes people who want to be better stewards of the planet look like crazy people.
The temperature trends look like they are going up at an insane rate if you look at the last 500, or 1000 years. But if you look at the last 200K years of half or million years, it's debatable.
The earth is not and hopefully will never be in a state of equilibrium any time soon. Do you know what is in a much closer state of atmospheric equilibrium? The moon is a pretty good place to look. Mars isn't bad either. I don't know about you, but I like our atmosphere. As long as we have it and there are living things on this planet, it will remain that way. Hopefully for a very long time.
I'm not even going to get started on the heat energy thing
I assume the link above is what you are referencing in regards to as "old swamps". At least that's what I'm guessing as I've never heard of the danger of thawing swamps. Plus there's a hell of a lot more methane in those formations than any swamp. It's also unknown if that methane will be released with rising temperature. But like you, I'd rather not find out. I would much prefer it remain an academic debate than see it put to the test.
There is strong evidence for the Albedo effect. However the link regarding atmospheric water vapor also seems to provide compelling evidence that water vapor in the atmosphere is also a strong greenhouse gas.
I understand that trying to make this problem something dire that will affect most of us in our lifetimes seems like a way to make others more motivated. But when it doesn't happen in the ridiculously short time-frames you are using, it makes most people call BS. Spreading this amount of misinformation is really not helping. I apologize for sounding like an ass, but posts like yours make it too easy for those who don't give a shit to keep on not worrying about it.
Chevy Volt, but it's not a sexy electric car like Tesla Model S.
The Volt is not sexy, not that I'm sure I'd apply that adjective to any car. But I personally find the Volt a hell of a lot more aesthetically appealing than a Prius. I'm sure many people disagree with me; it all comes down to personal taste I suppose.
On Thursday afternoon while all National Guard aircraft were grounded due to weather Falcon UAV was proud to have been the only aircraft that was able to take flight to support the flood efforts in Lyons.
So nothing was flying that day. Except for the drones.
Just as Falcon UAV was off to another damage assessment in Lyons, Colorado we were requested to standdown for National Guard helicopters now supporting evacuation efforts.
So they stopped flying due to this request.
Enter FEMA.......
Early Saturday morning Falcon UAV was heading up to Lyons to complete a damage assessment mapping flight when we received a call from our Boulder EOC point of contact who notified us that FEMA had taken over operations and our request to fly drones was not only denied but more specifically we were told by FEMA that anyone flying drones would be arrested. Not being one to bow to federal bureaucrats we still went up to Lyons to do a site survey for how we can conduct a mission in the near future to provide an adequate damage assessment to this storm raveged community.
While we were up there we noticed that Civil Air Patrol and private aircraft were authorized to fly over the small town tucked into the base of Rockies. Unfortunately due to the high terrain around Lyons and large turn radius of manned aircraft they were flying well out of a useful visual range and didn't employ cameras or live video feed to support the recovery effort. Meanwhile we were grounded on the Lyons high school football field with two Falcons that could have mapped the entire town in less than 30 minutes with another few hours to process the data providing a near real time map of the entire town.
So helicopters were not the issue. The CAP as well as civilians had planes in the air. Do you really think the national guard would have wanted civilians in the air if they were conducting helicopter flights? If FEMA would have had any intelligence they would have given them the 30 minutes to image the area. This had nothing to do with helicopter safety. It was some ass at FEMA on a power trip and not wanting to look bad because they couldn't have done this. Or best case, who ever made the decision at FEMA didn't want to be held accountable if something went wrong.
So if I was FEMA and I was tasked with coordinating all of these helicopter flights I might also say no to any drones I wasn't positive wouldn't be accidentally running into a helicopter full of evacuees.
I have a relative who works with the FAA regarding drones. They cannot be flown in US airspace without someone either on the ground or in a chase plane to keep it in line-of-sight at all times. You may find this interesting: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R42718.pdf
I don't think there was much danger of one hitting a helicopter if those are the restrictions on their operation.
Slashdot Mirror
To me stuff like this is what proves evolution. There is no one in their right mind who could sit there and convince me that such an obtuse solution to move from point A to point B is "by design", vs. random evolution.
I fail to see how this is an "obtuse solution". I find it very elegant.
He lives in New York, he's always swung from the multitude of high rises.
I'm guessing you're a little younger than I am, because I still remember the original 1960's Spider-man cartoon. He managed to swing across the Hudson River frequently. I recall one episode where he managed to "swing" to Mexico, or Central America even. Even so, not every area in all five boroughs of NY are covered in skyscrapers you know. He lived in a single family house with his aunt.
Is it just me, or does anybody have the feeling that this job is probably the opposite of the title?
Not at all. In fact it's exactly what it sounds like...
On the internal memos where this fantastic new position is code-named "Token Civil Liberties & Privacy Officer". Or just "Token" for short. It's also referred to using the acronym, "LOL".
Although the exact cause of the loss is not known, analysis has uncovered a potential problem with computer time tagging
Upon further analysis it was discovered that while the hardware was designed to run on imperial hours, minutes, and seconds, the software was written using metric time.
The web browser on the iphone was like nothing we had seen before. It actually worked for the vast majority of the web. THAT more then anything else is what drove its adoption. Calling it a toy is just ignorant hyperbole to make your point.
I had an HP iPaq 6315 back in 2004. The browser worked just fine. So I'm not sure what was so new about a browser on the iPhone. But Windows mobile was pretty damn clunky compared to the iPhone.
It would be pretty darned hypocritical of us to indiscriminately bomb people and then say that you shouldn't use A.I. driven robots because it's too impersonal a way to kill people.
It's all in the marketing. The killer robots will send flowers and a card within 30 days.
> A careful reading of the directive finds that it lists some broad and imprecise criteria and requires senior officials to certify that these criteria have been met if systems are intended to target and kill people by machine decision alone. [emphasis mine]
(I think I've seen that movie...) What could possibly go wrong?
I wonder if they'd be running Windows for Killer Robots?
Subject 8572 has initialed combative...
Action: Activate weapons system. Terminate subject
Divide Overflow
Abort, Retry, Fail?
This guy is a Roboticist. I think he's more interested in getting his own projects funded than anything.
Ray Kurzweil in his book The Singularity Is Near predicts that human beings will soon “transcend biology” and traverse the universe as immortal cyborgs. This has far-reaching implications for space travel: One can imagine cyborgs (with human consciousness) that are able to explore inhabitable planets such as Venus and Jupiter or can travel for centuries to the furthest galaxies.
So what the author is advocating is that we transfer human conciseness into the robots. It's interesting. But then he shows his complete lack of understanding by stating we may be able to explore Venus. It's fairly unlikely we will ever develop suitable materials that can survive for long in that caustic atmosphere. But that pales in comparison to stating that we will ever build anything that can explore Jupiter.
They also fail to recognize that technology may radically change humans in the next century or so.
there are already folks who are willing to be vitrified so that they can be immortal by transplanting their brain into a fresh (robotic) body. The Russian billionaire Dmitry Itskov hopes to do by 2035 or 2045. Cryonics, or the science of preserving human beings, has been endorsed by numerous scientists. This is fringe science, to be sure. But even if one does not believe that we will have fully robotic bodies in the next 20 or 30 years, it is not far-fetched to think that at least some of us might be a combination of robotic and human systems—yes, cyborgs—in 100 years or so.
So this is the big advancement of humans? Transplant our conciseness into a robot/cyborg. Are you even human at that point? That's a different debate. I suppose you can split hairs and as long as the robot body still has the same function as the original. But for it to be able to survive on other planets, like Venus. I have to think the answer is no. It kind of reminds me of the opposite of the original Star Trek episode; "By Any Other Name".
A recent Slate article makes the argument that manned space exploration is not useful and we should concentrate on Robots. The article makes the claim that manned space exploration was never popular and by diverting money to robotic space exploration we can get more bang for the buck.
It was very popular in the 1950's and 1960's. The US and USSR spent a lot of money on it, and the populations of both countries were very proud of what they accomplished. "More bang for the buck" is often times a pretty silly statement. You can buy dozens of Kia econo-box cars for the price of a Panoz GTRA. It would be "more bang for the buck". But it depends on what you are trying to accomplish. Are you looking for a cheap fleet of cars to use for the employees of a company? Or a race car. It all depends on the end goal.
'Most of the arguments in favor of manned space exploration boil down to the following: a) We need to explore space using people since keeping the entire human race on a single piece of rock is a bad strategy, and even if we send robots first, people would have to make the journey eventually; and b) humans can explore much better than robots. Both these arguments are very near-sighted—in large part because they assume that robots aren’t going to get any better. They also fail to recognize that technology may radically change humans in the next century or so.
It's pretty damn near sighted if you believe that having the entire race on one rock is bad, but don't bother to send out anything but robots. It's also very presumptuous to give up on manned space exploration under the assumption that robots will definitely surpass humans in the near future. The author is also pretty damn presumptuous in stating that technology is going to radically change humans in a hundred years, give or take. How much technology do we have and take for granted today that was developed decades ago because of the drive to send a man into space or the moon and return alive? How much tech would we miss out on by no longer pursuing this goal? That seems pretty damn short sighted too.
I didn't read TFA, but how is trying to get the species off this rock a short sighted goal? Are we suddenly going to become immune to global natural disasters through technological advances? What if one of the super-volcanoes erupts? Will we have the tech to stop it? Or "radically change humans" to survive it with society intact?
Granted, we're a long way off from a utopian star trek society, and will probably never see that. But you have to start at some point. Necessity is the mother of invention. Just think of what the world would be like today if we hadn't decided it was necessary to send people into space.
Later when their bodies were examined in the laboratories, it was found that they were killed by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared. . . slain, after all man's defenses had failed, by the humblest thing that God in His wisdom put upon this earth.
Maybe it has fingers.
I believe that would be "a finger". It's digital after all. It's either flipping you the bird, or it's not. If it had fingers, it would be analog. ;-)
Well we could send all the telephone sanitisers, hairdressers, and advertising account executives. I would throw in the politicians and lawyers also, but that's just me.
I'd send the politicians and lawyers first. Advertising account executives and MBA's would be next. If that doesn't kill all life on Europa, then we should surrender to our new Jovian overlords.
i love how everyone assumes we're just going to jump on a rocket and head over there, you don't think probes will be sent initially? should we not plan beyond that?
Then why even bother sending people? If the probe doesn't find life are the people still going to go? What is the plan beyond sending some people to be cooked by Jupiter?
they're starting "phase 1" which is research and determining what tech we can use and what we still need to invent. seems to me that's pretty damn reasonable.
What the fuck is reasonable about it? What if a probe does find life. We're going to send a bunch of bacteria/virus laden meat-bags to contaminate the Europan (or is it European, damn that's going to be confusing) biosphere...
To die there. Just how much thought has been given to how this will affect any life that may be there? Part of me thinks the idea of going there would be pretty damn cool. But it's nothing but a childish way to get into the history books at best. At least go somewhere where there is some possibility of surviving.
The goal here seems to be go, plant flag, possibly destroy ecosystem, get in history books and die.
God: Go out into the woods, collect all of the animals in the world by two and make the ark out of cubits. Eighty cubits, forty cubits, thirty cubits. Noah: Riiiiiight! What's a cubit?
-- Bill Cosby
I couldn't tell you how many times I listened to that as a kid.
If not even NASA can move to the metric system, what hope do we have as a nation to move over?
If NOAA can use cubits, then they are just fine for NASA. Or was it Noah? Meh, whatever.
We have four major carriers. Two carriers are on CDMA and two are on GSM. The two GSM carriers use different frequency bands for 3G, which means you need a phone with a pentaband 3G radio to be able to freely switch between those two. LTE is even more complicated.
Basically, this would have been a great suggestion ten years ago, but now the carriers have used technical measures to make the whole "carrier locking" thing moot.
None of that really matters anyhow. It doesn't matter if your phone is CDMA, GSM, OCD, PBJ, PTSD, ADHD, or SOL.
What he really meant was that all phones need to be "unlocked" for the NSA network.
I understood what you meant, and it doesn't work that way. There are a myriad of very complex things that cause these changes. Obviously there's CO2 and methane. But you have volcanic activity, the sunspot cycle (which we continue to learn we don't necessarily understand), and just try to understand relationship of atmospheric temperatures and ocean currents. If you think you have that figured out then you can take a look at the impact of solar vs. cosmic winds. There was a story on /. recently that indicated that the cosmic winds are not as constant as was once believed. So it will have an impact on the heliosphere. I think it was last year that NASA discovered that more heat was bleeding off into space than was previously believed too.
The annual temperatures will be trending in some way or another over damn near any time frame. If you look at last couple of hundred years it's trending up. But it's still not nearly as hot as it's been since homo sapiens has been on this planet. Take a look at this graph Or do a Google search for temperature graphs for the earth yourself. That's where I got this one. Do you see equilibrium?
Ancient swamps = Arctic tundra.
Massive amounts of methane. It's a fact.
So what you are saying is that the arctic tundra was actually warm enough to be a swamp at some point? Which means it was considerably warmer on the planet than it is now. How do you know that, that's not supposed to be temperature? Maybe that area should be a swamp.
Not that this is the case. The methane in the arctic is calthrate. You are correct that there is a massive amount of methane there, it just didn't get there they way you are claiming.
Equilibrium? Extra energy often becoming heat? Ancient swamps thawing? Additional atmospheric water vapor helps cooling?, Apocalyptic heat death in a few decades?
I'm really not trying to be mean to you, because we need to stop poisoning ourselves. But posts like yours do not help. Your post is a "deniers" wet dream. It's makes people who want to be better stewards of the planet look like crazy people.
The temperature trends look like they are going up at an insane rate if you look at the last 500, or 1000 years. But if you look at the last 200K years of half or million years, it's debatable.
The earth is not and hopefully will never be in a state of equilibrium any time soon. Do you know what is in a much closer state of atmospheric equilibrium? The moon is a pretty good place to look. Mars isn't bad either. I don't know about you, but I like our atmosphere. As long as we have it and there are living things on this planet, it will remain that way. Hopefully for a very long time.
I'm not even going to get started on the heat energy thing
I assume the link above is what you are referencing in regards to as "old swamps". At least that's what I'm guessing as I've never heard of the danger of thawing swamps. Plus there's a hell of a lot more methane in those formations than any swamp. It's also unknown if that methane will be released with rising temperature. But like you, I'd rather not find out. I would much prefer it remain an academic debate than see it put to the test.
There is strong evidence for the Albedo effect. However the link regarding atmospheric water vapor also seems to provide compelling evidence that water vapor in the atmosphere is also a strong greenhouse gas.
I understand that trying to make this problem something dire that will affect most of us in our lifetimes seems like a way to make others more motivated. But when it doesn't happen in the ridiculously short time-frames you are using, it makes most people call BS. Spreading this amount of misinformation is really not helping. I apologize for sounding like an ass, but posts like yours make it too easy for those who don't give a shit to keep on not worrying about it.
Chevy Volt, but it's not a sexy electric car like Tesla Model S.
The Volt is not sexy, not that I'm sure I'd apply that adjective to any car. But I personally find the Volt a hell of a lot more aesthetically appealing than a Prius. I'm sure many people disagree with me; it all comes down to personal taste I suppose.
So nothing was flying that day. Except for the drones.
A nitpick, because this is not a true statement. I know of at least one private plane that was flying the area on Thursday as well as on Sunday.
At the same altitude that the drones were at?
Here. Let me explain that to you with a diagram: http://i.imgur.com/nSD3ofw.gif
On Thursday afternoon while all National Guard aircraft were grounded due to weather Falcon UAV was proud to have been the only aircraft that was able to take flight to support the flood efforts in Lyons.
So nothing was flying that day. Except for the drones.
Just as Falcon UAV was off to another damage assessment in Lyons, Colorado we were requested to standdown for National Guard helicopters now supporting evacuation efforts.
So they stopped flying due to this request.
Enter FEMA.......
Early Saturday morning Falcon UAV was heading up to Lyons to complete a damage assessment mapping flight when we received a call from our Boulder EOC point of contact who notified us that FEMA had taken over operations and our request to fly drones was not only denied but more specifically we were told by FEMA that anyone flying drones would be arrested. Not being one to bow to federal bureaucrats we still went up to Lyons to do a site survey for how we can conduct a mission in the near future to provide an adequate damage assessment to this storm raveged community.
While we were up there we noticed that Civil Air Patrol and private aircraft were authorized to fly over the small town tucked into the base of Rockies. Unfortunately due to the high terrain around Lyons and large turn radius of manned aircraft they were flying well out of a useful visual range and didn't employ cameras or live video feed to support the recovery effort. Meanwhile we were grounded on the Lyons high school football field with two Falcons that could have mapped the entire town in less than 30 minutes with another few hours to process the data providing a near real time map of the entire town.
So helicopters were not the issue. The CAP as well as civilians had planes in the air. Do you really think the national guard would have wanted civilians in the air if they were conducting helicopter flights? If FEMA would have had any intelligence they would have given them the 30 minutes to image the area. This had nothing to do with helicopter safety. It was some ass at FEMA on a power trip and not wanting to look bad because they couldn't have done this. Or best case, who ever made the decision at FEMA didn't want to be held accountable if something went wrong.
So if I was FEMA and I was tasked with coordinating all of these helicopter flights I might also say no to any drones I wasn't positive wouldn't be accidentally running into a helicopter full of evacuees.
I have a relative who works with the FAA regarding drones. They cannot be flown in US airspace without someone either on the ground or in a chase plane to keep it in line-of-sight at all times. You may find this interesting: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R42718.pdf
I don't think there was much danger of one hitting a helicopter if those are the restrictions on their operation.