It might not fly in the USA but it doesn't stop US corporations and government agencies from pushing other countries to do exactly what has happened here. Just look at Kim Dotcom -- effectively exactly the same thing happened to him here in New Zealand at the behest of US authorities. They UNLAWFULLY survielled him, raided his home, held him and his family at gunpoint and seized his assets.
These kind of jackboot tactics are becoming all too common when it comes to alleged issues of copyright.
What a shame the authorities can't be as effective when it comes to dealing with real crime - like burglaries, assaults and fraud -- especially white-collar crimes and crimes committed by our politicians.
What annoys me most is that if *we* (as mere citizens and taxpayers) commit such crimes, we get our asses kicked and huge fines or imprisonment. When it's a large corporation or agents of the government who commit the "unlawful" acts, nobody is punished in the least and it's considered to be merely a transgression rather than a crime.
Regulators are *way* out of their depth on this issue.
Firstly, there are already regulations in place that make it illegal to endanger person or property using a drone. With this in mind therefore, those who *do* endanger person or property are obviously doing so out of ignorance or arrogance.
Just making more regulations does *nothing* to address ignorance or arrogance so it shows a lack of intelligence on the part of regulators.
What is needed is:
1. education (this addresses the issue of ignorance)
2. enforcement (this addresses the issue of arrogance).
Simply expecting that by making more regulation, those who are presently unaware of the regs or who choose to thumb their nose at them, will change their behavior is an incredibly naive perspective.
In the case of drones, the regulators are operating from their own position of ignorance. They are not au-fait with the technology or the culture and therefore they are trying to solve symptoms not causes.
The very first thing the regulators need to do is to draw a distinction between the idiot-droners (ie: those who buy a GPS-assisted camera drone from eBay and go fly it at the airport) and the responsible and traditional model fliers who have been safely flying remotely controlled aircraft, helicopters and multirotors for many decades. Without drawing this distinction, any regulation will be excessively punitive to the responsible fliers whilst having little effect on the idiot-droners.
It strikes me that the bureaucrats working on drone rules are more interested in "being seen to do something" rather than coming up with fair, reasonable, effective, workable solutions to the problem.
Let's remind ourselves of one very small but important fact when putting the drone issue into perspective:
Never, at any time, anywhere in the world, has a recreational multirotor drone been responsible for a single human death.
Compare that with other items which are not required to be registered and require no qualification to own or use but which have been responsible for countless deaths: knives, bats, bicycles, alcohol, tobacco, etc.
Surely there are much bigger problems worthy of the attention of regulators than some innocent RC model fliers?
I did a video rant on this for anyone who might be interested or who wants to put a face to this post: VLog on UK drone rule changes.
The FAA decided that Casey had no case to answer because (apparently) the YouTube videos were insufficient evidence to conclusively prove he broke the regulations. I have a feeling however, that if he wasn't a big-name YouTuber and well connected politically, the FAA may have formulated a slightly different position.
If you want the old format -- just enter your news-search term in the regular search box and then click on "news" from the menu that appears on the standard search result page. This delivers the news in the old-format with the tools such as sorting, time-period etc.
I always ask them "how do you know it was my computer sending you messages that it has a virus? Do you know the serial number of my computer?"
They respond by getting you to call up an immutable sequence of characters and digits from the bowels of the Windows OS that a stupid person might consider to be a serial number. They read it out using words like "one, five, B for Bob, S for Suzie"... etc etc.
Then they ask me to read it back so I pause and say
"Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo Oscar Foxtrot Foxtrot"
Without exception they say "can you read that again please?"
So I repeat the phonetics.
Once they twig I'm usually invited to have carnal relations with my own sister and mother.
Last time I did this they then hung up but rang straight back to further insult me.
In fact, they rang back several times so I simply answered "Good evening, you have reached the Vindows Support Center, how can we scam you?" -- and I've never had another call since.
Governments can murder, steal, defame and generally do many things that, as individuals, we would be prosecuted and perhaps even forfeit our lives for.
DJI are cunning like a fox. Since the FAA's compulsory registration scheme has been nixed by the courts, DJI realizes that if it implements its own compulsory registration scheme (via the mechanism just announced), they can go to the FAA and say "we've got your back".
There is already huge concern in the industry that DJI collects so much data about your flights and then reserves the right (it's in the TOS to which you agree) to send that data back to its servers in China!
By collecting all this data and demanding mandatory registration of customers (if they want their drones to fly "as advertised") then DJI can provide the FAA (and other law-enforcement agencies) with an astounding amount of detail whenever there's an "incident report" that involves one of their craft.
The ultimate outcome of this is probably that the FAA will grant special concessions to DJI which will allow their customers to do things that other drone users will not. This may well be in the form of a "certified drone" accreditation which provides exemptions from some of the more onerous new rules that are to come if the FAA manages to convince the Senate to overturn section 336 of the 2012 Modernization and Reform Act.
Personally, I'm more than happy with DJI's move -- because I build all my own craft and therefore am not reliant in the least on them.
Another positive is that this might encourage others to start learning more about drone technology and build their own craft rather than just buying a turnkey solution from DJI. Learning about the technology makes you a safer operator because you better understand the strengths/weaknesses of the gear and you are also more aware of the importance of preventative and remedial maintenance for for the purposes of safety.
I love Iron Sky -- the only disappointment was the rendering of the starfield that represents "outer space". Way too many stars -- looks fake. The rest of the movie however -- fantastic and the heroine is a real babe too!:-)
I also like 5th Element, Armageddon, Demolition Man, Independence Day and a few other blockbusters. Okay, I'm a sucker for big budgets, name-actors and CGI:-)
YT has no real incentive to take down re-uploaded videos that have been monetized by someone else in a timely fashion -- in fact it's very much in their favor not to take them down quickly.
Why?
Well think about what happens to the ad-revenues generated by these re-uploaded videos before they're removed?
Where does it go?
I don't think it goes to the actual original video owner and they're sure as hell not going to refund the advertisers -- so it's a nice little earner for YT because I'd bet the money goes straight into their own vaults.
I've lost track of how many hundreds of copyright claims I've filed against folk who have re-uploaded many of my more popular vids and it's a hugely time-consuming task -- time that I'd rather spend making new vids. I suggested to YT some time ago that they really ought to do something like this, especially when new channels pop up and have hundreds of videos added overnight. In such cases you can be almost 100% certain that they're running a script that downloads and re-uploads other people's vids.
I blogged about a similar proposal earlier in the week but I suggest that they go even further.
They should also come up with two content pools -- one (the premium pool) containing YouTube channel partners who meet a much tighter criteria -- such as 10 million views and 100K subs -- and another that contains all the others. These "premium" content creators would be vetted for the nature of their content (ie: ad-friendly) and offered to the J&J, Verizon, UK Government advertisers who are presently not advertising because of the hate/racist/extremist vids their ads were appearing against.
If they properly vetted these premium channels then they could offer big-dollar advertisers placements which they know would not be on offensive content -- and attract a premium ad-rate at the same time.
I recall back when the YT Channel Partner program kicked off, earnings were good for content creators because the entire ad-revenue pie was divided amongst a much smaller number of content creators. Viewers also got a much better experience because we didn't have every man and his dog monetizing 30 second "cute cat" videos with a 30 second unskippable preroll. Advertisers also got a good deal because their ads were only being placed on channels that had proven their worth and the quality of their content by having been chosen for the program.
Once they opened the doors so that everyone could monentize, the existing channel partners saw a huge drop in earnings. Now, with the big-dollar advertisers fleeing in droves, they're probably going to see yet another drop. This is further aggravated by the bugs in YT's new system for automatically detecting and demonetizing potentially "unfriendly" vids. Lots of YT's biggest channels have had significant numbers of their vids automatically demonetized by this lame system -- so are seeing an even greater drop in revenue as a result.
Unfortunately it's YT's greed that has created the current situation so I doubt they'll wind the clock back enough to solve it.
How many complaints were there of excessive noise caused by parties?
How about barking dogs?
Drivers speeding?
Burglaries?
Assaults?
By comparison, a few complaints about drones (often from people who believe the ridiculous hysteria drummed up by the media on this subject) seems to pale into insignificance doesn't it.
Wait... surely it's time for an other "Drone doesn't hit aircraft" story from a media bereft of all integrity and honesty!
I just put mine in a cardboard box with a random address on it and taped up to look like it's brand new, valuable and awaiting pickup by a courier or freight company -- and then leave it on the street outside my house.
So a precisely tuned flicker-frequency (40Hz in mice) does great things for brain function and maintenance -- so what deleterious effects do things like CRT monitors, mains-powered fluro/LED lighting etc have on our brains -- given that they're operating "out of sync" with our gamma waves?
Could it be that the increase in dementia/Alzheimer's is related to our exposure to such off-frequency flickering on a very wide scale, thanks to modern technology?
"Users can only get one movie per account. Both services offer an extensive list of titles, including this year's Suicide Squad, Bridge Jones's Baby, and Finding Dory among others"
Bridge Jones's Baby? I don't think I've heard of that one (rolls eyes)
So they didn't correlate the IMU data with ranging radar or even barometric altitude information so as to avoid this?
I know weight and volume are at a premium on such craft but a barometric sensor (even one capable of operating in Mars's rarefied atmosphere, is the size of a thumbnail and weighs just a fraction of a gram.
Instead of storing a music track (or movie) as an MP3 or MP4 file on a single server, why not break it up into a bitstream in chunks of less than a byte and distribute it amongst a large number of servers. Each file on each server would then appear to be nothing but a random bitstream bearing no relation to the actual original work.
To access/download said movie/music, all you need is the right piece of software and the key which activates a function that downloads the bitstream fragments from the relevant servers and re-orders them into the original track.
This way, no server will have a copy of the copyright-infringing material that could be recognised as the offending work so surely could not be the subject of a copyright violation.
Since the servers would be useless without the key and the key would be useless without the servers -- neither part constitutes the copyrighted work.
Yeah, it's a form of distributed encryption -- but how do copyright holders issue a takedown notice for something that is clearly not their copyrighted content?
Just a thought. Probably already been done because there's nothing new in the universe.
If I was Mr Trump, I'd be gravely concerned that those who have most to lose from this victory might seek out a grassy knoll somewhere to "put things right". From what I read of history, it would not be "unprecedented" -- which would then leave the USA "unpresidented". People who aspire to power often don't take failure very well.
Here in New Zealand Samsung did a huge recall of washing machines that were burning houses down. Apparently, when used with a full load, the machines would splash water on the electrics and the resulting current flow could precipitate a fire in which the plastic parts of the machine (top and cover) went up in flames -- setting fire to anything else that was nearby (such as your house).
Samsung delivered my replacement machine this week (after I had to wait a hell of a long time) and I asked them if I got a free Note 7 phone to go with it -- since it's Guy Fawkes this weekend and sometimes those bonfires are hard to get lit after a spring shower.
They said "no". Bugger!
Anyway, the new machine is so ugly we've called it Davros.
When your own government acts like terrorists -- you know the terrorists have won.
The terrorists have very effectively smashed the US Constitution and removed a huge swathe of "freedoms" that were previously enjoyed by Western nations. They did not do this alone -- the governments of those nations were complicit with the terrorists' objectives by bending to the pressure.
As Midnight OIl said: I'd rather die on my feet than live on my knees. Sadly, Western governments have opted to strip their peoples of the freedoms they're (allegedly) trying to protect, in promise of security.
I hope all Americans realize that the rest of the world is dumbfounded that Clinton and Trump are supposedly the best candidates for the presidency of your great nation.
It's not the registration that is the problem -- it's the contract that the FAA forces upon you when you register.
Section 336 clearly states that the FAA may make no new rules to control model aircraft so they've been clever as a fox. The FAA has no way to make new rules to control these craft so they conjured up a contract and called it "registration". In order to register you must agree to the terms of the contract which include restrictions that were not previously present -- such as not flying over 400 feet AGL etc. Once you've registered, you have agreed to that contract and breaching it (such as flying over 400 feet AGL) exposes you to legal action for breach of the contract. So, the FAA have created new rules by stealth in the form of this binding contract.
It's a crock and has been done solely to sidestep the decree of Congress. Nasty work!
Even nastier is how little has been done to highlight this fact. Thank goodness *someone* is taking them to court over this dirty dealing.
The problem is that the FAA (and other regulators around the world) have chosen to penalize the genuine hobbyist for the acts of the idiots. This is totally uncalled for and unfair. Imagine if, every time some dick-head decided to break the speed limit, *every* responsible driver was penalised as a result. That's the situation we have here with drones.
The regulators can't even define what a drone is accurately or consistently so instead of making even the smallest effort (such as differentiating between craft that have onboard GPS and an autonomous or semi-autonomous capability -- such as auto-land, return to home etc) they consider everything that flies without a pilot to be a drone.
This is just laziness on the part of regulators and gross unfairness towards the responsible members of a hobby that has for decades proven itself to be safe and family-friendly.
Ultimately, we have a bunch of suits who fly desks telling the rest of us (some like myself who've been flying model aircraft for over 50 years) under threat of severe fines and/or imprisonment, what's safe and what's not. Ludicrous!
Slashdot Mirror
It might not fly in the USA but it doesn't stop US corporations and government agencies from pushing other countries to do exactly what has happened here. Just look at Kim Dotcom -- effectively exactly the same thing happened to him here in New Zealand at the behest of US authorities. They UNLAWFULLY survielled him, raided his home, held him and his family at gunpoint and seized his assets.
These kind of jackboot tactics are becoming all too common when it comes to alleged issues of copyright.
What a shame the authorities can't be as effective when it comes to dealing with real crime - like burglaries, assaults and fraud -- especially white-collar crimes and crimes committed by our politicians.
What annoys me most is that if *we* (as mere citizens and taxpayers) commit such crimes, we get our asses kicked and huge fines or imprisonment. When it's a large corporation or agents of the government who commit the "unlawful" acts, nobody is punished in the least and it's considered to be merely a transgression rather than a crime.
Two sets of rules eh?
Regulators are *way* out of their depth on this issue.
Firstly, there are already regulations in place that make it illegal to endanger person or property using a drone. With this in mind therefore, those who *do* endanger person or property are obviously doing so out of ignorance or arrogance.
Just making more regulations does *nothing* to address ignorance or arrogance so it shows a lack of intelligence on the part of regulators.
What is needed is:
1. education (this addresses the issue of ignorance)
2. enforcement (this addresses the issue of arrogance).
Simply expecting that by making more regulation, those who are presently unaware of the regs or who choose to thumb their nose at them, will change their behavior is an incredibly naive perspective.
In the case of drones, the regulators are operating from their own position of ignorance. They are not au-fait with the technology or the culture and therefore they are trying to solve symptoms not causes.
The very first thing the regulators need to do is to draw a distinction between the idiot-droners (ie: those who buy a GPS-assisted camera drone from eBay and go fly it at the airport) and the responsible and traditional model fliers who have been safely flying remotely controlled aircraft, helicopters and multirotors for many decades. Without drawing this distinction, any regulation will be excessively punitive to the responsible fliers whilst having little effect on the idiot-droners.
It strikes me that the bureaucrats working on drone rules are more interested in "being seen to do something" rather than coming up with fair, reasonable, effective, workable solutions to the problem.
Let's remind ourselves of one very small but important fact when putting the drone issue into perspective:
Never, at any time, anywhere in the world, has a recreational multirotor drone been responsible for a single human death.
Compare that with other items which are not required to be registered and require no qualification to own or use but which have been responsible for countless deaths: knives, bats, bicycles, alcohol, tobacco, etc.
Surely there are much bigger problems worthy of the attention of regulators than some innocent RC model fliers?
I did a video rant on this for anyone who might be interested or who wants to put a face to this post: VLog on UK drone rule changes.
The FAA decided that Casey had no case to answer because (apparently) the YouTube videos were insufficient evidence to conclusively prove he broke the regulations. I have a feeling however, that if he wasn't a big-name YouTuber and well connected politically, the FAA may have formulated a slightly different position.
If you want the old format -- just enter your news-search term in the regular search box and then click on "news" from the menu that appears on the standard search result page. This delivers the news in the old-format with the tools such as sorting, time-period etc.
I always ask them "how do you know it was my computer sending you messages that it has a virus? Do you know the serial number of my computer?"
They respond by getting you to call up an immutable sequence of characters and digits from the bowels of the Windows OS that a stupid person might consider to be a serial number. They read it out using words like "one, five, B for Bob, S for Suzie"... etc etc.
Then they ask me to read it back so I pause and say
"Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo Oscar Foxtrot Foxtrot"
Without exception they say "can you read that again please?"
So I repeat the phonetics.
Once they twig I'm usually invited to have carnal relations with my own sister and mother.
Last time I did this they then hung up but rang straight back to further insult me.
In fact, they rang back several times so I simply answered "Good evening, you have reached the Vindows Support Center, how can we scam you?" -- and I've never had another call since.
So much fun baiting these scammers.
Gosh, 250m views for YouTube Read series... that's actually much less than I expected.
Hell, there are plenty of individuals with channels that have way more than 250m views. Even the Gangnam vid has much more views than that.
If I was YT, I'd be pretty disappointed with those figures.
You forget... there are two sets of rules:
One for those who *make* the rules
Another for the rest of us.
Governments can murder, steal, defame and generally do many things that, as individuals, we would be prosecuted and perhaps even forfeit our lives for.
And who says that power doesn't corrupt?
Oh, come on, really?
There is only ONE authoritative source of well-researched, verified, informative, objective news reporting and that is The Daily Mail!
Fantastic, hard-hitting news without all the fakery that drives so many click-bait sites these days
</sarc>
DJI are cunning like a fox. Since the FAA's compulsory registration scheme has been nixed by the courts, DJI realizes that if it implements its own compulsory registration scheme (via the mechanism just announced), they can go to the FAA and say "we've got your back".
There is already huge concern in the industry that DJI collects so much data about your flights and then reserves the right (it's in the TOS to which you agree) to send that data back to its servers in China!
By collecting all this data and demanding mandatory registration of customers (if they want their drones to fly "as advertised") then DJI can provide the FAA (and other law-enforcement agencies) with an astounding amount of detail whenever there's an "incident report" that involves one of their craft.
The ultimate outcome of this is probably that the FAA will grant special concessions to DJI which will allow their customers to do things that other drone users will not. This may well be in the form of a "certified drone" accreditation which provides exemptions from some of the more onerous new rules that are to come if the FAA manages to convince the Senate to overturn section 336 of the 2012 Modernization and Reform Act.
Personally, I'm more than happy with DJI's move -- because I build all my own craft and therefore am not reliant in the least on them.
Another positive is that this might encourage others to start learning more about drone technology and build their own craft rather than just buying a turnkey solution from DJI. Learning about the technology makes you a safer operator because you better understand the strengths/weaknesses of the gear and you are also more aware of the importance of preventative and remedial maintenance for for the purposes of safety.
I love Iron Sky -- the only disappointment was the rendering of the starfield that represents "outer space". Way too many stars -- looks fake. The rest of the movie however -- fantastic and the heroine is a real babe too! :-)
I also like 5th Element, Armageddon, Demolition Man, Independence Day and a few other blockbusters. Okay, I'm a sucker for big budgets, name-actors and CGI :-)
YT has no real incentive to take down re-uploaded videos that have been monetized by someone else in a timely fashion -- in fact it's very much in their favor not to take them down quickly.
Why?
Well think about what happens to the ad-revenues generated by these re-uploaded videos before they're removed?
Where does it go?
I don't think it goes to the actual original video owner and they're sure as hell not going to refund the advertisers -- so it's a nice little earner for YT because I'd bet the money goes straight into their own vaults.
I've lost track of how many hundreds of copyright claims I've filed against folk who have re-uploaded many of my more popular vids and it's a hugely time-consuming task -- time that I'd rather spend making new vids. I suggested to YT some time ago that they really ought to do something like this, especially when new channels pop up and have hundreds of videos added overnight. In such cases you can be almost 100% certain that they're running a script that downloads and re-uploads other people's vids.
I blogged about a similar proposal earlier in the week but I suggest that they go even further.
They should also come up with two content pools -- one (the premium pool) containing YouTube channel partners who meet a much tighter criteria -- such as 10 million views and 100K subs -- and another that contains all the others. These "premium" content creators would be vetted for the nature of their content (ie: ad-friendly) and offered to the J&J, Verizon, UK Government advertisers who are presently not advertising because of the hate/racist/extremist vids their ads were appearing against.
If they properly vetted these premium channels then they could offer big-dollar advertisers placements which they know would not be on offensive content -- and attract a premium ad-rate at the same time.
I recall back when the YT Channel Partner program kicked off, earnings were good for content creators because the entire ad-revenue pie was divided amongst a much smaller number of content creators. Viewers also got a much better experience because we didn't have every man and his dog monetizing 30 second "cute cat" videos with a 30 second unskippable preroll. Advertisers also got a good deal because their ads were only being placed on channels that had proven their worth and the quality of their content by having been chosen for the program.
Once they opened the doors so that everyone could monentize, the existing channel partners saw a huge drop in earnings. Now, with the big-dollar advertisers fleeing in droves, they're probably going to see yet another drop. This is further aggravated by the bugs in YT's new system for automatically detecting and demonetizing potentially "unfriendly" vids. Lots of YT's biggest channels have had significant numbers of their vids automatically demonetized by this lame system -- so are seeing an even greater drop in revenue as a result.
Unfortunately it's YT's greed that has created the current situation so I doubt they'll wind the clock back enough to solve it.
How many complaints were there of excessive noise caused by parties?
How about barking dogs?
Drivers speeding?
Burglaries?
Assaults?
By comparison, a few complaints about drones (often from people who believe the ridiculous hysteria drummed up by the media on this subject) seems to pale into insignificance doesn't it.
Wait... surely it's time for an other "Drone doesn't hit aircraft" story from a media bereft of all integrity and honesty!
I just put mine in a cardboard box with a random address on it and taped up to look like it's brand new, valuable and awaiting pickup by a courier or freight company -- and then leave it on the street outside my house.
Within hours -- it's gone.
Then it's the thief's problem :-)
So a precisely tuned flicker-frequency (40Hz in mice) does great things for brain function and maintenance -- so what deleterious effects do things like CRT monitors, mains-powered fluro/LED lighting etc have on our brains -- given that they're operating "out of sync" with our gamma waves?
Could it be that the increase in dementia/Alzheimer's is related to our exposure to such off-frequency flickering on a very wide scale, thanks to modern technology?
From the synopsis:
"Users can only get one movie per account. Both services offer an extensive list of titles, including this year's Suicide Squad, Bridge Jones's Baby, and Finding Dory among others"
Bridge Jones's Baby? I don't think I've heard of that one (rolls eyes)
So they didn't correlate the IMU data with ranging radar or even barometric altitude information so as to avoid this?
I know weight and volume are at a premium on such craft but a barometric sensor (even one capable of operating in Mars's rarefied atmosphere, is the size of a thumbnail and weighs just a fraction of a gram.
Sigh!
Instead of storing a music track (or movie) as an MP3 or MP4 file on a single server, why not break it up into a bitstream in chunks of less than a byte and distribute it amongst a large number of servers. Each file on each server would then appear to be nothing but a random bitstream bearing no relation to the actual original work.
To access/download said movie/music, all you need is the right piece of software and the key which activates a function that downloads the bitstream fragments from the relevant servers and re-orders them into the original track.
This way, no server will have a copy of the copyright-infringing material that could be recognised as the offending work so surely could not be the subject of a copyright violation.
Since the servers would be useless without the key and the key would be useless without the servers -- neither part constitutes the copyrighted work.
Yeah, it's a form of distributed encryption -- but how do copyright holders issue a takedown notice for something that is clearly not their copyrighted content?
Just a thought. Probably already been done because there's nothing new in the universe.
If I was Mr Trump, I'd be gravely concerned that those who have most to lose from this victory might seek out a grassy knoll somewhere to "put things right". From what I read of history, it would not be "unprecedented" -- which would then leave the USA "unpresidented". People who aspire to power often don't take failure very well.
Too late!
Here in New Zealand Samsung did a huge recall of washing machines that were burning houses down. Apparently, when used with a full load, the machines would splash water on the electrics and the resulting current flow could precipitate a fire in which the plastic parts of the machine (top and cover) went up in flames -- setting fire to anything else that was nearby (such as your house).
Samsung delivered my replacement machine this week (after I had to wait a hell of a long time) and I asked them if I got a free Note 7 phone to go with it -- since it's Guy Fawkes this weekend and sometimes those bonfires are hard to get lit after a spring shower.
They said "no". Bugger!
Anyway, the new machine is so ugly we've called it Davros.
When your own government acts like terrorists -- you know the terrorists have won.
The terrorists have very effectively smashed the US Constitution and removed a huge swathe of "freedoms" that were previously enjoyed by Western nations. They did not do this alone -- the governments of those nations were complicit with the terrorists' objectives by bending to the pressure.
As Midnight OIl said: I'd rather die on my feet than live on my knees. Sadly, Western governments have opted to strip their peoples of the freedoms they're (allegedly) trying to protect, in promise of security.
Benajin Franklin quote goes here [....]
I hope all Americans realize that the rest of the world is dumbfounded that Clinton and Trump are supposedly the best candidates for the presidency of your great nation.
Surely not.
You are all lost!
It's not the registration that is the problem -- it's the contract that the FAA forces upon you when you register.
Section 336 clearly states that the FAA may make no new rules to control model aircraft so they've been clever as a fox. The FAA has no way to make new rules to control these craft so they conjured up a contract and called it "registration". In order to register you must agree to the terms of the contract which include restrictions that were not previously present -- such as not flying over 400 feet AGL etc. Once you've registered, you have agreed to that contract and breaching it (such as flying over 400 feet AGL) exposes you to legal action for breach of the contract. So, the FAA have created new rules by stealth in the form of this binding contract.
It's a crock and has been done solely to sidestep the decree of Congress. Nasty work!
Even nastier is how little has been done to highlight this fact. Thank goodness *someone* is taking them to court over this dirty dealing.
The problem is that the FAA (and other regulators around the world) have chosen to penalize the genuine hobbyist for the acts of the idiots. This is totally uncalled for and unfair. Imagine if, every time some dick-head decided to break the speed limit, *every* responsible driver was penalised as a result. That's the situation we have here with drones.
The regulators can't even define what a drone is accurately or consistently so instead of making even the smallest effort (such as differentiating between craft that have onboard GPS and an autonomous or semi-autonomous capability -- such as auto-land, return to home etc) they consider everything that flies without a pilot to be a drone.
This is just laziness on the part of regulators and gross unfairness towards the responsible members of a hobby that has for decades proven itself to be safe and family-friendly.
Ultimately, we have a bunch of suits who fly desks telling the rest of us (some like myself who've been flying model aircraft for over 50 years) under threat of severe fines and/or imprisonment, what's safe and what's not. Ludicrous!
So this Netflix thing... it's kind of like paying for Kodi and Exodus on a Raspberry Pi except that you have less choice of content?
I don't get it.