To say nothing about the ridiculous price. Especially for a service that's unlikely to be used in any given month. F'em all.
If it's not working all the time, it's not working. That's the whole point of these systems. A lot of what it offers (like, knowing where your 85 year old grandpa's car is when he's late coming back from golfing and not answering his phone) isn't useful if it's only online and using its SIM card and burning some bandwidth when the driver decides just that moment to turn it on. If $15 bucks for a mobile device's connectivity and use of their services is too much for you, just don't buy it. There are plenty of people who would like some OnStar-type services on a vehicle that wasn't factory equipped for it, and the cost of two sandwiches a month is simply no big deal.
Yes. My experience in observing the habits and practices of both suggests very strongly that enthusiastic recreational multirotor fliers aren't nearly as thoughtful about things as are commercial users. Most recreational fliers are used to operating in very sedate, controlled spaces like AMA fields. Commercial operators are thinking about way, way more factors before, during, and after a planned flight.
No, you're not following, and/or sorry if I wasn't clear enough. I'm talking about neighbors complaining about their house being visible in shots taken from the ground with a traditional camera. There are always wackadoos.
Or you know, they could get permission from the neighbor!... Usually permission for stuff like this is trivial to get.
Speaking from years of experience, I can assure you that it is NOT easy to get. When a realtor makes arrangements for a photographer or a video crew to come and document a property, coordinating with two, three, or four neighbors on logistics, timing, and permission is usually impossible. We try to educate neighbors of clients along these lines: "We'll have a small 4-pound plastic quadcopter, about the size of a large pizza, moving just over your property line, right above tree top level, looking back at the house we're photographing - we'll be in that position over your property for about 30 seconds, and of course we won't do that until there's nobody out in your yard that might be uncomfortable with that. Would you like to see some video of how we operate so you understand what's involved? We'd also be happy to provide you with some free images of your own house, just for fun, that you can use in any way you'd like. If you'd like to look over our shoulders while we're operating, so you can see what we can and can't see through the camera, you're very welcome to..."
Most people are intrigued by the technology, some become very enthusiastic and say things like, "Hey, while you're up there, can you check our chimney, and our gutters?" (which we're always happy to do, no charge). But perhaps one in twenty people shut down their brains the moment they hear "camera" - sometimes even just ground cameras. I've had people yell at us because they don't think we should be allowed to depict the for-sale house if the shot includes a view of their property in the background. You can't EVER get permission from people that irrational, and instead have to point out that we have every right to shoot from the street and that anything in simple view from the street has no expectation of privacy.
Speaking of which, this new legislation seems to be silent on flying cameras above the street and other public right of ways. More absurdity.
Uhh, how's that? The legislation specifically says "without the owners approval". Realtors will have the approval.
Wow, you really don't get it, do you? The issue isn't the house that's being photographed. It's that for a useful perspective, you almost always need to stray off of the property that's being photographed, and over some adjoining property. The realtor doesn't always have the luxury of arranging written permission from someone who's away at work or otherwise unavailable just so their 4-pound quadcopter can stray over the neighbor's trees to look back at a for-sale house for 15 seconds.
It's clear that you have never had any involvement in any activity along these lines.
Oh by the way, the aerial view? Deliberately intended to be misleading. It's the ultimate approach to picking a camera angle to create a misleading photo.
Yeah, like I said. You have no idea what you're talking about. I shoot this sort of stuff professionally. I can be misleading if I want using equipment on the ground or in the air, or through things done in post production regardless of how the image was originally captured. Or I can be honest about it... because, you know, people who are buying million dollar houses actually look at them in person before they write a check. I get it, you're trolling.
Back in the 90's, you didn't have things with cameras flying over your backyard
But you did have nosy neighbors, kids who climb trees, bird photographers with 1000' lenses... the usual. Are you having a problem, now, with people flying multirotors low enough around your back yard to actually (really) invade your privacy? How often is this happening to you? There are literally millions of them in use.
Whatever idiot came up with this proposal is completely uninformed.
First, they're not saying you can't fly over someone's property without permission. They're just saying you have to do it above 350 feet. Of course the FAA says you have to keep it under 400 feet, so this absurd law forces the drone operator to work closer to the general aviation deck, and to have to fuss about keeping their equipment in an unnecessarily narrow 50' band. Operating over hilly terrain? Double plus difficult for no reason.
Secondly, all this does is make what would annoy a neighbor even worse. In the vast majority of these cases, we're talking about a real estate agent (or her photographer) usually popping some small, comparatively very safe, quiet machine like a DJI Phantom 3 up into the air for a quick few minutes while it does a quick lap around a house for some exteriors that show the lay of the land, to add to a listing. In a more packed-in suburban setting, yes - for a useful perspective, the picture of the house they're listing is going to be taken from a short distance over the property line, so it's not a straight look-down a la Google.
But no. This brilliant piece of legislation means that now the photographer is going to have to use a heavier-lifting machine (larger hex or octo) that can carry a much heavier gimbal tweaked to carry a larger camera with a better sensor and a longer focal length lens. This rig will be heavier, and so the machine carrying it will be much more powerful (and, in the event of an accident, more dangerous), much louder, and much more annoying to use and to see in use. But someone selling a two million dollar house isn't going to blink at using (or hiring someone to use) such a device in order to continue to benefit from the now fully expected aerials of an expensive piece of real estate. So instead of having a humming little 4-pound plastic toy like a Phantom buzz around the house shooting perfectly good material, we'll have a 20-pound carbon fiber beastie with large CF props growling around at 350'... and we'll have a new market for stabilized longer-focal-length camera platforms which will thrill the one-in-a-million actual creeps and paparazzi that everyone thinks this law is going to shut down.
California: for a place with so many smart people, it sure is dumb.
So, you're intending to use the alcohol to melt the surface of the filament-printed medical devices so that they aren't abrasive? Or will you also be shipping sandpaper, polishing compound, etc., along with the other materials, to leverage these absurdly slow-to-make rough pieces of plastic you intend to insert into women?
Or, any one of these enterprising hipsters could drop a note to the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, who could arrange to buy 10,000 of them wholesale for a tenth of that amount and have them delivered along with all of the supporting supplies and a commitment from an actual trained professional to show up and train people on how to use them. And they'll still work when there's no power for that ridiculous 3D printer (which, by the way, isn't going to make something like that with anything CLOSE to a smooth enough, or sterile enough surface to be appropriate to the task).
We're worried about people being able to afford a speculum (they cost about $0.90 each at retail) so we're... suggesting they just fire up their handy 3D printer?
they do not send you a bill that says "We sent you item A and item B, and we are charging your credit card X and Y". No, they just charge you account. And they send an email "Oh, we just shipped A and C."
Everything you want to know is right there under the "My Account" button, including per-shipment invoice display with charge details reconciled to every charge and shipping event. The only reason you aren't talking about that is because you're either trying to spread some FUD, or you're suggesting that you've been a customer of theirs through multiple orders, and couldn't ever bother to click on a "see details" link.
You are supposed to obediently pay whatever they feel like charging your account.
Ah, it's not laziness, then. This is demonstrably not true, even for someone giving it a casual look. For some reason, you're just trolling.
Also known as busy, intelligent people who have finally realized that there are finite minutes ticking away in their finite lives, and that if their time is worth anything at all, there are better ways to spend it than taking extra time to save a few pennies on a product they buy once in a while, but would rather not find themselves running out of. You're splitting hairs over $3, when that amount is completely lost in the noise of what a typical Amazon shopper's income and expenses looks like. I'd rather not crowd my brain with to-do lists and app fiddling. My brain is more valuable to me, even while doing laundry, contemplating the things I'm supposed to be doing for my customers, who pay me at least 50 times that $3 per hour to think for them. I could not be happier knowing that Amazon makes good money off of me. They provide me what I consider to be an incredibly valuable service: they sell me time.
So if you're running, say, a law firm... and someone uses a 15-ton piece of construction equipment and a crew of ten people to show in the middle of the night, smash the roof off your office building and crane-lift the 1,000-pound safe out of your office (thus losing you control over sensitive customer information), you'd consider yourself to be at fault for that loss? Be specific, on that exact scenario.
Careful, your tinfoil is on pretty tight there. And you're slipping. Where's the link to a discussion about the temperatures at which steel melts? Who's going to take you seriously if you don't talk about that? And chemtrails, of course. Haliburton Chemtrails.
so I guess you wanted Scooter Libby tarred and feathered when he disclosed the name of a CIA operative.
Either you're much to ignorant about an event that you can research in moments with a few keystrokes (in which case, please resist commenting in your ignorance), or you know that what you said is a simple straightforward lie, and you're saying it anyway (in which case, what do you think you're actually accomplishing when everyone else around you knows you're lying like a little kid who thinks he's clever)? Trotting out pure fiction like that just makes you, and what ever point you think you're making, look foolish. Just stop it.
Bullshit ass-hole. You like Condoleezza Rice should have known terrorists would hijack a plan and crash it into the Trade Towers.....
You mean the terrorists who hatched that plan and were working on it under the Clinton administration? Those terrorists? The ones who were answering to Bin Laden, a person that the Clinton administration let slip through their fingers more than once, even after his group and associates had already killed hundreds of people, including US Navy personnel? Yeah.
No, somebody is making perfectly valid observations that call into question those who are attempting to help Hillary by excusing her behavior and contempt for the rest of us by saying she's old. Those are observations that could be made by a Biden supporter, a Sanders supporter, or a Jindal supporter... or by anyone that simply finds her career of duplicitous hypocrisy under the cover of a fawning media to be simply too much, for too long.
I find that hanging out with even a couple of them makes for a better party than a room full of twits who want to talk about reality TV shows and their aunt's new homeopathy success stories.
He probably is, because he goes to parties full of intellectually curious people. If you think that's annoying, your baseline for normal must be binge drinking at the Alpha Omega Dementia frat house.
Slashdot Mirror
To say nothing about the ridiculous price. Especially for a service that's unlikely to be used in any given month. F'em all.
If it's not working all the time, it's not working. That's the whole point of these systems. A lot of what it offers (like, knowing where your 85 year old grandpa's car is when he's late coming back from golfing and not answering his phone) isn't useful if it's only online and using its SIM card and burning some bandwidth when the driver decides just that moment to turn it on. If $15 bucks for a mobile device's connectivity and use of their services is too much for you, just don't buy it. There are plenty of people who would like some OnStar-type services on a vehicle that wasn't factory equipped for it, and the cost of two sandwiches a month is simply no big deal.
You think commercial operation will be better
Yes. My experience in observing the habits and practices of both suggests very strongly that enthusiastic recreational multirotor fliers aren't nearly as thoughtful about things as are commercial users. Most recreational fliers are used to operating in very sedate, controlled spaces like AMA fields. Commercial operators are thinking about way, way more factors before, during, and after a planned flight.
No, you're not following, and/or sorry if I wasn't clear enough. I'm talking about neighbors complaining about their house being visible in shots taken from the ground with a traditional camera. There are always wackadoos.
Because somebody has to talk to the neighbors in advance, and you may not get a response if you pop by in the middle of the day?
Which is exactly how that tends to work in the real world. I get fairly positive responses when there's a human to talk to.
Who said I'm a realtor? That's the first of several bad assumptions on your part.
Well THAT response went to the wrong post! Sorry.
... the logistics of catching a neighbor at home are often very frustrating.
But as I mentioned in another reply in this thread
Or you know, they could get permission from the neighbor! ... Usually permission for stuff like this is trivial to get.
Speaking from years of experience, I can assure you that it is NOT easy to get. When a realtor makes arrangements for a photographer or a video crew to come and document a property, coordinating with two, three, or four neighbors on logistics, timing, and permission is usually impossible. We try to educate neighbors of clients along these lines: "We'll have a small 4-pound plastic quadcopter, about the size of a large pizza, moving just over your property line, right above tree top level, looking back at the house we're photographing - we'll be in that position over your property for about 30 seconds, and of course we won't do that until there's nobody out in your yard that might be uncomfortable with that. Would you like to see some video of how we operate so you understand what's involved? We'd also be happy to provide you with some free images of your own house, just for fun, that you can use in any way you'd like. If you'd like to look over our shoulders while we're operating, so you can see what we can and can't see through the camera, you're very welcome to..."
Most people are intrigued by the technology, some become very enthusiastic and say things like, "Hey, while you're up there, can you check our chimney, and our gutters?" (which we're always happy to do, no charge). But perhaps one in twenty people shut down their brains the moment they hear "camera" - sometimes even just ground cameras. I've had people yell at us because they don't think we should be allowed to depict the for-sale house if the shot includes a view of their property in the background. You can't EVER get permission from people that irrational, and instead have to point out that we have every right to shoot from the street and that anything in simple view from the street has no expectation of privacy.
Speaking of which, this new legislation seems to be silent on flying cameras above the street and other public right of ways. More absurdity.
Uhh, how's that? The legislation specifically says "without the owners approval". Realtors will have the approval.
Wow, you really don't get it, do you? The issue isn't the house that's being photographed. It's that for a useful perspective, you almost always need to stray off of the property that's being photographed, and over some adjoining property. The realtor doesn't always have the luxury of arranging written permission from someone who's away at work or otherwise unavailable just so their 4-pound quadcopter can stray over the neighbor's trees to look back at a for-sale house for 15 seconds.
It's clear that you have never had any involvement in any activity along these lines.
Oh by the way, the aerial view? Deliberately intended to be misleading. It's the ultimate approach to picking a camera angle to create a misleading photo.
Yeah, like I said. You have no idea what you're talking about. I shoot this sort of stuff professionally. I can be misleading if I want using equipment on the ground or in the air, or through things done in post production regardless of how the image was originally captured. Or I can be honest about it ... because, you know, people who are buying million dollar houses actually look at them in person before they write a check. I get it, you're trolling.
Back in the 90's, you didn't have things with cameras flying over your backyard
But you did have nosy neighbors, kids who climb trees, bird photographers with 1000' lenses ... the usual. Are you having a problem, now, with people flying multirotors low enough around your back yard to actually (really) invade your privacy? How often is this happening to you? There are literally millions of them in use.
Whatever idiot came up with this proposal is completely uninformed.
... and we'll have a new market for stabilized longer-focal-length camera platforms which will thrill the one-in-a-million actual creeps and paparazzi that everyone thinks this law is going to shut down.
First, they're not saying you can't fly over someone's property without permission. They're just saying you have to do it above 350 feet. Of course the FAA says you have to keep it under 400 feet, so this absurd law forces the drone operator to work closer to the general aviation deck, and to have to fuss about keeping their equipment in an unnecessarily narrow 50' band. Operating over hilly terrain? Double plus difficult for no reason.
Secondly, all this does is make what would annoy a neighbor even worse. In the vast majority of these cases, we're talking about a real estate agent (or her photographer) usually popping some small, comparatively very safe, quiet machine like a DJI Phantom 3 up into the air for a quick few minutes while it does a quick lap around a house for some exteriors that show the lay of the land, to add to a listing. In a more packed-in suburban setting, yes - for a useful perspective, the picture of the house they're listing is going to be taken from a short distance over the property line, so it's not a straight look-down a la Google.
But no. This brilliant piece of legislation means that now the photographer is going to have to use a heavier-lifting machine (larger hex or octo) that can carry a much heavier gimbal tweaked to carry a larger camera with a better sensor and a longer focal length lens. This rig will be heavier, and so the machine carrying it will be much more powerful (and, in the event of an accident, more dangerous), much louder, and much more annoying to use and to see in use. But someone selling a two million dollar house isn't going to blink at using (or hiring someone to use) such a device in order to continue to benefit from the now fully expected aerials of an expensive piece of real estate. So instead of having a humming little 4-pound plastic toy like a Phantom buzz around the house shooting perfectly good material, we'll have a 20-pound carbon fiber beastie with large CF props growling around at 350'
California: for a place with so many smart people, it sure is dumb.
So, you're intending to use the alcohol to melt the surface of the filament-printed medical devices so that they aren't abrasive? Or will you also be shipping sandpaper, polishing compound, etc., along with the other materials, to leverage these absurdly slow-to-make rough pieces of plastic you intend to insert into women?
Or, any one of these enterprising hipsters could drop a note to the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, who could arrange to buy 10,000 of them wholesale for a tenth of that amount and have them delivered along with all of the supporting supplies and a commitment from an actual trained professional to show up and train people on how to use them. And they'll still work when there's no power for that ridiculous 3D printer (which, by the way, isn't going to make something like that with anything CLOSE to a smooth enough, or sterile enough surface to be appropriate to the task).
We're worried about people being able to afford a speculum (they cost about $0.90 each at retail) so we're ... suggesting they just fire up their handy 3D printer?
they do not send you a bill that says "We sent you item A and item B, and we are charging your credit card X and Y". No, they just charge you account. And they send an email "Oh, we just shipped A and C."
Everything you want to know is right there under the "My Account" button, including per-shipment invoice display with charge details reconciled to every charge and shipping event. The only reason you aren't talking about that is because you're either trying to spread some FUD, or you're suggesting that you've been a customer of theirs through multiple orders, and couldn't ever bother to click on a "see details" link.
You are supposed to obediently pay whatever they feel like charging your account.
Ah, it's not laziness, then. This is demonstrably not true, even for someone giving it a casual look. For some reason, you're just trolling.
Everything you just said is exactly correct. The person to whom you were responding is either uninformed, or disingenuous (or both).
they're great for the ultra-lazy
Also known as busy, intelligent people who have finally realized that there are finite minutes ticking away in their finite lives, and that if their time is worth anything at all, there are better ways to spend it than taking extra time to save a few pennies on a product they buy once in a while, but would rather not find themselves running out of. You're splitting hairs over $3, when that amount is completely lost in the noise of what a typical Amazon shopper's income and expenses looks like. I'd rather not crowd my brain with to-do lists and app fiddling. My brain is more valuable to me, even while doing laundry, contemplating the things I'm supposed to be doing for my customers, who pay me at least 50 times that $3 per hour to think for them. I could not be happier knowing that Amazon makes good money off of me. They provide me what I consider to be an incredibly valuable service: they sell me time.
You say this like you believe it
No, he says it like it's true. Which it is.
So if you're running, say, a law firm ... and someone uses a 15-ton piece of construction equipment and a crew of ten people to show in the middle of the night, smash the roof off your office building and crane-lift the 1,000-pound safe out of your office (thus losing you control over sensitive customer information), you'd consider yourself to be at fault for that loss? Be specific, on that exact scenario.
Careful, your tinfoil is on pretty tight there. And you're slipping. Where's the link to a discussion about the temperatures at which steel melts? Who's going to take you seriously if you don't talk about that? And chemtrails, of course. Haliburton Chemtrails.
so I guess you wanted Scooter Libby tarred and feathered when he disclosed the name of a CIA operative.
Either you're much to ignorant about an event that you can research in moments with a few keystrokes (in which case, please resist commenting in your ignorance), or you know that what you said is a simple straightforward lie, and you're saying it anyway (in which case, what do you think you're actually accomplishing when everyone else around you knows you're lying like a little kid who thinks he's clever)? Trotting out pure fiction like that just makes you, and what ever point you think you're making, look foolish. Just stop it.
Bullshit ass-hole. You like Condoleezza Rice should have known terrorists would hijack a plan and crash it into the Trade Towers.....
You mean the terrorists who hatched that plan and were working on it under the Clinton administration? Those terrorists? The ones who were answering to Bin Laden, a person that the Clinton administration let slip through their fingers more than once, even after his group and associates had already killed hundreds of people, including US Navy personnel? Yeah.
Somebody is a Trump supporter....
No, somebody is making perfectly valid observations that call into question those who are attempting to help Hillary by excusing her behavior and contempt for the rest of us by saying she's old. Those are observations that could be made by a Biden supporter, a Sanders supporter, or a Jindal supporter ... or by anyone that simply finds her career of duplicitous hypocrisy under the cover of a fawning media to be simply too much, for too long.
or a failure in reasoning
You just typed the word "or" in your own sentence, and don't actually know what that words means, do you?
I find that hanging out with even a couple of them makes for a better party than a room full of twits who want to talk about reality TV shows and their aunt's new homeopathy success stories.
You must be a hit at parties
He probably is, because he goes to parties full of intellectually curious people. If you think that's annoying, your baseline for normal must be binge drinking at the Alpha Omega Dementia frat house.