You are not making any sense now. I told you that most places don't have sight seeing helicopters. You responded by asking how people that are getting into helicopters that don't exist know if it is safe or not.
Most places don' t have interesting sites to see. If there are a lot of low flying sight-seeing helicopters around places like the ones you mentioned then maybe those places need extra LOCAL regulations. That isn't an good excuse to saddle the entire nation with the least common denominator sort of restrictive rule set. The United States may not be the biggest nation on the planet but it is still a very large place with a lot of surface area. We don't all need to be limited by the needs of a small minority!
Furthermore.. even where sight seeing helicopters ARE common.. that doesn't give their pilots and passengers an exclusive right to the air. Think of it this way, what if personal drones had been available and practical first, before your helicoptor tours started. We would be having the opposite conversation with encumbant drone users trying to keep the helicopters out ot THEIR skies. This is foolish, you can't own the air. Any rules should be well balanced allowing all interested parties a chance to do their thing.
Even if what you say is a good way to handle things.. (plenty of other people arguing against that, no need for me to)
Would you really start at step 1 when this is an issue which has been happening with other officers in the same department and getting press coverage, attention of the mayor, etc...? Shouldn't they pretty much all know better at this point? Wouldn't you think this is pretty much beyond the "warning" phase?
The vast majority of the country does not have sight-seeing helicopters flying overhead. Maybe you live in one of those places and so it is normal for you? Don't regulate the whole nation by the most extreme needs of a few places! use local regulations for that.
"Second, are you talking about a small radio controlled quad copter that you fly only via visual observation, or via remote link? Not all RC aircraft are "drones", some are just RC aircraft."
Small.. definitely. I don't know many people who can afford to buy the big drones the millitary uses.
Radio controlled? Most of the time. Line of sight? The kid across the street loses sight of his quad copter all the time. When the battery gets low or it loses communication with his remote it automatically flies back to him. That shouldn't be outlawed!
I want home hacker/dyi enthusiasts "makers" if you will to be free to attempt to automate their little quad copters if they want to. That would make them drones would it not? Or.. fly by camera. Maximum weights and heights could definitely apply but they shouldn't be so small or low to keep people from experimenting. I'm not arguing that just anybody who wants too should get to fly full sized aircraft over a population!
"even a 5lb object" Outside of millitary circles 5 lbs would be pretty big. I'm thinking maybe 1/2 lb on the REALLY big side, probably far less. That could probably kill too if it were a 1/2 lb brick but this weight would be lightweight materials all spread out among a lot of parts. Picture a quad copter, the weight is divided up among motors which are pushed out to the edges and the electronics in the middle. Most of it is just free space between a stick frame. I don't think it's going to achieve anything close to terminal velocity unless you drop it in a vacuum and if it hits you it's probably going to be a glancing blow with only one of the motors actually getting you.
"The farmer is free to buy his own aircraft and fly it around taking pictures of his own field all he likes, no commercial operation there."
Umm.. no! I'm pretty sure it was right here on Slashdot, probably been a year or so there was an article about that. The farmer's field IS his business. He was using some sort of drone to check the state of his fields and plan watering, fertilizing or pestiside spray or something like that. The FAA shut him down because using it on his field made it commercial.
For the most part I really think you and I are picturing something entirely different. That doesn't matter because the FAA is trying to take everything and regulate it as though it all the same. Your kinds of rules might make sense IF they are tempered by only applying to things beyond a certain size/weight. They also might be relaxed a little far away from airports. Even more in really unpopulated places. Does rural Montanna need the same rules as NYC and DC for example?
Ugh.. my inlaws came to live with us. They never had a ton of money and yet they never learned to conserve any either! (not an uncommon combination IMHO) Anyway lights are on all over all the time, the washing machine and drier never stop. Are those really full loads? If so then how many outfit does one person need to wear in a day? Dishes are washed every meal plus several times between(no I'm not advocated re-using them dirty but they could be kept dirty in the sink and cleaned once with one load of water at the end of the day). A whole sink of hot water is ran any time there is even a cup or some silver ware from a snack in the sink!
They do a lot of work for us, I do appreciate that but an increase of merely 20% the number of people previously in the house has trippled our utility bills!
They may not be protesting for protecting the environment much but in many poor places, maybe the majority they are getting sick and dying young from exposure to polluted water and/or air. But.. hey.. the environment is a first-world problem. Just shut up and send them some bags of grain right?
If you really want clean air the best thing you can do is move to an isolated mountaintop.
If you meant clean air for the planet, not just yourself then your car is probably not the place to start. Use less electricity. That's where the majority of the air pollution comes from. Cars are a visible source of pollution, you see them everywhere but your daily drive might not take you past the local coal plant. Don't let that bias your thinking. Most of the pollution is from there, not from your car.
Start turning off any lights you don't need. Get up with the sun, go to bed earlier. (man I hate that one). Upgrade your computer to one that uses less power. Unplug all the wallwarts to your rarely used devices. Take shorter showers or colder ones. Etc.. Etc...
While you are at it, if you are an anti-nuclear protester do your protesting closer to the reactor. Remove yourself from the gene pool. We have you to thank for many of those coal plants. If your'e a coal miner.. stop protesting against alternative energy. My god, that job is no doubt giving you cancer anyway. Stop clinging to it so tightly. Don't let your bosses get you so riled up about protecting coal either. They are just using you and will throw your wheezing, cancer ridden body away when you can't dig anymore anyway! Go find yourself a better life!
Sorry but that's just how it is going to be. Buying a newer car doesn't make any sense. They are far too expensive and they lose their value far too quickly. Even with occasional repairs for an older car and gas being expensive a new car is still just a money sucking black hole.
If you are worried about the price of gas just buy a smaller old car. If you are worried about the environment you probably shouldn't be thinking about a new car anyway.
The materials and parts are mined and built in separate places all over the planet. Your car probably has probably traveled more miles right off the factory line than it will in the first 10 years it is driven. Pollution was generated all along it's path. So.. if you are worried about the environment keep driving the jalopy and give some of the savings to an environmentally friendly charity.
Cash for clunkers was nothing but a thinly veiled donation to the auto industry.
Bike lanes are a horrible idea. Bikes are not cars! They should not mix with cars in traffic. It's better to just let them up on the sidewalk. Most sidewalks aren't that occupied with walkers anyway. On the occasion that a biker and a walker do collide... injury. Car or truck and bike... death. Think about it.
The exception... I'm not talking about big metropolitan areas. That is a different world from the majority of land area. There the sidewalks really are full of people, the traffic is slower and drivers are more expecting there to be non-cars on the road.
I agree that horizontal scrolling sucks. I still use a portrait monitor for most web browsing. It's a decent sized monitor with decent resolution. I hardly ever have to scroll horizontally. I wonder what resolution you tried it at! I do have dual monitors though, one is landscape. On the rare occasion I have to scroll horizontally i just drag it over.
That's how html was originaly designed to work. It was a vehicle for content, not design. Content would be displayed by the browser in whatever way made the most sense for the device it was being displayed on.
Then the older, geeky computer users whom were actually there to read meaningful content became outnumbered by the artsy designers selling fluff to the masses. They demanded the ability to paint a pretty much by-pixel image of what was in their little heads on their user's screens.
And some guy in the middle of nowhere in Montanna should have the same regulations applied to him as someone stroling along the beach next to a major national airport why???
Your strange wind day excuse is still limited to an area around a runway, even if it is a larger area than a layman might predict. There can certainly be laws that only apply within a certain distance of a runway. This is common in laws regarding antenna height for example. That is not a reason to restrict everyone nationwide!
As for the helicopter, I still think it would be very disruptive to have helicopters flying low wherever they feel like it. I did use to live within sight of a lifeflight landing pad. It was enough to blow branches out of trees!
Also, what happens if these vulnerable helicopters hit a bird? A bird is bigger and heavier than most personal drones.
Crop dusters fly over private property. The farmer should not be playing with his drone the same day as he hires the crop duster. I really doubt NASA is flying that low over populated areas. I'm pretty sure most people would be pretty pissed to have something that close to their homes.
And how much schooling do you need to be able to get that certificate? I suppose that's free right? How about all those hours of flight required to keep it? Yeah, that airplane fuel is peanuts!
All this just so I can take a few pictures with a little quad copter that is too small to hurt anyone at an event I happen to be charging admission to?
Or how about the farmer who wants to monitor his own damn fields that nobody else has any business being in? Good thing the FAA is there to protect the company he will have to hire!
If I went to an event and someone was taking pictures of the crowd with a typical quad-copter / go-pro setup and it fell and hit me in the head how bad would it be! What do those things weigh, 1/8 lb? Less? How fast do they go? How much of the blow would be absorbed by the flexing of the vehicle's frame? Sorry but I just don't see that this is a big boogey man I need to be afraid of! I'd be far more concerned about getting hit by a ball at a baseball game. Should the FAA start regulating sports?
Now.. if the FAA wanted to do split "drone" into some reasonable classes where the free-for all anybody can do whatever they want ones are small, light-weight and maybe even require some padding I'd be all for that. But why bother? The only people so far to be flying anything that would fall in the bigger classes are the military and a few police departments. They are going to just do whatever they please anyway!
Pretty much shutting down arial photography to anyone without a pilots license, which by the way is a VERY expensive thing to obtain is just protectionist bullshit.
Yeah, I'm going to lose a friend or family member because some kid decided to automate his quadcopter with a raspi or an arduino. Dream on! If that ever happens WTF was the pilot doing flying so low?!?!? This sounds more like an excuse to lock others out of your playground.
How are we under attack? When did Isis or Syria ever even send anyone to our hemisphere let alone specifically our nation? I think AC has inhaled a bit too much Faux News.
Slashdot Mirror
You are not making any sense now. I told you that most places don't have sight seeing helicopters. You responded by asking how people that are getting into helicopters that don't exist know if it is safe or not.
Most places don' t have interesting sites to see. If there are a lot of low flying sight-seeing helicopters around places like the ones you mentioned then maybe those places need extra LOCAL regulations. That isn't an good excuse to saddle the entire nation with the least common denominator sort of restrictive rule set. The United States may not be the biggest nation on the planet but it is still a very large place with a lot of surface area. We don't all need to be limited by the needs of a small minority!
Furthermore.. even where sight seeing helicopters ARE common.. that doesn't give their pilots and passengers an exclusive right to the air. Think of it this way, what if personal drones had been available and practical first, before your helicoptor tours started. We would be having the opposite conversation with encumbant drone users trying to keep the helicopters out ot THEIR skies. This is foolish, you can't own the air. Any rules should be well balanced allowing all interested parties a chance to do their thing.
No, put the C on their backs where it will be more visible in the shower.
Even if what you say is a good way to handle things.. (plenty of other people arguing against that, no need for me to)
Would you really start at step 1 when this is an issue which has been happening with other officers in the same department and getting press coverage, attention of the mayor, etc...? Shouldn't they pretty much all know better at this point? Wouldn't you think this is pretty much beyond the "warning" phase?
The vast majority of the country does not have sight-seeing helicopters flying overhead. Maybe you live in one of those places and so it is normal for you? Don't regulate the whole nation by the most extreme needs of a few places! use local regulations for that.
"Second, are you talking about a small radio controlled quad copter that you fly only via visual observation, or via remote link? Not all RC aircraft are "drones", some are just RC aircraft."
Small.. definitely. I don't know many people who can afford to buy the big drones the millitary uses.
Radio controlled? Most of the time. Line of sight? The kid across the street loses sight of his quad copter all the time. When the battery gets low or it loses communication with his remote it automatically flies back to him. That shouldn't be outlawed!
I want home hacker/dyi enthusiasts "makers" if you will to be free to attempt to automate their little quad copters if they want to. That would make them drones would it not? Or.. fly by camera. Maximum weights and heights could definitely apply but they shouldn't be so small or low to keep people from experimenting. I'm not arguing that just anybody who wants too should get to fly full sized aircraft over a population!
"even a 5lb object"
Outside of millitary circles 5 lbs would be pretty big. I'm thinking maybe 1/2 lb on the REALLY big side, probably far less. That could probably kill too if it were a 1/2 lb brick but this weight would be lightweight materials all spread out among a lot of parts. Picture a quad copter, the weight is divided up among motors which are pushed out to the edges and the electronics in the middle. Most of it is just free space between a stick frame. I don't think it's going to achieve anything close to terminal velocity unless you drop it in a vacuum and if it hits you it's probably going to be a glancing blow with only one of the motors actually getting you.
"The farmer is free to buy his own aircraft and fly it around taking pictures of his own field all he likes, no commercial operation there."
Umm.. no! I'm pretty sure it was right here on Slashdot, probably been a year or so there was an article about that. The farmer's field IS his business. He was using some sort of drone to check the state of his fields and plan watering, fertilizing or pestiside spray or something like that. The FAA shut him down because using it on his field made it commercial.
For the most part I really think you and I are picturing something entirely different. That doesn't matter because the FAA is trying to take everything and regulate it as though it all the same. Your kinds of rules might make sense IF they are tempered by only applying to things beyond a certain size/weight. They also might be relaxed a little far away from airports. Even more in really unpopulated places. Does rural Montanna need the same rules as NYC and DC for example?
Most drones I have seen are not hard and metally, they are weak brittle plastic.
If seagulls are so bad how do they deal with them?
Ugh.. my inlaws came to live with us. They never had a ton of money and yet they never learned to conserve any either! (not an uncommon combination IMHO) Anyway lights are on all over all the time, the washing machine and drier never stop. Are those really full loads? If so then how many outfit does one person need to wear in a day? Dishes are washed every meal plus several times between(no I'm not advocated re-using them dirty but they could be kept dirty in the sink and cleaned once with one load of water at the end of the day). A whole sink of hot water is ran any time there is even a cup or some silver ware from a snack in the sink!
They do a lot of work for us, I do appreciate that but an increase of merely 20% the number of people previously in the house has trippled our utility bills!
They may not be protesting for protecting the environment much but in many poor places, maybe the majority they are getting sick and dying young from exposure to polluted water and/or air. But.. hey.. the environment is a first-world problem. Just shut up and send them some bags of grain right?
If you really want clean air the best thing you can do is move to an isolated mountaintop.
If you meant clean air for the planet, not just yourself then your car is probably not the place to start. Use less electricity. That's where the majority of the air pollution comes from. Cars are a visible source of pollution, you see them everywhere but your daily drive might not take you past the local coal plant. Don't let that bias your thinking. Most of the pollution is from there, not from your car.
Start turning off any lights you don't need. Get up with the sun, go to bed earlier. (man I hate that one). Upgrade your computer to one that uses less power. Unplug all the wallwarts to your rarely used devices. Take shorter showers or colder ones. Etc.. Etc...
While you are at it, if you are an anti-nuclear protester do your protesting closer to the reactor. Remove yourself from the gene pool. We have you to thank for many of those coal plants. If your'e a coal miner.. stop protesting against alternative energy. My god, that job is no doubt giving you cancer anyway. Stop clinging to it so tightly. Don't let your bosses get you so riled up about protecting coal either. They are just using you and will throw your wheezing, cancer ridden body away when you can't dig anymore anyway! Go find yourself a better life!
Sorry but that's just how it is going to be. Buying a newer car doesn't make any sense. They are far too expensive and they lose their value far too quickly. Even with occasional repairs for an older car and gas being expensive a new car is still just a money sucking black hole.
If you are worried about the price of gas just buy a smaller old car. If you are worried about the environment you probably shouldn't be thinking about a new car anyway.
The materials and parts are mined and built in separate places all over the planet. Your car probably has probably traveled more miles right off the factory line than it will in the first 10 years it is driven. Pollution was generated all along it's path. So.. if you are worried about the environment keep driving the jalopy and give some of the savings to an environmentally friendly charity.
Cash for clunkers was nothing but a thinly veiled donation to the auto industry.
Bike lanes are a horrible idea. Bikes are not cars! They should not mix with cars in traffic. It's better to just let them up on the sidewalk. Most sidewalks aren't that occupied with walkers anyway. On the occasion that a biker and a walker do collide... injury. Car or truck and bike... death. Think about it.
The exception... I'm not talking about big metropolitan areas. That is a different world from the majority of land area. There the sidewalks really are full of people, the traffic is slower and drivers are more expecting there to be non-cars on the road.
That's how it works in YOUR state. Neither of the states that I have lived in mandate any sort of emissions test.
I agree that horizontal scrolling sucks. I still use a portrait monitor for most web browsing. It's a decent sized monitor with decent resolution. I hardly ever have to scroll horizontally. I wonder what resolution you tried it at! I do have dual monitors though, one is landscape. On the rare occasion I have to scroll horizontally i just drag it over.
That's how html was originaly designed to work. It was a vehicle for content, not design. Content would be displayed by the browser in whatever way made the most sense for the device it was being displayed on.
Then the older, geeky computer users whom were actually there to read meaningful content became outnumbered by the artsy designers selling fluff to the masses. They demanded the ability to paint a pretty much by-pixel image of what was in their little heads on their user's screens.
Windows suck. Frames are so much better!!
Slow news day /.?
buy or build a real computer
And some guy in the middle of nowhere in Montanna should have the same regulations applied to him as someone stroling along the beach next to a major national airport why???
Your strange wind day excuse is still limited to an area around a runway, even if it is a larger area than a layman might predict. There can certainly be laws that only apply within a certain distance of a runway. This is common in laws regarding antenna height for example. That is not a reason to restrict everyone nationwide!
As for the helicopter, I still think it would be very disruptive to have helicopters flying low wherever they feel like it. I did use to live within sight of a lifeflight landing pad. It was enough to blow branches out of trees!
Also, what happens if these vulnerable helicopters hit a bird? A bird is bigger and heavier than most personal drones.
Crop dusters fly over private property. The farmer should not be playing with his drone the same day as he hires the crop duster. I really doubt NASA is flying that low over populated areas. I'm pretty sure most people would be pretty pissed to have something that close to their homes.
How dangerous can a little quad-copter be?
And how much schooling do you need to be able to get that certificate? I suppose that's free right? How about all those hours of flight required to keep it? Yeah, that airplane fuel is peanuts!
All this just so I can take a few pictures with a little quad copter that is too small to hurt anyone at an event I happen to be charging admission to?
Or how about the farmer who wants to monitor his own damn fields that nobody else has any business being in? Good thing the FAA is there to protect the company he will have to hire!
If I went to an event and someone was taking pictures of the crowd with a typical quad-copter / go-pro setup and it fell and hit me in the head how bad would it be! What do those things weigh, 1/8 lb? Less? How fast do they go? How much of the blow would be absorbed by the flexing of the vehicle's frame? Sorry but I just don't see that this is a big boogey man I need to be afraid of! I'd be far more concerned about getting hit by a ball at a baseball game. Should the FAA start regulating sports?
Now.. if the FAA wanted to do split "drone" into some reasonable classes where the free-for all anybody can do whatever they want ones are small, light-weight and maybe even require some padding I'd be all for that. But why bother? The only people so far to be flying anything that would fall in the bigger classes are the military and a few police departments. They are going to just do whatever they please anyway!
Pretty much shutting down arial photography to anyone without a pilots license, which by the way is a VERY expensive thing to obtain is just protectionist bullshit.
Yeah, I'm going to lose a friend or family member because some kid decided to automate his quadcopter with a raspi or an arduino. Dream on! If that ever happens WTF was the pilot doing flying so low?!?!? This sounds more like an excuse to lock others out of your playground.
How are we under attack? When did Isis or Syria ever even send anyone to our hemisphere let alone specifically our nation? I think AC has inhaled a bit too much Faux News.