I’ll see your Nena and raise you a Kevin
Covered this in an earlier thread and I really don’t wish to rehash this. However, since there have been an increase of near misses reported by pilots, the idiots who play chicken with planes have made it an issue for the majority of safe drones users. Drones are just as likely to cause problems with an engine as birds, perhaps more because birds are organic matter.
If you’d like to volunteer your services as a test dummy, by all means let Boeing and Airbus know.
As an airline mechanic once told me: shit happens with your car and you pull over; shit happens with an aircraft and it falls out of the sky and slams into earth.
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They can have my “drones” when they take them out of the cold, dead shoebox that both of them and their controllers, batteries and USB charging cables are sitting in.
With an operating ceiling of approximately 12 feet and a flying time of about 9 minutes per charge, I don’t think my tiny quadcopters are a threat to aviation. Maybe to myself if I manage to fly one directly into my eye or something.
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Fwiw, the FAA isn’t stupid; they are planning on exemptions for “toys”, which in my mind would involve some sort of consideration of range, payload, or purpose.
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Actually, bird strikes can be quite serious. They usually damage and can sometimes destroy an engine. Most jets are multi-engine and can (usually) ‘limp back’ with one blown engine - but with multiple strikes you can end up with an airliner in the Hudson River.
Modern commercial jet engines must be able to shut down safely after ingesting a bird weighing up to 4 lbs. (The engine may be damaged or destroyed, but it must shut down safely, and not, you know, blow up and destroy the whole plane or anything.)
These new FAA rules apply to unmanned aircraft weighing up to 55 lbs.
Which are usually made of much tougher materials than your average bird.
You really, really don’t want to be on a plane that sucks a 30-lb camera drone into an engine.
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Your counter example is stupid. Installing software on something “to keep you safe” (or whatever) is qualitatively different than asking people to publicly declare ownership of a piece of hardware that can cause serious damage to stuff.
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Your breed of kind of anti-government fear-mongering is informed by exactly the same kind of rhetoric the gun nuts use.
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If I do decide to play along with your slippery slope rebuttal, then the obvious response is that it is the government’s job to draw lines. I know anarchism sounds all cool and edgy, but in practice I am rather happy that we have many of the laws that we do.
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You did:
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I’m not suggesting Anarchy.
We also don’t need laws for every god damn little thing in the world.
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Next thing you know they will want us to register our Guns!
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dingdingdingdingdingdingdingdingdingding
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How about for those of us who do not believe in ownership or property? Ever try to register the communal neighborhood car? I don’t like a massive proliferation of weapons. But so far as I am concerned government property is public property, to whatever extent property can be spoken of.
Meanwhile, we’ve got a government which seems to want to apply a double standard of avoiding accountability for its use of drones to deliberately kill people (on our behalf, ostensibly), while insisting that the average person register their drones as a responsible course of action.
Sorry, but no. I would rather be killed in an honest accident than be deliberately manipulated.
Insofar as US law treats military issues as completely separate from civil issues, this isn’t really intrinsically contradictory; for example, people aren’t allowed to own tactical nukes, but the military has tons of 'em.
Don’t get me wrong! I am totally against militarized drone use and the culture of accepting civilian deaths as “collateral damage”, but thar is still a very different issue from private drone use.
If we are so worried about aviation safety, we should be regulating laser pointers. And also those things you hold in your hand that make a loud bang and launch a chunk of lead at high velocity. Anything that puts people’s lives at risk in the air.
Seems to me drones should be dealt with in the same way. If someone’s doing something stupid and dangerous, find them, arrest them and charge them.
No need to keep a giant unworkable database of everyone who owns something that can fly.
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Man, I hate it when my conspiracy theories turn out to be predictions.
Is… is having to register your car fascist? I can take @popobawa4u’s point that inflexible bureaucracy can make perfectly valid ownership models difficult and that sucks. But establishing ownership of property for such purposes as legal liability is totally normal, and an important part of how many of us expect society to function in cases where e.g. someone decides they don’t want their shitty old communal car no more so they leave it sitting on the side of a residential street for someone else to deal with.
In other words for large communal societies to work we expect people to take responsibility for their actions, and that extends to taking responsibility for their property. In the communal car example supposing that nobody takes responsibility for maintaining the car and the brakes fail and it runs out of control into a bus full of elderly schoolchildren. Who’s at fault? Everybody? Nobody? Do I have to do a full fitness test every time I get behind the wheel to avoid liability? And by the way, how do you tell if the car is stolen?
In the case of drones I can think of about half a dozen crimes off the top of my head where the anonymous viewpoint they provide would be helpful. Studies have shown that people are more comfortable committing acts of aggression if you give them a mask and I’d argue that the same psychology comes in to play with drones. Flying around the neighbourhood peering in windows has that much more dark appeal than creeping around the neighbourhood in person, and in a couple of years you’ll pick up a long-range drone with camera for under $50 and if anyone sees it you just turn off the remote and abandon ship.
The comparison of registration to mass surveillance is absurd. The idea that one is a slippery slope to the other sounds a bit silly too considering how well and fucking truly bolted is that horse. I’d like to see significant dismantling of the infrastructure that’s been revealed by Snowden and others but I don’t think this is part of that. This is just giving a name and address and an ID on a bit of paper when you buy a drone and I think that alone will be enough to make some people think twice about what they do with it.
Honestly I wonder if the push-back isn’t just people daydreaming about all the cool shit they’d like to do with a drone who are sad because now there are stupid dumb boring rules.
Let’s separate the toys from the serious big-ticket stuff - there are drones and then there are drones…
That itsy-bitsy hand-held thing with a range of 200ft is one thing, and the Amazon delivery thingamajig is another. The first, we need to regulate like we regulate bicycles, the second, probably like automobiles. I’m thinking weight classes, range and other criteria to figure out what needs regulation and what doesn’t.
Probably we’ll eventually need a drone-pilot’s license to complement the instrument registration too - to ensure that the guy flying it knows how to handle it.
But we need to balance all that out, so that innovation doesn’t get hogtied. I have no clue how to do that…
If I’m giving the Libertarians an apoplectic fit, so be it! 
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I agree that people are accountable for their actions. But there is no accounting for property because it is a fiction. A relationship between numerous people is fine, but a relationship between a person and an object is only in the head of that person. Laws which buy into notions of property don’t only enforce an accountability which already exists anyway. but they also require people to function with a certain level of selfishness, by stressing attachments to things.
I AM my “ID”. The simple scheme you outline already presents the problems of working against nomads, and assuming commerce.
It’s great that people make rules and are accountable to each other. But to some people, having rules imposed by others and being accountable to them is not an acceptable option in any circumstances.
So supposing five people are sharing a car. One of them decides to sell it, and after a bit of arguing gives some of the money to two of the others. Was the car stolen? How should the police deal with the issue? How can we assure any protection for people like the two who got left out?
My point of view is that it’s trying to separate actions from property that’s the fiction, or more generally trying to make arguments about common, broadly understood and agreed-on ideas being fictions. You can say the same thing for monetary value, contracts, parental responsibility, language and communication in any form, life and death and human beings themselves and at that point you can’t legislate for murder any more and you have to throw out everything from the Hammurabi Code onwards.
What you’re saying might be fundamentally true but it’s just not consistent with any kind of model where you’d also like to reason about human beings as being entities that have attributes and do stuff. Actions are a relationship between subjects and objects. It seems inconsistent to me that you go from talking about property as a fiction then talk about identity as if it’s something built into the laws of the universe itself.
I do agree that over-legislation can change peoples’ behaviour for the worse. But I would say that my definition of identity is more flexible than yours and writing a few details on a bit of paper doesn’t worry me too much. Anyone who needs a drone for ‘special purposes’ badly enough will still be able to find what they’re looking for because no, in the end the piece of paper isn’t the same thing as the owner of the drone. It just means that hobbyists and frat boys who want to fuck around with a dumb toy will be reminded that their fingerprints are on it. Sometimes the right amount of legislation can change peoples’ behaviour for the better.
I’m interested as to how you think legislation for driver licensing should work for nomads. Do they not get to drive cars or do they get to drive without certification?
Just as an FYI - I find it helps, when discussing with popo, to presume that you are having a discussion with an alien who doesn’t understand how humans work. Because that’s how most interactions seem to go.
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