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This is not valid reasoning. Under this logic, we could feasibly be just as alarmed by balconies of any sort or platforms at any height greater than one story.

This is not valid reasoning. Under this logic, we could feasibly be just as alarmed by balconies of any sort or platforms at any height greater than one story. [Edit]: Which is not to say that there are hurtling objects on these things, but that this is talking about What Happens Least, and there is just as much risk of something falling from a balcony or second+ story area as there is a drone falling mid-flight.

samfoo 15y ago
Which we are by way of building codes and regulations...
- esmevane 15y ago
  That's exactly what I'm getting at, here. The accusations of this being because there is an ominous police state is ludicrous when we could just put expectations of responsibility in place.
aaronblohowiak 15y ago
>This is not valid reasoning. Under this logic, we could feasibly be just as alarmed by balconies of any sort or platforms at any height greater than one story This is why we have building codes and regulations. Since the FAA did not have these regulations in place, it was disallowed (commercially.) Congress recently said "make the regulations" because it seems like there is enough demand to justify the increased burden on the taxpayer.
ericd 15y ago
There's a reason many sidewalks in NYC have sidewalk "sheds" covering them. Balconies usually aren't directly over places where people walk, for a reason. I'm guessing that this is due to laws. To drop something really dangerous off of a balcony usually requires malice or gross negligence, and that generally goes straight down. The operator of a drone with crappy safety systems might simply have to leave it flying for too long without noticing the fuel gauge is nearing empty. Once the FCC hashes out things like how drones should act automatically in safe ways such that untrained pilots can't easily kill multiple people with them by being slightly negligent or stupid, then I'm all for civilian drone flight.
- cookiecaper 15y ago
  I'm not sure I like the a priori nature assumed by the regulatory bodies. Why don't we legislate based on actual occurrences instead of just hypotheticals? I'm not sure why a law like this wouldn't work: "Any individual found to negligently operate a drone in a way that caused harm to persons or property will face jail time and fines". Isn't that effectively the same as regulating the machine specifically, but without all of the overhead, corruption, and limitations on creativity, and wouldn't the law actually have the same effect if persons found to operate drones in an unsafe manner were actually prosecuted? Wouldn't the market only accept safe drones due to the possibility of jail time? Just curious. Been kicking that line of thought around a lot as I've been in some creaky elevators recently.
  - asynchronous13 15y ago
    The FAA has always operated more like a white-list rather than a black-list. By default, nothing is allowed to fly in the national airspace. Then, regulations are added to allow a specific vehicle or a specific class of vehicles. At the moment, UAVs have not been white-listed, hence they are not legal.
  - jarek 15y ago
    As I see it, this is similar to food safety or mass-produced vehicle certification processes. Unfortunately, modern markets are empirically fairly poor at optimizing for long-term outcomes with all externalities accounted for (example off the top of my head: the Deepwater Horizon oil spill). When a major malfunction or accident does happen, no penalty or fine is really sufficient to bring about any meaningful sense of justice. (Think again the oil spill, or a tainted staple food poisoning tens of thousands of people, or to use a really cliché example, a malfunctioning UAV crashing into a group of kids playing at recess.) As the accidents are often due to incompetence or attempts at cost-cutting rather than outright malice, the deterrence factor of the penalty doesn't really apply – to those guilty, it just looks like they're taking the good kind of risk optimizing their systems until it's too late. The guilty corporation simply can go bankrupt and out of business, and finding and then charging personally responsible employees isn't always easy.
TeMPOraL 15y ago
Apart from other good points mentioned in comments, there's also this thing that in free-fall scenario (h = how high you object is above the ground, v = velocity, Ek = kinetic energy), v(h) ~ sqrt(h) thus Ek(h) ~ v^2 (h) ~ h Which means, the higher something starts, the more it will hurt when it hits your head.

samfoo 15y ago

Which we are by way of building codes and regulations...

esmevane 15y ago
That's exactly what I'm getting at, here. The accusations of this being because there is an ominous police state is ludicrous when we could just put expectations of responsibility in place.

aaronblohowiak 15y ago

>This is not valid reasoning. Under this logic, we could feasibly be just as alarmed by balconies of any sort or platforms at any height greater than one story This is why we have building codes and regulations. Since the FAA did not have these regulations in place, it was disallowed (commercially.) Congress recently said "make the regulations" because it seems like there is enough demand to justify the increased burden on the taxpayer.

ericd 15y ago

There's a reason many sidewalks in NYC have sidewalk "sheds" covering them. Balconies usually aren't directly over places where people walk, for a reason. I'm guessing that this is due to laws. To drop something really dangerous off of a balcony usually requires malice or gross negligence, and that generally goes straight down. The operator of a drone with crappy safety systems might simply have to leave it flying for too long without noticing the fuel gauge is nearing empty. Once the FCC hashes out things like how drones should act automatically in safe ways such that untrained pilots can't easily kill multiple people with them by being slightly negligent or stupid, then I'm all for civilian drone flight.

cookiecaper 15y ago
I'm not sure I like the a priori nature assumed by the regulatory bodies. Why don't we legislate based on actual occurrences instead of just hypotheticals? I'm not sure why a law like this wouldn't work: "Any individual found to negligently operate a drone in a way that caused harm to persons or property will face jail time and fines". Isn't that effectively the same as regulating the machine specifically, but without all of the overhead, corruption, and limitations on creativity, and wouldn't the law actually have the same effect if persons found to operate drones in an unsafe manner were actually prosecuted? Wouldn't the market only accept safe drones due to the possibility of jail time? Just curious. Been kicking that line of thought around a lot as I've been in some creaky elevators recently.
- asynchronous13 15y ago
  The FAA has always operated more like a white-list rather than a black-list. By default, nothing is allowed to fly in the national airspace. Then, regulations are added to allow a specific vehicle or a specific class of vehicles. At the moment, UAVs have not been white-listed, hence they are not legal.
- jarek 15y ago
  As I see it, this is similar to food safety or mass-produced vehicle certification processes. Unfortunately, modern markets are empirically fairly poor at optimizing for long-term outcomes with all externalities accounted for (example off the top of my head: the Deepwater Horizon oil spill). When a major malfunction or accident does happen, no penalty or fine is really sufficient to bring about any meaningful sense of justice. (Think again the oil spill, or a tainted staple food poisoning tens of thousands of people, or to use a really cliché example, a malfunctioning UAV crashing into a group of kids playing at recess.) As the accidents are often due to incompetence or attempts at cost-cutting rather than outright malice, the deterrence factor of the penalty doesn't really apply – to those guilty, it just looks like they're taking the good kind of risk optimizing their systems until it's too late. The guilty corporation simply can go bankrupt and out of business, and finding and then charging personally responsible employees isn't always easy.

TeMPOraL 15y ago

Apart from other good points mentioned in comments, there's also this thing that in free-fall scenario (h = how high you object is above the ground, v = velocity, Ek = kinetic energy), v(h) ~ sqrt(h) thus Ek(h) ~ v^2 (h) ~ h Which means, the higher something starts, the more it will hurt when it hits your head.