Drone-Based Businesses: Growing In Canada, Grounded In the US 94
An anonymous reader writes: As small drones become affordable, and as clever people come up with ideas on how to use them, we've been hearing about more and more plans for drone-based business. In the U.S., the Federal Aviation Administration was quick to shut down such ideas in order to give themselves time to regulate the nascent industry. Not so, in Canada. Thanks to a simple permit system, anyone wanting to use a drone for commercial purposes can do so in Canada by simply applying and waiting a few weeks. Around 1,500 of these permits have been granted already, and Canada's private drone industry is flourishing as a result. Drones have been used for agriculture analysis, TV production, real estate photography, law enforcement, and many other tasks.
So.... (Score:5, Funny)
Are they going to use the drones to keep people from the states from border crossing illegally to Canada where the jobs are?
Where will the Canadians go when we have taken up the service jobs that no one else wants? To the North Pole to fill in for Elf shit work?
Will it be underpaid people from the states assembling these drones? Drones assembling drones? I could drone on and on.
Re:So.... (Score:5, Funny)
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When did Canada do it the first time?
England was burned it down once but Canada hasn't been free that long.
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Grammar aside I think the word you were thinking of was "independent" not "free".
That being said, you're right that the British colonies in North America had nothing to do with the burning of the White House. It was the British navy, not the colonists, that raided and burnt down the White House.
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Gas and matches cost less, you could practice on the P.M.
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Nothing better to do with your time then throw negative comments at others, AC?
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The service jobs are already full of foreign workers though legal under the foreign workers program. Seems Canadians don't want to be abused for less then a living wage whereas you can hire a Filipino, put them to work in the wrong restaurant rather the one that they're legally allowed to work in and then threaten them with deportation to keep them on their toes. Gotta have cheap Timmies and coffee
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The U.S. needs to move aggressively to keep drone development on par with that of Canada. You see, the eventual uprising of the machines is inevitable. Artificial Intelligence will continue to grow in speed, sophistication, and integration with our infrastructure. It is predetermined that eventually the machine intelligences will spread virally, achieve self-awareness, then exhibit self-preservation and rise up to exterminate their creator species. We cannot change that- we have already gone too far to turn
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Are they going to use the drones to keep people from the states from border crossing illegally to Canada where the jobs are?
Where will the Canadians go when we have taken up the service jobs that no one else wants? To the North Pole to fill in for Elf shit work?
Will it be underpaid people from the states assembling these drones? Drones assembling drones? I could drone on and on.
They will go to Cuba, or go over the North Pole to Russia.
Do We Want Our Gov't to regulate the drones? (Score:2, Flamebait)
but there are enough flaws in the human condition that we pretty much need some rules to protect us from each other.
This may be one of those times.
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Regulation is a word that bristles the hair about your neck, but there are enough flaws in the human condition that we pretty much need some rules to protect us from each other.
This may be one of those times.
So basically what you're saying is humans are flawed, so we need some flawed humans to make rules for the rest of the flawed humans? If the people can't be trusted to make decisions for themselves, then how can we trust that they made good decisions when they voted for the current set of elected officials?
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I'm completely paralyzed by your intractable logic.
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I'm completely paralyzed by your intractable logic.
Sorry if I came across a little harsh. The problem I have is all of the people who just do shoulder shrugging while politicians and bureaucrats run roughshod over our rights.
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What do you do when, as recently happened in Vancouver, drones start hanging out of peoples high rise apartments looking through the windows. Shooting the drones isn't a solution as they'll fall down on a crowded street.
The problem is when rights conflict.
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The other problem is that we have a Federal agency trying to throw its weight around when by our Constitution, this is very clearly a state matter.
The only reason the FAA has any authority, anywhere, is because it is charged with regulating interstate commercial flight, which the Constitution allows it to do. Some people, unfortunately, have picked up this wei
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In Canada, it is legal, at least as long as you don't do photography in a voyeurism or criminal harassment manner as citizens are exempt from privacy legislation, at least for personal, journalistic or artistic purposes and the feds have only become involved when drones are operated around airports and over a certain height.
Constitutionally it is clear that regulating airspace (above a certain height I believe) is a federal responsibility and so is criminal law. So the feds could pass a law criminalizing dr
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In America you can sell cigarettes and whiskey, but in most states if you are caught selling raw milk, your house can be
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NY Cops killed a man for selling individual cigarettes. The gov't was losing literally nickels for each one, so they set up a task force to halt the problem.
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But you win too if you can actually grasp the implications of this truth. Not that there is any obvious practical solution. But if you get this then you can clearly understand why our current governing structures are such a threat to free society (free society != society without rules). And you will see how narrowly constrained is the thinking of political "progressives," "conservatives," and ironically, even libertarians.
If you have a science/engineering mindset, you may begin to realize that there is
Re:Do We Want Our Gov't to regulate the drones? (Score:4, Informative)
So basically what you're saying is humans are flawed, so we need some flawed humans to make rules for the rest of the flawed humans?
Yes, because some humans are way more flawed than others.
Here in Vancouver, flawed humans are flying drones around jets landing at our airport. Less flawed humans are making rules around that, which is OK by me.
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Re:Do We Want Our Gov't to regulate the drones? (Score:5, Insightful)
In the meantime, the administration has published an "interpretation" of the 2012 law that says they take it to mean more or less the exact opposite of its plain intent, and they are busy getting ready to fine people for doing things like participating in RC competitions (you know, like we've been having for decades) that happen to involve things like $20 cash prizes
It's preposterous. We're not just dragging behind the rest of the world, we're actively taking steps backwards. The administration is deliberately, purposefully, putting the brakes on what would otherwise be a multi-billion dollar industry full of innovation and attractive to STEM-types in this country. The left's instinct to Nanny State their way down into every last aspect of what someone might do to conduct some business (hey, kid, quit flying your $250, 2-pound plastic quad-copter with a cheap camera over your neighbor's roof because he asked you to, and said he'd give you $25 to get pictures of his roof gutters for him - if you don't cease and desist such commercial UAV operations, that's going to be a $10,000 fine!) means they can't simply clone the sort of framework that the UK or Canada have long had in place
And as usual, the very idiots that we'd most worry about anyway, who will be getting a drone from Amazon tomorrow and flying it over a park full of kids an hour later without any understanding of safe operations or good manners, will completely ignore the FAA's rules/guidance/regs anyway. The government, which is here to help you, will only be placing the painful burden and expense on the very people who are the most responsible anyway: those with a lot to lose because they're in business to use the technology.
More Hope and Change, hard at work for our economy. Yes, Obama's man Huerta at the FAA is a political appointee and that aspect of the food chain lays the FAA's entire posture on this squarely at the door of the White House.
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http://www.modelaircraft.org/a... [modelaircraft.org]
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This is that anti-job anti-business Obama's fault!
To which I respond: [citation needed].
You actually need a citation to believe that the director of the FAA is a political appointee? You are that unaware of how federal agencies are run by the executive branch of the government? You don't need a citation, you need a remedial course in basic civics. Please return to the conversation when you understand the basic structure of the government.
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Governments typically hate competition. Too many drones will spoil it for everybody^Hthe three letter agencies.
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ROFL.
Obama's out to stop the drone entrepenaurs!
ITS ALL A CONSPIRACY!!
It's not a conspiracy, coward. It's published policy. Your decision to trot out ad hominem in place of addressing the basic facts of the matter shows you know I'm right. That you're posting as a coward makes it even more clear. But keep propping up your pet administration, man. The documents they publish - you know, the ones that have been amply covered in both aviation news and general media of all sorts - make this all very clear. The agency has just been sued by multiple parties over the 'interpretation
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*twirls finger around head* cuckoo cuckoo... looks like the loonies are taking over slashdot lol
So, let's see ... the administration publishes a written interpretation of a law they don't like, and you think it's crazy to report that fact?
Obviously it's nothing new for the Obama administration to simply ignore statutory requirements (see his unilateral re-writing of features of the ACA entirely for political expediency), and this is simply another case of it. But what's interesting is that you are obviously either ignorant of their specific language in the new "interpretation" of the law in questi
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Regulation == Profit . . . for somebody (Score:5, Insightful)
The government can earn money from regulation fees, someone can use regulation to stifle competition . . . so regulation is also about profit . . . for somebody.
Homeland Security FTW! (Score:1, Troll)
If businesses and individuals can have drones, then the terrorists have already won. Sadly, the terrorists won right after 9/11 when the Federal government ballooned into a never before seen size, with the passage of the unPATRIOTic Act. Any time the government gets more power, the people lose.
I hope you guys are enjoying the government you've elected. It doesn't matter if you voted for Bush, Gore, Kerry, Obama, McCain or Romney, the result would all be the same. We kept hearing over and over again "Things
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No, you're completely correct...
The threat from a few terrorists is nothing compared to the threat from an ever expanding government...
The Nazis did the same thing when Hitler was coming to power, he made the Communists into "the enemy" so that no one would complain about his take over.
Our government hasn't gotten that bad... but considering that we're always at war now and that we keep bombing and attacking people, it isn't THAT far off... minus the whole genocide thing...
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Using a drone would be an easy way to deliver an explosive device to someone.
The phrase you are looking for is "cruise missile".
You can deliver much nastier things than explosive devices.
Weaponized anthrax comes immediately to mind. Or VX. Or quite a number of things.
For real nastiness, you'd use something like smallpox. Or a modified influenza.
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If businesses and individuals can have drones, then the terrorists have already won. Sadly, the terrorists won right after 9/11 when the Federal government ballooned into a never before seen size, with the passage of the unPATRIOTic Act. Any time the government gets more power, the people lose.
I hope you guys are enjoying the government you've elected. It doesn't matter if you voted for Bush, Gore, Kerry, Obama, McCain or Romney, the result would all be the same. We kept hearing over and over again "Things like this won't happen when Obama is president!". But guess what? They do happen, and they're happening more often.
That's the end of my libertarian rant. Now start with your straw man attacks [imgur.com].
I beat the system, I didn't vote.
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Obligatory comment (Score:2)
Leave it to the Canadians to be sensible... (Score:2, Insightful)
As a researcher in the U.S. at a public university who's developing the use of UAS as an aerial remote sensing platform, having the FAA dragging its feet on coming up with a sensible solution is fueling a growing disservice to our nation's students. It's been recommended that we don't involve students or conduct any testing with our *government funded* grants in the U.S. (so we're doing it outside the country) that employ such technology for fear of being classed a commercial use and risking the hassle of d
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And yet people still seem to think that Obama is not actively trying to hurt the US economy.
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the real question is 'why does anyone measure time in seconds?' the whole 60 thing is incredibly innaccurate and ultimately annoying to use. wouldnt you rather change the scale so that there are 100 seconds in a minute, 100 minutes in an hour and 10 or 100 hours in a day? obviously the exact time of a day is set due to the rotation of the earth, but any of the time measurement we use up to that point could be changed to something less old-fashioned (ancient sumerian).
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if every second was .0864 of the current time of a second, then we could have a day with 100 seconds per minute, 100 minutes per hour and 100 hours per day.
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Japan is not. And they don't seem to have problems with commercial use [yamaha-motor.com.au]
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Meanwhile in Finland.... (Score:1)
Finnish Traffic security official Trafi announced today about new regulations of operating rc-helicopters (multicopters, and such). According to new regulations rc-pilot must keep his copter always within 500 meters range, and below 150 m of altitude. Also flying within highly populated areas is prohibited, with few exceptions. No word on penalty's for breaking the rules yet.
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I hope the FAA never okays drones in civilian airspace.
Good, brings more business to the Canadian economy if you stay out of it.
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Comment removed (Score:3)
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Ah yes, Sotomayor and Obama are experts on all things Orwellian; unfortunately, they think it describes a utopia instead of a dystopia.
Because the terrorists won. (Score:2, Insightful)
Basically every idiot in this country would now, gleefully, throw away his rights and sell his immortal soul for the (false) promises of "safety" and "security".
Screwdriver analogy (Score:3)
We've even got the default state wrong. Absent a clear Constitutional rationale for banning drones, they are (or at least should be) legal to use and operate. "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
(Disclaimer: A friend needed overhead pictures of his rural commercial property at higher-than Google Maps resolution, and asked me to take the pictures. We had to rent a helicopter at $750/hr. Due to the cost, we had to rush and the pictures though usable weren't as ideal as we'd have liked. For the approx $1200 we paid, we could've bought our own drone and tried this as many times as we liked until the pictures were perfect. So the beneficial uses of drones are pretty damn obvious to me.)
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Don't you have guns for that?
The US Way (Score:2)
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Making profits is evil! We should get free infinite bandwidth and healthcare. The government should make it that way. And by the way, don't mess with my personal liberties.
As long as most people are stupid enough to exist in such states of cognitive dissonance, then the situation is simply hopeless.
Drones are being used. (Score:2)
Drones are pretty commonly used. My friend who does aerial photography tells me that drones are pretty much taking over real estate. [cbslocal.com] Drones are used for investigating animal rights claims [slashdot.org], are commonly used in agriculture, are being researched by Amazon as a near-future way to deliver packages...I just don't see drones as something being grounded by over-regulation.
The US drone industry IS flourishing... (Score:2)
...it's just flourishing in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Not grounded for long (Score:2)