UK to introduce drone registration
It will affect anyone who owns a drone which weighs more than 250 grams (8oz).
Drone maker DJI said it was in favour of the measures.
There is no time frame or firm plans as to how the new rules will be enforced and the Department of Transport admitted that "the nuts and bolts still have to be ironed out".
The drone safety awareness test will involve potential flyers having to "prove that they understand UK safety, security and privacy regulations", it said.
The plans also include the extension of geo-fencing, in which no-fly zones are programmed into drones using GPS co-ordinates, around areas such as prisons and airports.
Personally I have thought that registration and licensing of drone usage should have been brought in a long time ago.
United Earth
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
"Stop Having Fun" Guys. The "crazy" usage is people who don't know what they saw making the "therefore Aliens" leap.
Well, if you don't know the vessel's designation or don't have a callsign for it, you still haven't properly identified it, have you? Planespotting during the Cold War must have been fun.
edited 31st Jul '17 5:39:08 AM by TheHandle
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Red Bull has been getting into Drone Racing
ESPN is even getting in on the drone racing.
So in short Drone Racing is gaining some public popularity.
edited 3rd Oct '17 4:10:10 PM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?
United Earth
Drones threaten to proliferate and become too cheap, easy, fast, and unaccountable. Efforts should be made to anticipate this outcome:
- have full contextual and situational awareness of the target area at the time of initiating any specific attack;
- be able to perceive and react to any change or unanticipated situations that have arisen since planning the attack, like the legitimacy of targets;
- have active cognitive participation in the attack;
- have sufficient time for deliberation on the nature of targets, their significance in terms of necessity and appropriateness, and likely incidental or possible accidental effects;
- have a means for the rapid suspension or abortion of all attacks.
These are ideals that we should strive towards if we want our children and our grandchildren to grow and flourish in a world where technology helps humanity to create justice and harmony between nations.
The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots has been keeping the subject on the table at the UN by successfully urging the adoption of a mandate for a week-long meeting of experts every year since 2014. Now a new mandate has moved the discussions forward to the next level with meetings of a Group of Government Experts in 2017 to discuss what to do about AWS. Let’s hope they will decide to rid us of the automation of violent force while we still have time.
We do not have long to act
‘Lethal autonomous weapons threaten to become the third revolution in warfare [after the invention of gunpowder and nuclear bombs]. Once developed, they will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend. These can be weapons of terror, weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways. We do not have long to act. Once this Pandora’s box is opened, it will be hard to close.’
Honestly, if a country leader decides that a war needs to be fought, I'd rather he send in drones to do the fighting rather than humans who would inevitably leave either traumatised or dead.
United Earth
That's the problem: it lowers the the threshold for "has to be fought".
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
That article is pretty much utter garbage from start to finish. Not only is it overtly dishonest, it ignores extant technology that has existed for a few decades at least that contradicts the technophobic view it presents. It also is already ignoring actual current military practice that largely addresses a number of the concerns in reality. It makes gross and astoundingly broad over generalizations, raises false dilemmas, illogical appeals to emotion to illicit unthinking knee jerk responses, and begs the question. It even outright lies about the org and its sister organizations goals which have repeatedly and publicly stated they want to end robotic automation for the military.
As for the points at the end. Again yet more dishonesty and deliberately ignoring reality and actual practice.
1. Already done. The article is pretending these weapons operate in a vacuum separate from the data of their environment and the people who release them or use them. To top it off the weapons have even better contextual awareness than humans because their sensors collect and process far more information far more quickly than any human ever could and far more accurately to boot. We already have a basic standard in place that handles this in military operations for guided weapons that have no further human input after release. Namely be sure of your targets which covers most of other points as well. The responsibility boils down to those who designate targets and those who release said weapons are responsible
2. Many of the new generation of guided weapons have some sort of wave off capability. The article pretends like this isn't already an going trend and is desirable to the military for a wide number of reasons. Other systems that may not wave off will self destruct or increasingly disarm themselves to prevent or reduce civilian collateral.
3. All systems have a human in the loop somewhere. Someone somewhere has to make the decision to not only choose the target but release the weapon. The article is pretending that military doesn't include human in the loop options when even our most sophisticated systems include them as a default.
4. This is a part of mission planning but also a responsibility of both target designators and those overseeing release in "Call for Fire" situations. Which are the only variety of weapons engagement that happens spontaneously or an adhoc basis. Pre-planned strikes already incorporate it otherwise.
5. This has hard technological limits but is not a bad thing to have an increasingly sophisticated and capable weapon systems un-astonishingly already incorporate a self destruct or wave off capability of some sort up to a point of no return.
The article ignores the fact that machine controlled targeting is significantly more accurate than human controlled targeting by leaps and bounds. Machine controlled targeting has enabled systems damn near make pinpoint strikes which yes has reduced civilian casualties by a significant degree. To use their own bad example against them. The WWII bombing campaigns every single bomber strike human controlled start to finish. The only thing affecting the bombs was gravity and the laws of ballistics. Yet these craft because of the conditions of battle field bombing had a hard time hitting the broad side of barn quite literally. They ignore the civilian casualties of WWII from mass bombings being owed to a change of bombing tactics after the war had started as an overt and deliberate choice controlled multiple humans and done in such a way to attempt to affect a strategic goal.
Who watches the watchmen?
United Earth
Maybe they changed goals in the face of convincing arguments to the contrary? Also maybe they aren't technophobic per-se, they just want international rules and regulations to enforce what is already being done by the world's more advanced militaries?
What is your response to this part
I get a feeling you're jumping to conclusions and responding to an attack that isn't there, but I'm not familiar enough with the background of the discussion and its actors to check how accurate you're being. One thing I can tell is that your response is hardly dispassionate. Do you have a horse in this race?
edited 16th Dec '17 7:38:29 AM by TheHandle
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
No I am responding to their bogus arguments made in that article. They are quite opaquely the worst kind of arguments you could make created to solely illicit knee jerk counter responses and doing it in a blatantly dishonest fashion.
That line you posted right there is pretty a sterling example of the bad faith and bad argument present throughout the entire article. It has no basis in reality or facts. They are presenting an existing technology, one that has existed for decades in quite a few forms including highly mobile smart munitions as some extraordinarily dangerous force that will totally spiral out of control. This is blatantly false. Their entire argument is hinged on a false premise that these weapons will magically run amok or become unmitigated tools of violence and oppression when the reality is quite very different.
edited 16th Dec '17 7:52:54 AM by TuefelHundenIV
Who watches the watchmen?
This applies to every new weapon ever though. All new weapons since the spear up the scale of conflict, make the human element more detached, can be used by despots to terrorise the weak and are more subject to the whims of fate and or interference.
The romans thought that the ballista would be a horrible enough weapon to end war, the ballistics missile and guided bomb are basically the same technology as the drone-released guided missile.
This shit ain't new and they act like it is.
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
This especially Silas last line.
Jupiterian Local
People have been making the "weapons are bad because they make it easier to fight at a greater remove from actual danger" since someone picked up a rock to hit people with instead of using their bare hands. History generally doesn't bear this out.
We can already kill people from hundreds of miles away with no risk to our own people using things like cruise missiles. That technology is decades old. It hasn't caused us to lose our minds and go on a spree of pointless wars. (At least, not any more so than we did before cruise missiles were invented.)
Drones don't do anything different than bombs or missiles do — they just do it more reliably and more precisely. The problem with the argument that drones make killing easier is that the killing happens either way. With drones, we can watch a target get into a car, wait until the car is somewhere that reduces the risk of collateral damage, and then destroy the car. Before that, we would do things like use a missile to demolish an entire building because we had second- or third-hand intelligence that the target spent the night there.
Weapons don't cause fighting. Fighting happens regardless of weapons. All we can do is make our weapons as powerful and precise as possible, so that we can approach the fighting with a scalpel instead of a sledgehammer.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
United Earth
Put a scalpel in the hands of a hack, though...
Jupiterian Local
Which has absolutely nothing to do with drones specifically.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
United Earth
It has as much to do with them as thrown rocks.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
All tools are prone to abuse. That doesn't make any given tool immoral. Automated or human directed it is the person using or it that is the deciding moral factor.
Who watches the watchmen?
United Earth
![[down]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_down.png "[down]"){kind=icon}
And that's why safeguards and accountability are so important.
edited 16th Dec '17 9:05:46 AM by TheHandle
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
Jupiterian Local
My point is that weapons are always dangerous in the wrong hands. Drones are no more or less dangerous in the wrong hands than bombs, cruise missiles, and artillery cannons. So you can't make the argument that drones are more dangerous than existing weapons because they can be misused. All weapons can be misused. Drones are no different.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
In world's first, a drone rescues two teenage boys in Australia from possible drowning. Proof they aren't the absolute evil people portray them as.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-42731112
Oh, bother.
So someone in my family finally bought a drone.
All I will say is that I never realized just how loud one of those things can get.
Disgusted, but not surprised
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
This is more of a news threat about the topic of drones rather than a hobbyist thread. You might have better luck in the Sky-High thread as there are a couple RC enthusiast past or present who have been in that thread or may know some info.
Who watches the watchmen?
Tell Me, Have You Seen the Yellow Sign?
These coffee drones could soon deliver you coffee (before you even realize you need it)
Computer manufacturer IBM has reportedly secured a patent to develop a product that does just that, according to paperwork filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
In the filing, manufacturers write that the device, an unmanned aerial vehicle or drone, would deliver coffee or another drink to individuals who either gesture they want the drink or those who “have a predetermined cognitive state,” assessed by factors such as sleep quality, electronic calendar (time of day, meeting schedules), complexity of work schedule, biometrics, blood pressure and more.
The drones could even assess how long a group has been talking and the mood of the conversation to see whether individuals are in need of a drink.
How can the drones hone in on those factors? According to the patent, sensors on the drones can compile data from wearables, cameras and through special biometric sensors. These sensors would be able to detect facial expressions and pupil dilation, among other metrics.
Sensors on the drone scan for folks in the crowd gesturing for drinks or gravitate toward individuals “for whom an electronic analysis of sensor data indicates to be in a predetermined cognitive state” before flying to them to deliver the drink.
The technology may be used in offices or near coffee shops to amp up sales, but personal data collected would be used “according to privacy rules, and/or with the user’s permission,” according to the paperwork.
IBM, which is known for leading the industry in computer tech, hard drives, bar codes and laser eye surgery, declined to comment whether the new patent filing is a sign the company is transitioning to new businesses, according to the Financial Times.
“While this patent seems like a strange one for IBM, the company is notorious for its prolific patent filing and, not unlike others, sometimes creates interesting scenarios no one else has yet envisioned and file a patent for it,” the Spoon reported last week, citing Amazon’s previous patent in February on predictive restaurant ordering.
But whether it’s with a wave, an app request or your “predetermined cognitive state,” it’s possible coffee drone delivery may be on the horizon.
rollin' on dubs
Reminds me of a joke:
Bob: "Man, I'm hungry, I sure could go for-"
[door bell rings]
Alice: "Psychic Pizza with your delivery!"
All night at the computer, cuz people ain't that great. I keep to myself so I won't be on The First 48
Except you are both missing the obvious point. They were obviously referring to it as the crazy usage more frequently than actual intended usage. It was part of a craze of such reports
Who watches the watchmen?