Comment by mrandish
12 days ago
This is so misguided it's breathtaking. Even if one buys into the supposed "harm" it's apparently trying to address, by targeting a specific corporate entity the proposed legislation won't do anything meaningful toward those ends. But it will confuse the market and hurt U.S. hobbyist consumers while being largely unenforceable anyway.
It's one of those things that's just so dumb you assume it's only congressional election year virtue signaling designed to get some headlines and then be quietly negotiated away during 'reconciliation', yet congressional processes are so dysfunctional there's always a risk it accidentally becomes law.
Be thankful that consumer/hobbyist drones haven't been banned entirely already (banning other model aircraft along with them as collateral damage).
Especially after all the footage of essentially-hobby-grade drones with familiar open-source flight controller software being turned into very effective weapons of war in Ukraine.
Would turning drones into arms not make them more, rather than less, protected in the US?
I like the way you think.
Explosive drones would be a destructive device. I don't know about drone mounted firearms though.
No
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Or 3D printers! You can print scary "ghost guns" with them. And they're mostly made in China. Although maybe Stratasys will push for that next now that they're lost their stranglehold on the market.
While the cheaper 3D printers are mostly chinese, Prusa is still a non-chinese option :)
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We'll what happens after the first public vigilante action against a corrupt cop who got a paid vacation instead of a jail sentence.
But I think that the cat is out of the bag and that DRM will be the attempted solution to this kind stuff. It's going to go poorly though.
What part can you regulate and control? Not the batteries or the motors, or the off the shelf microcontrollers.
They could put anybody who assembles those parts into a drone into prison. Of course it would still be technically feasible to make one anyway, just as it's technically feasible to make an autosear, or for that matter a whole gun. Doesn't mean it can't be banned.
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The bans are inevitable. It's only a matter of time before somebody tries to drop a pipe bomb on a politician.
I hope not, i'm pretty involved in the high power rocketry hobby and the materials/electronics and knowledge exist in the hobby to make something like a guided surface-to-surface rocket with a range in 10s of miles but no one does because it would instantly ruin the hobby for everyone. A friend of mine in heavy into r/c planes and is an embedded engineer so he has a bunch of autopilot stuff going on. I'm sure he can scale as high as he wants (he's also a private pilot) and fly a heavy payload to a point on a map autonomously. Again, no one does it because it would ruin the hobby for everyone.
Lots of people want to do this but the place for it is like a DARPA challenge not in the general hobby. If the authorities got wind of it then down come the regulations and no more hobby.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Caracas_drone_attack
They wouldn't want to use a firearm for that. Might get guns banned...
Hey at least if the drones are turned into weapons there's a chance the Supreme Court might overturn the bans.
Just need to attach a trigger to the drone and then it can kill as many people as it wants without being regulated.
Everyone knew that they would be easy to convert into very effective weapons since the very start, no?
grenades are sold separately though.
"Batteries not included" just won't have the same ring again.
Whatever else you may think of the move ( I dislike it, because I dislike adding equivalent of riders to big bills like these ), it is surprisingly consistent with current wave of government actions ( recent placement of DeepCool on US sanctions list ). Things are happening and reading the political tea leaves makes one recognize current unmistakable trend as a the drums of war.
Why would ou think it's "dumb", when we've already had TikTok ban, tariff on Chinese EV, and chip ban on China?
It's very clear that China is an enemy that has to be dealt with by US
I already said why it's dumb
> "the proposed legislation won't do anything meaningful toward those ends."
It's not practical, one should always assume or even pretend to be the cause of problems yourself.
Maybe it was not a good idea to kill RND in favor of greed?
Do you remember the parable of the ground breaking publication with its findings never finding a way into industry?
Musk often moaned about how hard it is to make things. It's our culture/society/economy a lot of the mechanisms are things we've made up sometimes going against reality. If we want to make something easier we would have to apply ourselves?
In 1950 the Chinese had 83% working in agriculture, the USA had 7%. (Today it is 22% and 1.6%)
You could argue they had access to abundant cheap labor but it is more practical to say we don't have access because everything is insanely expensive. Everything we do primarily benefits people who are useless to the process.
If you cant afford babies there is no need to have a family, no need to build houses for them. If one does accidentally a baby training and educating it should benefit everyone except the baby and the future?
We did all that and then boo hoo, China this China that?
Since corporations are people (in the minds of US jurists) wouldn't that make it an unconstitutional Bill of Attainder?