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Comment by MichaelApproved | Hacker News Reader

I love the progress drones have given our society. From surveying property to beautiful aerial views in a video to cool view of your kids soccer game to just plain fun. Drones are amazing.

You can buy a great drone and get amazing shots over and over for less than it would cost to hire a helicopter once.

However, they also pose a risk. I'd favor a simple registration process and clear cut rules that are not infringing on the use of drones. I'd like to see the registration used mostly to enforce the rules and track a drone back to its owner.

Ideally, drones should also broadcast its ID, so it's easy for other pilots to know they're in the area and also allow LEO to ticket/fine for offences. Without a broadcasting ID, most of these rules will be hard to enforce.

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What is registration supposed to do? Broadly, those who will register are responsible enough to not be a problem, those idiots you want to control won't register, and it all just ends up mostly harassing the wrong people. Have and enforce laws against bad behavior, yes, but stop this "guilty until proven innocent" nonsense.

Would you apply the same logic to cars? Because I think all of your points apply equally to cars, but nobody seems to object to the idea of both registering them and requiring a license to drive.

Only if you drive them on public roads.

So maybe not a public road -> airspace below a certain height?

Yes. Make driver education mandatory in public school. A vehicle tag should simply identify the vehicle out of a sea of mixed clones (a la: which blue Mustang?).

I actually think the U.S. Founding Fathers would have enumerated a "right to vehicular travel" if they had conceived of license-as-a-privilege restriction on horseless carriages.

>Yes. Make driver education mandatory in public school.

This is not a good time investment for children, given that not all of them will drive. Especially, considering that driverless cars are coming soon.

It's a few hours' training to teach a basic skill most of them will use (along with all the other "not all of them will use it" things they do or should learn). Those who don't formally learn will still likely end up behind a wheel anyway, documented or not - and it's those non-documented ones who are precisely the ones we particularly DO want to ensure are trained one way or another.

In what universe is learning to drive a "few" hours? At minimum most courses I know of have 10-20 hours of lecture type instruction.

When it comes to an entire course, that's few. If you took the whole school day it would be 2-3 days. It's barely anything.

not just horseless...

>>I actually think the U.S. Founding Fathers

We'll never know though, which makes personal conjecture meaningless. And while the "Founding Fathers" may have had some singular ideas at the time, they were merely people. We could speculate what the authors of the Magna Carta might feel about drones, or the Athenian democrats as well...

The position the founding fathers held on freedom of movement is known based on their writings. I don't think it's too speculative to debate about which way they'd lean on the matter. That said it should be an exercise in futility since we do live in very different worlds but it isn't because the constitution's only flexibility is interpretation by federal judges.

Or maybe they would have been scared completely senseless seeing tons of steel being piloted by an idiot with no training at speeds they didn't even know were possible for humans to achieve.

Either way, I couldn't care less about what people who died 200+ years ago would have thought about cars, except in an abstract "wouldn't it be cool to show George Washington a modern car and see how he reacts" sort of way.

> Or maybe they would have been scared completely senseless seeing tons of steel being piloted by an idiot with no training at speeds they didn't even know were possible for humans to achieve.

In light of the second amendment, that seems unlikely.

Automobiles are far more deadly than any 18th century firearm.

The Founding Fathers approved of personal ownership of battleships, hence the "letters of marque" clause in the constitution.

Isn't a letter of marque basically a primitive license?

I think it's funny that both of these replies center on refuting my idea that they might be frightened, but ignore the more important idea that what they would or would not think is not important.

License to initiate warfare under authority of Congress, yes. License to own and operate harmlessly one defensively, no.

The philosophy of the Founding Fathers is extensively documented. Not the least of which is their carrying out revolt and secession against a superpower for the purpose of securing personal liberty and minimizing control & harassment by government. In light of that, the notion of them fearing cars and using government to restrict ownership thereof by punishing lack of paperwork is absurd.

I don't think it's absurd to imagine that something so completely beyond what they could have even imagined might have hit them on a deep, irrational, emotional level.

> nobody seems to object to the idea of both registering them and requiring a license to drive.

I do. It feels so liberating not to have to do those things in countries with corrupt + ineffective policing.

Then you probably wouldn't mind if someone hit you while rushing through the city at 100MPH.

And yet that doesn't really happen. The death rate in Vietnam per inhabitant is only 2x higher than the U.S. which is pretty much all explained by the fact that they drive motorcycles instead of cars.

"Only" 2x ? That's 250.000 people more. One human life is too much.

> That's 250.000 people more.

It's 10,000 people more (in a country of 90M people) not 250,000. And, like I said, it's not due to the lax traffic laws/enforcement, it's due to the average Vietnamese riding a motorcycle instead of a car while wearing a useless brain bucket -style helmet.

> One human life is too much.

We all die anyways, might as well enjoy ourselves instead of spending all our time and money on insurance and waiting for "stop signs" and "red lights".

A similar concept applies to license place on road vehicles.

Sometimes some dude drives around without plates or takes an off road vehicle on the road. The police ticket the operator and tow the vehicle in some cases.

Seriously: why?

Pretty easy.

The privilege granted by registration can be linked to other things. So when Mr. Dumbass decides to buy more beer instead of paying for insurance, and subsequently rear ends your car, you are screwed as a motorist. The requirement for registration and insurance tied to a drivers license makes the driving environment work for the vast majority of people.

The same thing applies to drones. When some jackass decides to peep into my daughter's window every day, why should that person be able to act with anonymously and with impunity?

We should have a telescope and x-ocular registry! Also camera registry! That way he can't spy on your daughter "remotely" and with "impunity."

I was questioning the arrest and seizure over a mere paperwork error. Bad behavior, sure, but not for mere want of documentation.

dont forget that registration will usually come with tax.

But then again, what if people start harvesting people's identities from the drones through the identifier? I think it's a neat idea, but it straddles the 4th Amendment line and could potentially expose your identity to people who don't like drones.

...really? Because both aircraft and road vehicles today have identifiers painted or printed on them. What about driving around with a license plate or flying with a tail number? What's the difference?

It would make sense to expose an identifier, rather than the person's identity. I may have misunderstood the comment.

Would it be correct to think that you would be shocked to learn that the FAA has a publicly-accessible aircraft registration database?

http://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/NNum_Inquiry.aspx

Aircraft and cars kill people daily. Constantly. Cars more. Aircraft sometimes more tragically.

Well if you're flying a real plane or copter, you have its registration number widely visible. No difference there.

You don't have a right to privacy in public spaces. You can be a weirdo and wear a baclava and only travel by foot or use cash to use public transit, but that behavior in itself de-anonymizes you.

Yum, baclava! Or perhaps you're thinking of a "balaclava"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balaclava_(clothing)

Haha autocorrect strikes again! Walking around with baclava would make you popular if you shared though!

> You can be a weirdo and wear a [balaclava]

That's actually illegal in Virginia: http://law.justia.com/codes/virginia/2006/toc1802000/18.2-42...

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