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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

Do it before someone dies: "Regulation out of control!"

Do it after someone dies: "Why didn't you do anything?!"

It's not insane to get out in front of drone regulation; their numbers are likely to continue to increase. Lack of regulation certainly isn't DJI's advantage; they still have to comply with it to sell their product in a whole bunch of major markets. That's the exact reason this drone weighs 249 grams.

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> It's not insane to get out in front of drone regulation

Nor is it surprising. There are a lot of regulations around aviation (though perhaps not as many as there are in other places) and safety is the reason. Every flying object in the sky is sharing the space with commercial airliners, hobbyist pilots, logistics companies, government aircraft, etc. All of which share the same regulations or have specific ones depending on the industry. It makes sense that drones would be regulated as well.

Solution: stop saying "why didn't you do anything", righteously slap people who do.

No. Sometimes "you should have anticipated this would be a problem" is the appropriate response. I don't subscribe to the idea that government should be exclusively reactive to things.

The problem isn't that, it's governments being excessively reactive to things. In their view few people dying of random mishaps is always an excuse for more government. In my view everybody dies of something and faced with the threat of a 251g drone to the skull vs the horror of everyone pickled in aspic under maximum government insanity just to preserve me long enough enough into decrepitude that the medics get to torment me properly before death, bring on the drone. A society where people aren't free to die of ordinary mishaps is a sick society.

I mean, it's not free, but flying a drone under 55 pounds for personal use requires a $5 registration fee in the US. I'm pretty comfortable with that level of "pickling".

And anyway, I get the impression the real reason we went so hard on drone regulation was that it thought it'd be easier to make unlicensed drones illegal than it was to investigate every time somebody shot a drone out of the sky. That violations of the anti-anti-aircraft-artillery laws haven't risen commensurate with drone usage really speaks highly of the general populace (although there are a fair number of news stories surrounding incredibly dumb people shooting down drones)

I think there's plenty of room to criticize the degree of regulation, while accepting the need for baseline rules.

See the other reply upthread with respect to line of sight ("You're not allowed to use binoculars.") If true, that's stupid and unnecessary.

Why is it stupid and unnecessary? Binoculars give you a very narrow view, limiting situational awareness; the whole point of the line-of-sight rule is so you know what obstacles are near it.

Same reason sniper teams like to have someone on overwatch who isn’t zoomed into a target.

I either trust the judgement of someone who's out there flying a drone with binoculars, or I don't. If I do, I DGAF if they're using binoculars. If I don't, it's my opinion that they have no business flying a drone to begin with. But it's also safe to say that someone who is reckless with a drone and a pair of binoculars doesn't GAF about my opinion... or the FAA's.

In reality, rules this stupid simply get ignored with impunity. Which is fine by me.

"Under" 249g. They never say how much it actually weighs, like they do for the larger model.

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