The Good Drone | Hacker News Reader

The Good Drone

openstandard.mozilla.org

28 pointscalebgarling7 comments

I get annoyed when people compare the multimillion dollar military UAVs, with jet engines and satellite guidance, with quadcopters that have 20 minutes of battery, can carry a few ounces, and use line of sight controls.

They should have different names. The quadcopters are really just RC planes, but everybody is calling them drones now for some reason.

If I was more conspiracy-minded than I am then I'd say that the confusion is presumably intended to make military drones more acceptable.

This was true in the early days of hobbyist quadcopters, but at this point even ready-to-fly consumer models are offering FPV and even full beyond-line-of-sight autonomy.

I think this automation unlocks a lot beyond classic R/C flying - yes, people have been flying beyond-line-of-sight FPV for a long time, but certainly not as beginners while using a $550 RTF kit which can fly itself and also offers GPS-based waypoints and a built-in camera gimbal.

I do agree that using the same word for weaponized military platforms and little quadcopters is frustrating, but I think we're far past the "glorified R/C plane" phase of hobbyist flying gear, too.

I think they do, the 'drones' people are talking about are ones that you can pre-program to follow a set course, have on board GPS guidance, and at least the payload of a surveillance camera. Not unlike some military tasked ones which are carried by soldiers in the field. Generally the military goes with fixed wing though for the higher time on station being more efficient.

RC Planes are a different thing entirely. And after reading this article again I did not get the impression that they were confusing them.

I was unsure what this had to do with Mozilla. From the site's About page:

The Open Standard provides online news coverage of open, transparent, and collaborative systems at work in technology and our daily lives. Our purpose is to showcase the positive global impact of these systems and inspire more people to seek out, support and adopt open principles of accessibility, participation and experimentation.

The Open Standard is published by Mozilla, a global community of technologists, thinkers and builders working together to promote openness, innovation and opportunity online. We will disclose and be transparent if we take a position on or promote the products and services of Mozilla or a partner company.

It appears to be an extension of their OpenNews initiative: http://opennews.org/

Just a nit-pick - I thought Ferguson, Missouri imposed a no fly area directly above the protests so drone surveillance was not an option.

Why is it web browsers can't do web font fallbacks? I had to read this stuff in the inspector...

https://mediacru.sh/oXZoeWraAtA7

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