Probably not the same situation once the airline is a common carrier...

I don't think he's saying the airspace should be reserved for him, I think most of us think that those of us who fly deserve some regulations to prevent us from being killed because some idiot realtor caused a drone to strike our aircraft. I haven't heard anyone here say drones shouldn't be allowed. What we want is to be able to share the airspace safely.

Currently, a drone operator who causes a manned aircraft to crash has little fear for their own personal safety. They may have some liabilities (civil or even criminal) but they probably won't lose their life. I'd certainly like some regulations so that I'm not risking my life due to drone strikes every time I go flying.

You forgot to quote paragraph d:

(d) Helicopters, powered parachutes, and weight-shift-control aircraft. If the operation is conducted without hazard to persons or property on the surface—

(1) A helicopter may be operated at less than the minimums prescribed in paragraph (b) or (c) of this section, provided each person operating the helicopter complies with any routes or altitudes specifically prescribed for helicopters by the FAA; and

(2) A powered parachute or weight-shift-control aircraft may be operated at less than the minimums prescribed in paragraph (c) of this section.

We frequently operate at 500 feet and below - it's one of the things that makes a helicopter useful. It's going to be a real issue when we start sharing the airspace with drones. Birds are already enough of an issue, but birds large enough to take down the helicopter are generally visible at the speeds we fly close to the ground. A maneuvering quadropter on the other hand is probably close to invisible to us - it's hard enough to see flying objects below the horizon, but one that can maneuver aggressively such as a model helicopter or quadropter is almost impossible to see and avoid. Usually we see RC Fields well before we see the RC Aircraft - the fields tend to look a certain way so when we see such a field we generally keep clear or at least are much more vigilant (and would be reluctant to go below 500 feet if we though an RC aircraft was being operated).

Anyway, there are lots of operations that legitimately take us below the altitudes specified in paragraph b & c.

I'd like to second this. If I go out flying I'm likely to see one or two fields where people are flying RC aircraft. Not too hard to avoid. (and they have maximum altitudes the keep them below most manned aircraft). When uses for commercial drones are found, it's likely to suddenly flood the national airspace with a huge number of drones, and at that point we're going to need to have safety regulations already in place. If anything, I think FAA has been a little slow to enact drone regulations. I hope they hurry up, but also make balanced regulations that protects the flying public (and public on the ground) but also does not hinder the development of what will certainly be a huge and useful capability - I'm thinking autonomous drones here......

The reason FAA has the concept of commercial operating certificates is so that:

a) it can make sure those operators are following regulations enacted for safety reasons.
b) It can revoke the certificates of operators who for one reason or another violate those regulations.

The FAA has very little authority over an entity (person/corporation) who operates without a license or operating certificate. (I think it can levy fines against individuals but I'm not sure where their authority stops in that sense. I don't believe the FAA can act in a law enforcement capability, so it's not clear to me at what point a person can be arrested for violating FAA regulations).

By licensing drones, the FAA can enact rules to prevent them from endangering manned aircraft. For instance, if something akin to a type certificate is required by drones because FAA finds that certain equipment (like ADS-B) is required to insure separation from manned aircraft, how would they enforce that? Probably the way they will is by having certain equipment requirements for drones that want to operate in the national airspace.

Hopefully they will use a layered approach so that very small light drones will have little to no equipment requirements, but may have severe altitude restrictions, while larger/heavier drones, or drones that need to be operated at higher altitudes will have equipment requirements to keep them separated from manned aircraft.

We also have the issue of parts falling out of the air onto the public. In general this isn't an issue for manned aircraft, because usually when big pieces fall off the aircraft, the people on board are killed - it gives the crew plenty of incentive to make sure this doesn't happen. But what's to prevent an SLR carrying drone from falling out of the sky and killing people walking down the sidewalk? Since there's probably little to no risk on the part of the drone operator, we need a way to enforce some rules about how drones can be operated above people...

And I don't want people driving down my road disturbing my sleep at night, but I have to share the road with my neighbors and to some degree the same thing is true of the airspace above our property. There are lots of things that may take a helicopter low over your property - I've done utility inspection jobs that sometimes require us to fly quite low - while the noise may be a nuisance, it's an even bigger nuisance when your home loses electricity because the transmission wires weren't inspected.

I've flown traffic helicopters and we try to fly high so as to not make a lot of noise for people on the ground, but there are circumstances where we may have to fly fairly low so again, it's a nuisance, but does serve a useful purpose in helping to keep driver's aware of traffic conditions.

Another case I can think of would be a medivac helicopter making a low approach over your house in order to land nearby to pick up a critically ill person.

In general, the helicopter community works hard to be responsible about how and where we fly; we try to be sensitive to the noise we make and the fact that people on the ground have a right to feel safe, i.e. we need to operate the aircraft in a responsible fashion so that people on the ground are not exposed to risk due to our presence.

One worry I have is that crazy people with access to drones may try to enforce their desire to keep helicopters away from their homes by purposely crashing drones into helicopters. I'm thinking that there may be a market for armored civil helicopters in the not too distant future!. Or maybe a pod of anti-drone drones I can release from my helicopter... ;-)

I was talking about the Objective-C runtime making it safe to send messages through a nil pointer, i.e.:

MyFavoriteClass *mightBeAnObject = nil;

[mightBeAnObject pleaseDoSomething]; // effectively a noop

I think that's more elegant than mightBeAnObject?(args)

From what I've read so far, I have to agree. Like lots of people I first went to swift-lang.org and started reading and got really excited. Wow.. Apple has taken this dataflow language and adapted it as a programming language. What a cool way to keep all those cores busy! Finally, a parallel programming language adopted by the mainstream.

Then I realized my mistake. Now I'm pretty let down. Seems kind of lame, from what I've read so far. Also, I think I prefer the elegant way of handling nil in the runtime versus spreading ?'s all over my code

Just comparing my Honda Fit EV versus my Subaru STi (not the worlds most efficient ICE car):

Honda: 5.5 m/kWh = $0.12/5.5 = $0.02 per mile
Subaru: 22 mpg @ $4.05 (needs premium) $4.05/22 = $0.18 per mile

OMH they are! I'm a helicopter pilot and when we fly around these days we're amazed at how many solar panels there are! We see two different forms: lots and lots of rooftop installations, both commercial and residential. They're *everywhere*. And then, solar gardens, i.e. 5-10 acres of land someone has installed solar panels on. Again, we see huge numbers of these around.

It's been an amazing thing to watch over just the last 2 years. Also, on a slightly different subject I was ferrying a helicopter across the country a couple years ago and was amazed by the number of windmills in Kansas. Thousands and thousands and thousands of them!

People are making investment in solar and wind

Some quick googling shows lots of similar articles and studies. The utilities don't seem to be worried. My guess is that they are happily anticipating becoming the energy provider for transportation in addition to their current business. And, if BEV takes a decade to become commonplace they have a full decade to upgrade the grid.

"As the power grid stands right now, it can already handle millions of electric vehicles without bringing any further power plants online."
( http://science.howstuffworks.c... )

"Kjaer is less concerned about transmission or generation being overtaxed, as long as consumers are taught to charge their plug-in cars at night, during off-peak demand periods, to smooth the load. "
( http://www.scientificamerican.... )

"Doggett is CEO of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas – which oversees the state’s electric grid. On Tuesday he told lawmakers on the Senate Natural Resources Committee that he doesn’t believe even widespread adoption of electric vehicles would have any negative effect on the transmission system."
( https://stateimpact.npr.org/te... )

"“Surprisingly, we found that in general, the electric utility infrastructure is already prepared to meet the President’s 2015 challenge. Our research revealed that utilities will not likely need to upgrade or expand transmission or generation capacity in the next ten years specifically to meet electric demand from EVs at projected adoption rates."
( http://www.forbes.com/sites/pe... )

And here is a paper from Southern California Edison which doesn't seem too worried about the impact of BEV on their grid:
http://newsroom.edison.com/int...

This study says that's not the case:

http://cleantechnica.com/2014/...

I knew a guy who worked on Ammonia refrigerations systems. One day he told me they had a safety drill, simulating an Ammonia leak at the facility. The fire department was called, they drove through where the Ammonia cloud would have been, and he said that they figured 100% of them would have died if it had been a real leak. Granted because it was simulated they couldn't smell it, but he believed that by the time they would have smelled it, they would have been doomed. Just saying!

He also said that when they were working and the managers would hang around getting in the way, they would just surreptitiously vent a little Ammonia and the managers would scatter.

Seems like a nasty material for the general public to be pumping into their cars!

Even if that Carbon-Carbon battery turns out to be a scam, it's hard to believe battery technology won't improve dramatically in the next 10 years. It's not just EV automobiles driving the technology, it's portable electronic equipment and probably at some point home solar installations.

That seems an exaggeration. I have a Honda Fit EV that will go about 105 miles on a charge (best case). I have a Subaru STi that goes 250 miles on a fillup. There are electric vehicles that have smaller and larger ranges, and the same is true for gas powered cars, but I don't think we need an order of magnitude improvement in battery capacity in order to be useful to the majority of people. The Fit EV is a lease (it's a compliance car) but my plan when the lease ends is to get a Tesla Model-E with 200 miles of range. Based on my experience with the Honda, 200 miles of range should be enough for all but a couple trips a year that I do.

With the Honda, I use about 50% of a charge on my 55 mile commute. It takes about 90 minutes to recharge that when I get home, i.e. I can commute to work and back home again, grab a bite to eat and have nearly a full charge before I'm ready to go back out that night. This is all without public charging infrastructure!

I think that when people talk about wanting to recharge their EV in the same time it takes to fill a gas tank, they're missing the point that the refueling of the two vehicles would typically be different, specifically that cars tend to sit for long parts of the day and installing a recharging network that can be used (say, while you are at work) is not an insurmountable barrier.

Long trips are indeed the one case that the EV struggles with, but I think that Tesla et al will come up with reasonable ways to deal with this, whether it be superchargers or towed battery packs

I maintain my gas car for just such trips, and I find that when I'm commuting daily with the EV, the gas car only gets run once or twice a month (seldom enough that I've had problems with the brakes rusting so that it's difficult to get the vehicle to move).