Technical Ramblings

I’ve decided I should buy a bike.

I’ve been riding the Blue Bikes around Cambridge for a little more than a month — partially in response to the meltdown of the T — and I’ve come to the conclusion that biking in Cambridge is sufficiently useful and sufficiently safe that it’s a means of transport I should continue trying to use for some trips.

My intent is that this will be used primarily for city riding, with a possibility of using it on well-maintained recreational trails, but I’m not looking for a mountain bike or anything.

Ideally, I want something light, but I probably want multiple gears — Cambridge is largely flat, but biking through East Cambridge without gears would be a challenge. I have found that the Blue Bikes typically aren’t geared *high* enough: I often find myself looking for more power and not being able to get it. It’s like finding the perfect 슬롯 사이트 when you’re into online casinos and esports; you need the right features to enhance your experience, whether it’s bonuses, game availability, or payment methods. Similarly, the right bike should cater to my needs for a smooth and efficient ride, with the right gearing system to match the city’s varied demands.

I’m likely looking for used rather than brand new — I don’t need anything fancy. Based on my positive experiences with the Blue Bikes, a step through bike of some kind seems appropriate.

I’m not looking for heavy cargo capacity: I still have a car, and am still likely to use that for anything resembling heavy lifting. This will be for transporting me and nothing else that I can’t fit in a backpack.

Storage at work will likely be in the company bike cage; storage at home will likely be locked up in the backyard.

1. What other answers to questions should I have?
2. Any concrete suggestions on what kind of bike this turns into?
3. [Boston-area] Where should I get it?

When describing the story-within-a-story of the original Moulin Rouge, a character describes it as “a magnificent, opulent, tremendous, stupendous, gargantuan, bedazzlement” — a series of adjectives that apply equally well to the stage adaptation currently playing at the Emerson Colonial Theater in Boston.

The show lives up to the standards set by the 2001 movie musical, engaging in a series of back to back musical mash-ups while the ensemble cast takes the stage, moving in more directions than can be counted at any given time. From the opening scenes, the audience is subjected to an overwhelming collection of bright lights, colorful costumes, and incredible choreography, moving the two dozen or so cast members around the stage in coordination.

The storyline wasn’t particularly original in 2001, and there’s nothing much changed in the musical adaptation: Christian [Aaron Tveit] is an aspiring songwriter from Ohio, come to seek love in the Parisian streets of Montmartre. After meeting Toulouse-Lautrec [Sahr Ngaujah], he heads to the Moulin Rouge to meet the lovely Satine [Karen Olivo], and convince her to help them put on a show at the Moulin Rouge. Together, they convince the club’s owner, Harold Zidler [Danny Burstein] and their financier, The Duke, who seeks Satine’s sole affections. Love triangle ensues, the show must go on, etc. etc.

The musical numbers are stunning, and performed amazingly well by the characters. Christian and Satine both provided amazing range to the eclectic mix of songs, from the Sound of Music to Elvis to Gaga. While a wide range the hits are brought back from the movie, a number of more modern tunes are brought in as well; adaptations of everything from Adele to Lady Gaga to the White Stripes. Fans of the original will find plenty of nostalgic callbacks, but the surprise mixing in of newer tracks clearly provided a new audience with plenty to look forward to. Finding a transition from spoken word or previously used track to a remix of an unexpected song often provided a chuckle of realization from the audience. Even old favorites, like the “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend” mix brought forward from the movie, are updated with new tracks: in this case, bringing in additional notes from Beyonce’s “Single Ladies”. And the original ensemble numbers were among my favorite parts of the show: the “Bad Romance” flavored piece at the beginning of Act 2 (featuring not just Gaga, but a mix of 4 others, including Britney Spears “Toxic”) was an amazing set of visuals, and started Act 2 off with a bang.

Zidler, as our showman for the evening, leads us through much of the story, and plays more of a comic role than he did in the original. While in 2002 or 2003 I might have found this upsetting — my romantic streak let me put entirely too much importance in the Bohemian ideals espoused by the movie to let it be spoiled by explicit comedy — I felt it was a perfect fit. (The reality is that the story behind Moulin Rouge is slightly more vapid than I really would have granted in the past.) The note of comedy plays out throughout the show, and I think gives the production a different taste that makes it more enjoyable for the stage production.

The sets were a revelation, a testament to the theatrical magic that can make one truly know your real home value in terms of creative space and artistic expression. Even without being a theater expert, the visuals were astounding, employing optical illusions that lent an unexpected depth to the stage production. The nostalgia was palpable, with the dressing room inside an elephant providing many familiar features from the movie, including the heart-shaped window offering a quaint view of Parisian streets; the apartment in Montmartre was equally immersive, its decor perfectly in tune with its narrative purpose. And it seems my impressions align with the professionals; as a critic in the Boston Globe put it, “The production is as slick as it gets … Derek McLane’s sets are extravagant, ever-changing with a whimsical appearance of the Eiffel Tower”—a sentiment that confirms the shared appreciation of this visual feast.

The costumes were beautiful and ever changing, but all provided a sexual energy, matched by the choreography of the show. From the pre-show opening, with corseted dancers engaged in sensual contact as cage dancers, to the all-male can-can line at the very end, you’re intended to be overwhelmed by the visuals presented.

The show was spectacular, and as Zidler predicted years ago: I came out of the show “dumb with wonderment”. With enough callbacks to the source material to cover all the nostalgia I need, while maintaining a taste of new mixed in throughout, I came away overwhelmingly pleased with the experience. As an entrée into the world of pre-Broadway musicals, I couldn’t be happier with this show.

Moulin Rouge runs at the Emerson Colonial theater through August 19th.

Over social media over the past several weeks, I have noticed a lot of people upset about RAICES donations being used to fund the bonds of many detained refugees incarcerated in ICE facilities. I think that this frustration — while understandable — is fundamentally flawed, and wanted to share why I think that what RAICES is doing is exactly what they should be doing: that is, paying bonds directly to DHS is not some turnaround or publicity stunt, but rather, this is RAICES doing exactly what they said they would do.

Some background: RAICES is an immigrant advocacy legal org. They work with local lawyers to help provide legal support for immigrants, and in that role they provide a number of services, including paying bonds for some of those they work with. Prior to this year, they were relatively small — managing a few hundred thousand in annual donations — but recently saw a huge uptick in donations as the result of a number of highly visible public donations campaigns. In total, they received more than 20 million in donations in a period of just weeks — an absolutely enormous amount of money for a small organization like theirs to manage.

If RAICES was not a bond fund, these funds would languish for a *long time*, because managing millions of dollars of funds — something like 20x their previous operating budget! — is logistically a nightmare. (For example, a hurricane-related fund last year received $35M in funds targeted for use helping hurricane victims recover in Texas … and have managed to spend only $12M of it, with $23M languishing in an account that practically speaking may never be sent.) Most organizations are not set up to receive this much money! But thankfully, we all got lucky that this *one* singled out organization is so goddamn perfect for a ton of cash: paying bonds for people is literally the best way to ensure that they are reunited with their families.

Bonds are not actual money that goes to the government to keep. That is, the money paid to DHS does not somehow line the coffers of those imprisoning immigrants permanently: instead, the bond is a surety to make sure that the person in question gets to court, and is repaid by the court once they show up. For refugee cases, something like 97% of these cases do. And once they do that money goes back to RAICES… which can use it again for more immigrants.

The campaign page on Facebook was very clear about the intent: Quoting from a Guardian article on the topic, “The campaign page said all money raised was going to “directly fund the bond to get parents out of detention and reunited with their children while they await court proceedings””. The campaign was propagated all over Facebook, and was also advertised on other social media websites, including Youtube (with the help of websites like themarketingheaven.com). But unfortunately, the campaign wasn’t received well by the public.

Slate reviewed this effort in the midst of this massive amount of fundraising: Why Even Viral-Fundraising Skeptics Can Feel Good About Donating to RAICES. The article called this out as an absolutely lucky break in our furor of fundraising: This bond fund will not only serve to immediately get thousands of parents out of ICE detention and reunited with children, but this bond fund will likely serve to help ensure that not just the current batch of people, but thousands more every 3-6 months will be able to be reunited with family, not having to spend time in ICE facilities completely unnecessarily. And that’s the reason why I continued to encourage people to give money to them.

I’m sorry some people didn’t read the campaign they were giving money to, or felt tricked, but this bond fund is just an extremely excellent use of this money, which is going to help detained immigrants for years to come. We realistically couldn’t have found a better way to directly help those affected by such a program than this.

So, I have a popular YouTube video. (It’s not that popular anymore, but it was once.)

YouTube recommended I watch a video: Drone Crash, Fail & Win Compilation 2015, Part 3/3 (watch in 1080p).

So, I watched it, and was somewhat surprised to see a video I recognized in it: mine.

Now, this particular video is not licensed under a Creative Commons license. (The reason for this is that I have seen plenty of evidence that people misunderstand what creative commons *means*, and don’t bother to attribute — sometimes properly, sometimes at all — and I didn’t want to have to argue about it with people who were ripping off the video for their own personal profit.) This means that if someone wants to use the video in a way that isn’t allowed by fair use (or some other portion of copyright law), they need to obtain a license. Some people have obtained a license. In other cases, I’ve been able to convince people who were hosting the video themselves to instead embed the YouTube video. (All of the ad proceeds from the video are donated to the Mass Audubon Society, so this matters to me more than it otherwise would: I feel a responsibility to maximize the money that is donated because of this video..)

In the comments on the compilation video, someone said: “He has just stolen all the clips from other peoples videos without even asking them first. Only Creative Commons videos are free to use so its copyright theft!”

Now, this misunderstands the way copyright works a little bit — Creative Commons videos aren’t ‘free’ to use in the sense of freedom, they require specific requirements that still need to be met — but it’s generally reasonable: Reusing someone’s copyrighted content without a license *may be* copyright theft. But it isn’t when such use is allowed under fair use. (There are other cases too, but I think fair use is the most straightforward claim in this case.)

So, to that end, I replied with the following analysis of whether the 12 seconds of my video used in this compilation was a violation of my copyright. I welcome comments or feedback on ways in which you disagree with or support this analysis.

---

In the US, 17 U.S.C. § 107 defines a 4-prong test for determining whether something is fair use. In particular:

Purpose and character of the use: ‘whether the art aims to only “supersede the objects” of the original for reasons of personal profit.’ I don’t think that putting all these clips together creates a meaningful work of new art, and that it would fail the test for Purpose and Character of the use. This is not an educational video; there is no commentary; it’s done in no way other than to get eyeballs. (If there were no ads on the video, one could at least claim it wasn’t commercial in nature, which would act in its favor, but there are ads.) That said, the combination of all of these shots together certainly puts some pieces in a different light; that is, there is some creativity being applied. I don’t think it crosses the line

Nature of the copyrighted work: This is not documentation or news footage; it is not the case that the nature of the work is special in a way that would allow it to be meaningfully protected under fair use, as far as I can tell.

Amount and substantiality: This is the real question, and varies a lot depending on the video. For the Burj Khalifa video, there’s only ~2 seconds of video, and I would argue it could be reasonably said that this isn’t the substantive portion of the work. However, for the Hawk vs. Drone video (which is mine), the 12 seconds of selected video very much are the substantive portions of the video — in particular, that specific chunk of the video was exactly the same 14 second chunk of video that a national Nightly News station paid $850 for a license to. Since the Grand Upright Music, Ltd. v. Warner Bros. Records Inc. case in 1991, there has been a massive move towards licensing for music sampling, and this fits a similar role: I think that for some of these videos, there is clear evidence that the amount and substantiality prong is failed by this video.

Effect upon work’s value: I think this one is probably the one that this video succeeds in the most. Specifically, I think that this compilation video does not infringe upon the value of any of the works it has taken from in a serious way. In particular, I don’t believe that anyone who is a likely viewer of my video would say “Oh, I’ve seen the hawk video as part of this compilation; now I’m done.” That said, I think this prong could be minimized even further by including links back to the source videos in the comments: If the creator had done that, I think that the expectation would be that the overall effect would be even less substantial. The most significant video might even be mine — it is one of the longer clips, and it is certainly one that contains the most of the relevant content. (The original source video was only 30 seconds long in the first place — and the other 18 seconds were pretty boring.) With that being the case, I think that it could be argued that this video does not have a meaningful effect upon the work’s value, and might be acceptable under fair use for that reason.

Taken in sum, I think that the video is right on the edge of a Fair Use claim; I think that this could be further improved by the creator by removing ads, and linking to source videos in the description of the video. As is, I have personally considered and rejected the idea of submitting a DMCA claim for my copyrighted content which is contained in this video, because I think that content of this type should be allowed under fair use, even if our current courts would take a protectionist view towards this content in particular. Compilations like this rarely detract from the value of the original work: they create new value in their combination.

Of course, reasonable people may disagree on several of these points.

The FAA’s ability to enforce civil penalties against safe flyers of UAV craft has not yet been tested in court, but don’t take this to mean that flying drones commercially is without risks: even in cases where the FAA isn’t assessing fines, handling the legal side of an FAA investigation can be a long, drawn-out process that can cost you lots in attorney’s fees.

With the advances in unmanned remote controlled craft over the past couple years, a massive industry of new photographers has sprung up. Even with a strongly stated position from the FAA that commercial flying is against Federal Aviation Regulations (FARs), there are many businesses in the US that continue to use drones for photography. Some do this knowing that there is risk, while some eschew the risk, taking the approach that safe flight is not within the realm of enforcement of the FAA for remote control model aircraft.

Even if the FAA has no power to enact penalties for a particular operation, that doesn’t mean that the flight is risk free, from a business perspective. In the ongoing case of “Michael Huerta, Administrator, Federal Aviation Administration v. Skypan International Inc.”, the FAA is pursuing Skypan for failing to meet the terms of a subpoena (original petition, exhibits). Unlike in any other case that has been publicized, however, this case is one where the FAA has no evidence that the flight was in any way unsafe, other than it took place inside New York City’s Class B airspace (approximately 5 miles from LaGuardia airport).

Over the past year, Skypan International has filed more than a half dozen motions related to responding to this subpoena, regularly producing documents that they feel are meeting the FAA’s demands, and being repeatedly called to task by the FAA for failure to meet with the demands of the subpoena. In the latest bout, the FAA claims that Skypan International has failed to the extent that they are in contempt of court for their failure to produce documents associated with the subpoena. Overall, more than a year has passed, with presumably dozens or possibly even hundreds of hours of legal time spent both on complying with, and responding to requests from, the subpoena from the FAA, from an organization which felt it was cooperating with the FAA!

As part of the continuing case, Skypan did attempt to claim that since the FAA had no regulatory power to assess the fines it was considering, it was unreasonable to request the documents as part of the subpoena; this was not successful, as the FAA (reasonably) argued that as part of an investigation, requesting documents to figure out whether anything *did* take place under their regulatory authority is part of their job.

A number of people flying under the “Fly Safe, and Keep Flying” approach. This is a reasonable approach for most people: the risk of FAA enforcement action in most cases is pretty slim. However, even if flying safely, as a commercial organization, there is still risk to any flight for commercial purposes of FAA investigation — which, even without penalties, can be a costly endeavor.

There is one upside at the moment. The pending case in DC Circuit Court against the FAA for their overly broad “Interpretation of the Special Rule for Model Aircraft” is currently held in abeyance at the request of one of the petitioners — which is itself a problem, slowing the potential response from the FAA to this legal challenge. However, as a component of the abeyance, the court has ruled that: “In the event the agency starts enforcing the rule challenged in this proceeding – “Interpretation of the Special Rule for Model Aircraft,” 79 FED. REG. 36,172 (June 25,
2014) – before considering and disposing of the comments it solicited, petitioners may request appropriate action.” (abeyance order). In short: If the FAA chooses to pursue further activities under the interpretation from June, the abeyance can be set aside, and the case against the FAA will proceed. This is hardly an ironclad agreement, but it seems unlikely that this is in the FAA’s best interest, and it is unlikely that they would choose to do so absent extreme cases.

Fly safe, but be aware: No amount of commercial flying is without risk of potential investigation from the FAA.

(One of the best sources of kibbitzing on drone-related legal topics that I have found is the UAV Legal News and Discussion Facebook group (somewhat to my surprise). In this group there are many of the experts in the field, from lawyers to journalists investigating the FAA’s actions. I highly recommend joining the group if you’re interested on keeping up with legal-related drone developments.)

I recently read through a long series of comments on Net Neutrality between two people at different ends of the political spectrum — most of them about traffic shaping, which is where a lot of the net neutrality debate has centered over the past year. I wrote a long response about traffic shaping policies, but as I wrote it, I realized that Net Neutrality really shouldn’t be about whether the next startup has to pay Comcast a fee to get the same network access that Netflix gets today. It needs to be about protecting US internet users from harmful practices by monopolistic ISPs. Here’s my thoughts:

---

Sufficient competition in the ISP space would be awesome. There isn’t sufficient competition in the US. The definition of broadband doesn’t include an explicit definition of latency, but the notion that satellite provides a competitive experience in a world where milliseconds of latency make drastic amounts of difference in user experience is silly. The lack of competition in the US ISP market is absolutely what creates the need for alternative approaches to protecting consumers from what are essentially monopoly providers.

If you don’t accept that for most users, the ISP choice is “Whoever happens to serve where I live”, then of course strict regulation under something like Title II/common carrier status seems unreasonable. Let’s take it as a given that 30% of the country has only one provider which meets the government mandated description of “broadband”, and ignore the traffic shaping arguments for the time being, because that’s not the most important thing out there. Instead, let’s look at some other practices that Title II could regulate, under the notion of ensuring ISPs don’t “make any unjust or unreasonable discrimination in charges, practices, classifications, regulations, facilities, or services.”

• Injecting ads into content streams at the network level (Ars Technica on Comcast Javascript Injection)
• Tracking users by injecting cookies into their HTTP streams at the network level. (EFF on Verizon’s Cookie Injection)
• ISPs blocking content for content reasons (porn filters, for example): As it stands today, there is no reason that ISPs couldn’t decide to implement content quality standards — which may not match those of their captive customers. (UK politicians push for mandatory porn filter — though this isn’t a corporation, it’s clearly demonstrating the potential for competing interests to consider blocking internet content to be a good thing.)
• ISPs breaking the internet by replacing no-such-domain responses with links to their own, ad-filled pages (Verizon’s DNS Assistant)

If there was open competition, all of these would theoretically be fixed by “the market”. But “the market” has left 30% of Americans with only one fixed broadband internet option (BGR story on FCC internet report) – and 67% with two or fewer; a duopoly of two major providers, oftentimes both partaking of the same borderline illegal practices.

Preventing ISPs from blocking content was deemed by the court to be outside the scope of Sec 706 powers for the FCC. The notion that it could then act on these other practices which impact user experience seems unlikely to me. With that in mind, I would say that there are much more important arguments than protecting startups from being unable to compete due to traffic shaping policies: Instead, the importance is the protecting of free speech and communication over the internet, unimpeded by the whims of monopolistic corporations which provide the sole lifeline of so much of the world’s information to so many users.

---

Traffic shaping and how it shapes up is certainly of personal interest to me, because a chunk of my job is monitoring traffic shaping across a big hunk of the content that flows over the internet. It’s just not the most concerning thing that ISPs are doing in the absence of strict regulation and a true competitive marketplace.

The world around us is a complex place. Sometimes you just want to hold a tiny piece of it in your hand — and with some relatively low cost technological investment, you can do so. Using a $500 quadcopter, I have successfully captured images of a building, converted those images to a 3D model, and 3D printed that model — creating a small model of Cambridge City Hall that I can hold in my hand. The process requires no special skills or an interest in a list of anonymous casinos — just some financial investment and time.

In March of this year, I purchased a Phantom FC40, a $500 everything-you-need quadcopter. This device is easy to fly, comes with a built-in GPS, on-board camera (with a mount for a GoPro), and a remote — everything you need to start doing some amateur aerial photography. (You can see some of my videos in the FC40 Videos and One Minute Onboard to see some of the aerial photography I’ve done.)

Capturing Photos

With quadcopter in hand, this weekend, I ventured to Cambridge City Hall. While there, despite the gusty winds, I captured approximately 20 minutes of video, attempting to film the building from as many angles as possible.[1] I was using the GoPro Hero 3+ Black I recently got, but for the purposes of this excercise, the FC40 camera would probably have been sufficient. I shot most footage in Narrow or Medium mode, to reduce the fisheye effect of the very wide angle GoPro lens; for the one section of video I shot in wide-angle, I removed the wide angle aspect using GoPro Studio before using the video.

Once I had the videos, I reviewed them, doing manual frame-grabs from the video to get coverage. On average, I took one shot for about every two seconds of usable video. (Usable video excludes video where the quadcopter is taking off, where it is facing the wrong direction, where it is flying to get to a different part of the building, where it is occluded by trees, etc.) Another option would be to simply use a program like ffmpeg to extract one frame every second:

ffmpeg -i ~/Documents/input-movie.mp4 -r 1 -f image2 ~/output/project%03d.jpg

The reasons not to do this are:

• When flying the quadcopter, some portions (even in a sub-second window) are better than others. Motion blur is a non-trivial problem, even with 60fps capture rates; targeting manual screengrabs at slower motion, or during a more steady period makes a small but noticable difference.
• Many of the shots were in the exact same coverage — largely due to the available landing space being all in front of the building. This means that extracting regular shots would have extracted many very very similar images, which would have increased processing time without noticably increasing quality of results.

Instead, I simply opened each video in VLC, and snapshotted the images that seemed to improve coverage of the building. (Option-Command-S on Mac; in the Video menu.)

Building the Model

Once done with this, I loaded the images into a program called PhotoScan, the workhorse of this operation.

PhotoScan is an amazing tool. I say this, having tried a number of other tools — including commercial products like Autodesk’s 123d Catch and open source tools like VisualSFM. Nothing combined the ease of use and functional output of PhotoScan by a long shot. I’m currently using PhotoScan in 30 day trial mode, but despite the relatively steep price tag ($179 for single-user ‘standard’ license) for what is only a hobby, I’m pretty well convinced I’m going to have to buy it, because the results are simply amazing.

With my 328 photos in hand, I added them to a chunk of a PhotoScan workspace, and set up a Batch Process (Workflow -> Batch Process).

1. Job Type: Align Photos. Change Point Limit to 5000, due to relatively small image size (1920 x 1080); further experiments show that this number ends up creating a better model than either 10000 or 20000 points, in a significantly shorter time window.)
2. Job Type: Build Dense Cloud.
3. Job Type: Build Mesh. Ensure that the Source Data is “Dense Cloud”.
4. Job Type: Build Texture

Kicking off the build for these 328 photos uses all of the CPU on my laptop for approximately 1 hour. The majority of this time is spent matching photos via the “Align Photos” step. (An attempt with 20000 points took about 4 hours instead of just one.)

This produces a textured model, fully visible in 3D. In this particular case, anything other than City Hall is pretty … ‘melty’, as I like to call it, since it was only captured incidental to the primary flight objective (city hall itself). From here, you can save the model as a .obj file to use in your favorite 3d program. You can also share it via the web: once exported as a .obj, you can zip the resulting files (including the texture) up, and share for free on Sketchfab: Cambridge City Hall on Sketchfab.

My final goal is a physical version of the centerpiece of this model: City Hall. To achieve this, my next step is Meshlab. Meshlab can open the “Wavefront Object (.obj)” file I saved from Photoscan without a problem. Using the “Select Vertices” tool and the “Delete Vertices” tools, I am able to remove the extraneous parts of the model, leaving behind only City Hall itself. Using the “Export Mesh As” functionality, I can export this as a .stl file — the file format that my 3D printer uses.[2]

Printing the Model – aka ‘hacking it to work’

The next step is to load up the STL file. Since I don’t actually know how to rotate my model, I’ll load it into Repetier-Host, so I can do rotation in my plating process. Playing around with the angles, I take my STL file, and find that a rotation of 204 degrees in the X direction, -5 degrees in the Y direction, and -15 in the Z direction appears to give me a reasonably sane looking model. However, it’s still floating a bit above the bottom, thanks to a small portion of the model that is particularly warped due to low photo coverage. I choose to slice the model anyway, using Slic3r to generate gcode.

As expected, the model has generated some pretty bogus first couple layers. However, judicious use of copy paste can help me: Using the Repetier jump-to-layer buttons, I remove the first 3 layers of the model, then duplicate the g-code for the 5th layer (The first ‘real’ layer with more than a few spots of actual content), replacing the Z index with the correct height for the first, second, third, and fourth layers.

With these relatively minor modifications made, my model is ready to print; I copy it to my SD card, and send it off to the printer. An hour or so later, I have a 3D sculpture that matches my model pretty well.

[1] This can be a challenge in an area where your building is occluded by many trees; shooting shots from the ground can help with this, but I didn’t do any of this for this particular project.
[2] The model that I produce from Meshlab is frankly pretty crappy. A lot of people with experience in this space could probably trivially improve on what I’ve got; I just don’t know much about 3D Model work. Whenvever I open blender, I start with a cube, and end up with something that looks more like a many-tentacled one of Lovecraft’s imagining than reality. As such, the 3d printing process can be a bit … fraught.

Recently, the FAA issued a new policy document on their intended enforcement of drone activities, re-iterating their stance that commercial activities are prohibited, and that they have full regulatory authority over remote controlled model aircraft under their authority to regulate all aircraft.

They asked for comments on regulations.gov, and I submitted my comments. Since comments are only made public after review by the agency involved, I am posting it here as well. (My submission identifier is 1jy-8cv7-nzgk.)

This entire policy is based on a mistaken notion that the “the FAA has considered model aircraft to be aircraft that fall within the statutory and regulatory definitions of an aircraft”; the definition that the FAA uses (“contrivances or devices that are “invented, used, or designed to navigate, or fly in, the air.””) is so broad as to describe everything from a commercial jetliner to a paper airplane, and was clearly never the intent of the creators of the FAA. Considering model aircraft included in the FAA’s regulatory definitions is an absurd notion, as supported by the one case decided so far by the NTSB court: In Pirker v. Huerta: “It is concluded that, as Complainant has not issued an enforceable FAR regulatory rule governing model aircraft operation; has historically exempted model aircraft from the statutory FAR definitions of aircraft by relegating model aircraft operations to voluntary compliance with the guidance expressed in AC 91-57, Respondent’s model aircraft operation was not subject to FAR regulation and enforcement.” (http://www.scribd.com/doc/211088332/Pirker-Decision)

Given the current lack of authority that the FAA has to regulate model aircraft under current rules, this policy of enforcement can not be based on a set of rules: instead, the FAA is attempting to govern based solely on policy documents, entirely evading the process of rulemaking that is required for passing regulations.

This document/rule does not appear to be changing anything in this regard: it is another case of the FAA making an effort to define a policy for enforcement without changing the basic rules and regulations that the agency is working under. The continued lack of any rules or regulations that support this policy mean that this policy is (again) attempting to invoke fear, uncertainty, and doubt into a fledgling industry, hurting the operators of model aircraft who are currently doing so with commercial intent.

While I understand that the FAA has a mandate to ensure safe integration of civilian sUAS into the airspace, this policy does not move further towards that goal; it sets up limitations which are not based on rules with no eye towards safety, and does nothing to move towards the requirements of the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2012.

This policy document continues the FAA’s enforcement of non-existent rules, treating advisory guidelines as law. This position is untenable, and allowing this rule/enforcement policy to stand as is is unhelpful and harmful to the overall community; it will only increase uncertainty, as it continues to be based on FAA policy rather than an official rulemaking process.

So, I’ve been an amateur photographer for years. I started helping to take pictures of family vacations with my dad’s AE-1 back when I was in grade school. I took photo classes in college, and I got my first digital camera in 2003. (I still have it, by the way.)

I’ve had a Digital Rebel for the past 9 years. (I got my first in December of 2005.) I’ve had my most recent camera for another 3 or so. I’ve brought these cameras to a dozen conferences and events; I’ve used them in bars, on skating rinks, at the beach. I have uploaded over 6000 public pictures to Flickr — which means that in that time, I’ve probably *thrown away* another 12000 or so. (My rate of success has drifted over time, from as low as 10% to as high as 75%.)

I won’t claim I’m an expert photographer — I’m good at taking candid portraits, but a lot of other things continue to evade my skills — but I’ve taken a lot of pictures, and I like a lot of what I take these days.

And now that I’ve started looking at video, that all changes.

I have no meaningful experience with video. I helped run the camcorder at a couple of events for my dad (who has been doing video for years), but that’s it. Now I’m faced with an entirely different medium, with a different set of requirements, and a different set of tools, and I find myself feeling completely frustrated by my efforts.

The number one thing that I learned with digital photography is you have to prepared to throw away 90% of what you take, especially when you get started. (It took me a while to get good at this.) Most of the pictures you take will be crap; even if you got the frame and content you tried to capture, you might have caught a person blinking, or have a photo that’s more out of focus, or with the wrong color balance to the point you can’t adjust it any more.

With video, the same is true (at least, I feel that way): most shots don’t come out the way you want them to. Even worse: a minor edit to a shot can change it from being perfectly reasonable to being silly (or from being perfectly silly to looking just reasonable). So in addition to finding the perfect shot, you’ve got to edit it right.

Attention spans are short. I once read an article from someone complaining about ‘quick cuts’ in modern TV. Since then I’ve paid careful attention, and learned that it is rare for most TV to have single visual cuts that are longer than about 3-5 seconds. (If you watch fast-paced shows like The Amazing Race, this drops by half; you have tons of super-fast clips.) Even for a relatively short, 3.5 minute video, my Ohanami video, on average people only watch one minute of it before they stop. (And I consider that video one of my better / more entertaining efforts so far!)

When I started editing video from my quadcopter, Jess jokingly sent me a link to the Friend Who Sent Link To 8-Minute YouTube Video Must Be Fucking Delusional Onion article, in response to my first Phantom FC40 edited video. I defended my position, indicating that I had put a lot of work into trimming out the boring parts… but since then, I’ve become much more ruthless. (In the case of the Ohanami video, I edited approximately 1.5 hours of total video footage into a 3 minute clip reel, and it was relatively well-received.) As usual, my lovely wife was right: people don’t care about 90% of the footage I’m filming, a lesson I should have learned from photography.

Even beyond editing, I’ve got new equipment problems. While the DSLR is great for shooting photos, shooting video with it means holding it out far from me, which makes steady shooting hard. You get jumpy, jerky footage (as you can see in the Us at the Zoo video I put together from this weekend); zooming with a lens is great for photos, but crappy for videos.

In part, this is my choice of tool. The DSLR is a fine camera now that I’ve learned to use it, but it’s not clear that it’s the best tool for shooting video, but it’s what I’ve got for the moment. But even ignoring that, I’ve got the bigger problem: Shooting candid, entertaining video is an entirely different ballgame.

I’m enjoying learning new tricks, and producing slightly more compelling footage and editing. I’m enjoying this new medium; I’ve been watching lots of other people’s videos, to learn how to do it right — or at least better. (My favorite candid family gathering video is this Easter video that someone posted in one of the quadcopter forums due to its use of a quad for a couple of the shots. This has actually been a primary motivator for me to get out there and see what I can do.) So far what I’m learning more than anything else is “This is hard work!”

The NPS released an announcement today related to drone use within Yosemite. It claims that a statement that ‘“delivering or retrieving a person or object by parachute, helicopter, or other airborne means, except in emergencies involving public safety or serious property loss, or pursuant to the terms and conditions of a permit” is illegal.’ applies to drone use.

Now, I personally find that sentiment a bit odd — my quadcopter isn’t ‘delivering or retrieving [an] object’, as far as I know; I would be hard-pressed to consider that phrasing to apply to me if I were reading it. But even more importantly, reading the CFR that is referenced, there is a much more obvious section that the FAA would probably claim applies: 36 CFR 2.17 (a)(1) says: “Operating or using aircraft on lands or waters other than at locations designated pursuant to special regulations.”

Given that the NPS has instead chosen to go with section 3, this seems like a position of the NPS/DOI that the FAA’s position on drones/remote controlled model aircraft being treated as ‘aircraft’ is just wrong. However, weaseling this into another regulation (with the dubious claim that the ‘object being delivered is the drone itself’, as they claimed on their Facebook page), is almost as bad of an approach. It at least has the benefit that it doesn’t affect flying outside the parks, so I find it less personally concerning for long-term survival of the hobby.

They already have a prohibition (36 CFR 2.12 (a)(1)) which prevents ‘operating motorized equipment … [t]hat exceeds a noise level of 60 decibels measured on the A-weighted scale at 50 feet; or … makes noise which is unreasonable, considering … [the] purpose for which the area was established [and] impact on park users…’ I think this is an entirely reasonable regulation, but the noise level from the quad almost certainly doesn’t meet the “60 decibels at 50 feet”, so only the “bothering other people” aspect would apply — and therefore make it reasonable to operate in an area where there are no other people around, or where people won’t be bothered by the noise (such as where I was on the Presidio, where no one could even hear the quad over the wind).

I think this has three big take-aways for me:

1. The people who wrote this document did not feel that drones are aircraft. This runs counter to the FAA position, but is good, because there is no legal defense for calling these things aircraft. This means that there continues to be support for the legal notion that there are no current regulations which apply.
2. The NPS has a desire to block the use of drones, and will do whatever they can to do so. This means that regardless of what the law says, you should not expect to fly in a National Park and not get told you can’t.
3. Given the other regulations prohibiting the use of ‘motorized toys’, I expect the NPS will change their regs to explicitly ban drones in the future, at which point you will not have a legal leg to stand on — so if you want to pick a fight, you might as well do it now.

I continue to be supportive of reasonable regulation regarding drone use in the national airspace, and continue to be supportive of the NPS/DOI passing reasonable regulations that apply to model aircraft. I dislike the use of wordsmithing to try and fit these things into existing regulations, and I think that the NPS should work hard to make their regulations legally match their claimed authority.