Moderator Comment by Chris Anderson on February 2, 2009 at 5:08pm

Absolutely, and thank you for underscoring that. I suspect you would have posted as a comment on Lance's post but he's not accepting them, which is also frowned on. This is a community and conversations should be two-way.

Moderator Comment by Chris Anderson on February 2, 2009 at 7:46pm

Lance, to be clear we do not frown on using drones as weapons--we take no position on that whatsoever. Some of our members work in the military and for military contractors, and they're very welcome. The point Sgt Ric is making is that this site is not the place to discuss the use of UAVs as weapons or in a military context. We are entirely focused on civilian (and mostly amateur) uses of UAVs here. There are other places to discuss the weapons side.

Comment by Mike on February 3, 2009 at 12:30am

Chris, I do think the use of the Predator model on the home page may give out the wrong message. I have been looking for an opportunity to raise this for some time and, well, here it is!

I am sure you must have far more interesting pictures now that ArduPilot is up and running?

Mike

Moderator Comment by Jack Crossfire on February 3, 2009 at 1:43am

The site can never be totally clean. Most of the AUVSI feeds are military & some military products are going to be unavoidable with Adsense. It's always going to be on the site even though none of the build logs are using guns.

Moderator Comment by Varga András on February 3, 2009 at 4:49am

The only thing which shouldn't be present on this site is POLITICS (I mean no "WAR ON TERRORISM" or "JIHAD" from the other side). Personally I don't feel the atlantic culture close to me (Wester Europe and North America), I even remember the helicopters of the soviet forces which occupied Hungary, but I don't feel hurt at all by military content. There's a lot of members here who are from different cultures and they are interested in everything which is technical and not political. Also, there's a lot of blog posts with military content:

Boeing’s Truck Mounted Laser Weapon Destroys Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
Guardian 2.0-Fast Response UAV - development for military usage!
extreme navigation 4 U
60 Minutes on how UAVs won the battle for Sadr City
Air Force's New 'Killer Zombie' Drone
Ratheon KillerBee in trials
You're never too young to pilot a Predator (it's a joke)
First bot-on-bot attack in Iraq
Shrinks help drone pilots cope with robo-violence
Is this for real? (air sniper)
UAV Snipers
A GOOD REASON FOR UAVS AND THEIR ROLES
UAVs in the Smithsonian
Amazing new robotic fly from Harvard: fly-sized, really flies!
Observer Airframe, now heres a challenge
UAV use surging in Iraq, led by micros
Armed forces now has 3,200 UAVs, most of them under 10 lbs

I do not agree with the moderation of military content, because it prevents us from migrating some military technology into civil life. The main point is to keep a ratio between civilian and military content. So Lance's post shouldn't have been erased.

Moderator Comment by Chris Anderson on February 3, 2009 at 8:54am

A few responses:

1) Good point on the Predator picture. When I get back home next week I'll change it,
2) I agree that we can't ban military stuff entirely here, but we do try to keep it to a minimum. It's really not what this site is about and if we want the authorities off our back, we'll keep it that way,
3) Lance's post was not "deleted". He chose to take it down himself.
4) The news items on the bottom right column are autogenerated from an RSS feed from AUVSI. I don't control them.

Comment by Noth666 on February 3, 2009 at 10:49am

My 2 cents would be to just focus only on civilian use UAV's in terms of what we develop and discuss on this forum. I do think we should try to keep the military content not concering technological advances/uses/anything practical out - since it would probably land us on some watchlist or get us in other issues potentially (negative media exposure etc).
However I must say I did read(not all yet) and find interesting the material posted by Lance, both the concepts exposed in the paper he wrote and also the ONR report and in total I think I did learn something out of it which is useful for the development of my own systems.
I do not have a point with this other than that it is very subjective what one finds useful for what, and that making the distiction of wether something is useful for civilian purpose uavs can be hard.

Comment by John Stanton on February 3, 2009 at 11:27am

To me the situation is quite simple. Civilian and military UAV technology are the same, but the function is different. It is legal for private individuals to operate UAVs under controlled conditions for peaceful purposes. It is not legal for private individuals to build weapons of war and deploy them.

By all means discuss and use the technology, just avoid illegal activity and come down hard and ostracize any individuals who appear to be crossing the line into creating weapons. The backlash from a well publicized infraction would be very harmful .

Moderator Comment by Varga András on February 3, 2009 at 11:48am

-There is a distribution statement somewhere on the first pages of military documents, something like this:
"DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT A: Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited"
In other words, the document must be for public release (not confidentieal or inner use) and non-copyrighted. So there cannot be any problem with the authorities.
-If someone posts military content, he should tell us why the content is important from civilian aspect.
-Avoid politics and political opinions, battlefront reports etc... Objective media don't exist, news are always subjective.

Comment by Noth666 on February 3, 2009 at 1:28pm

Varga Andras: The point in avoiding military related stuff is to avoid being labeled as people into illegal stuff or getting bad publicity etc - I doubt anyone would be dumb enough to post confidential information here. At least I sure hope no one is.

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