People are more accepting when there's a person who can be punished. There's also the fact that society generally expects cars/trucks hitting things. A drone impact might be a more minor impact, but it's possible for it to hit things that are more shocking to the public if they get hit.

I'm sure there's a surprisingly high frequency of "acceptable" collisions if the bar is matching truck-inflicted property damage and injuries. Much like with replacing human drivers with computers, though, merely matching the cost and harms of the existing system is far from enough. Entrenched systems benefit from familiarity with the associated costs and risks, and from any structures built to mitigate them. New solutions have to be much better to gain acceptance.

Fortunately, automated systems can meet that higher threshold so long as we actually aim for it. If you aim for the lower "beats existing systems by some measures" bar then you make stupid decisions and tradeoffs like rushing to market or leaving out more capable sensors. We ought to try to make new technologies as good as possible. Sometimes the market will bet against that, but that's a tide that engineers should fight back against. Trucks kill too many people, and if drones kill half as many that's still unacceptable. We can do better.

I would expect the result to be the same as running into anything else: drone and any payload crash into the ground.

Drones are lightweight, they're not going to do much to heavy machinery. Basically the same as a brick wall.

The real fear is propellers hitting a human. The result is not good at all.

Zero? I think the expected number of collisions can be larger than zero. Jimmy Johns sandwich delivery by bicycle has resulted in more collisions than zero and that is arguably safe.

You are setting an impossible standard.

The presence and operation of drones on one’s personal property appears more corporatist in nature than democratic.

> democracy: live with the results

The GP was suggesting that democratically, we could define "a legal means for property owners to keep drones off their property". Your comment is the one attempting to preempt democratic consensus.

I think there should be a way for people to have some kind of control when it comes with drones. Imagine there’s a air channel of commercial drones passing by your bedroom window, every 2-5 minutes. They’re noisy and you lose sleep over it. You want no recourse?

Drone are noisy and invasive. I know I’d be upset if the neighbor boy was flying his camera drone around my property. Amazon doesn’t get a pass just because they’re a corporation. There is all kinds of passive data gathering that a these could be doing

> no, there really doesn't need to be

Bob the Bully doesn't like you. Whenever you leave your front door, Bob will fly his drone over your head while its onboard speaker continuously curses you out with TTS. Whenever you want to have a romantic moment with your boyfriend / girlfriend, Bob's drone will be watching through the nearest window.

If you ask Bob to stop harassing you, he'll laugh and curse you out in person. If you sue Bob, after thousands in legal fees the court system will say "You're SoL; there's no law that says Bob can't do what he's doing." If involve the police, they'll say "We can't do anything because no illegal activity is occurring." If you shoot down the drone, you'll be sent to prison like the guy in the video.

You only have one realistic option in this situation, "Just put up with it." This certainly seems like a bug in the law that ought to be patched.

If they fly low enough that I could hit them with a shotgun, they're on my property. This isn't true of planes and helicopters.

These things aren't planes or helicopters and poised to be much more invasive and annoying, why people act like they are just like a passenger airplanes flying a literal mile overhead is baffling. But to that end if Amazon started making deliveries by landing a fucking helicopter in my yard on the regular I would also want them banned.

It is the same law, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Aviation_Regulations

But drones are classified differently and the rules need to be updated and tightened up, particularly drones for commercial purposes.