Especially after all the footage of essentially-hobby-grade drones with familiar open-source flight controller software being turned into very effective weapons of war in Ukraine.
Lots of people want to do this but the place for it is like a DARPA challenge not in the general hobby. If the authorities got wind of it then down come the regulations and no more hobby.
The MK4 delivers pretty much the same quality at the same speed as the P1P.
Paying 30% more to get an open-source, fully modular, fully repairable and customizable product that's made sustainably with fair wages is not a huge markup.
I'd gladly pay 30% more to get an Android phone that's fully modular, open-source, repairable, upgradable and made in the EU.
The printers are both pretty identical in performance today. And while CoreXY has significantly more headroom in case you'd like to upgrade the current bottlenecks, that's not an option with the Bambu printers anyway.
But I think that the cat is out of the bag and that DRM will be the attempted solution to this kind stuff. It's going to go poorly though.
What part can you regulate and control? Not the batteries or the motors, or the off the shelf microcontrollers.
This is closer to banning moonshine which was arguably fairly effective.
> not be a plant of any value what so ever
It’s long been a perfectly viable strategy to plant pot on public lands and then come back for harvest. That doesn’t mean people are tossing seeds randomly, but lower rewards are balanced by lower risks. Some customers are always interested in savings cash even for a terrible product.
That said, I think enforcement would be more effective for drones. Marijuana can be effectively enjoyed in the privacy of your own home, but that's only true for a limited extent of drones. They're noisy and usually flown out in the open where annoyed neighbors can narc on you. Furthermore, just my subjective guess, I think people will be more willing to break the rules to enjoy marijuana than to enjoy drones. Marijuana is very effective at making a shit life tolerable, so people are more willing to break the law for it (and alcohol, etc).
And it'll be the same here in this context. If the government wants to make drones illegal because people are using them domestically for vigilante/terrorism purposes that'll be quite difficult.
People regularly ran clandestine grow operations that used 100kw+ of power for years and were never caught. If there's a desire for drones to commit crimes than someone will easily be able to make a clandestine drone factory.
It's very clear that China is an enemy that has to be dealt with by US
> "the proposed legislation won't do anything meaningful toward those ends."
Maybe it was not a good idea to kill RND in favor of greed?
Do you remember the parable of the ground breaking publication with its findings never finding a way into industry?
Musk often moaned about how hard it is to make things. It's our culture/society/economy a lot of the mechanisms are things we've made up sometimes going against reality. If we want to make something easier we would have to apply ourselves?
In 1950 the Chinese had 83% working in agriculture, the USA had 7%. (Today it is 22% and 1.6%)
You could argue they had access to abundant cheap labor but it is more practical to say we don't have access because everything is insanely expensive. Everything we do primarily benefits people who are useless to the process.
If you cant afford babies there is no need to have a family, no need to build houses for them. If one does accidentally a baby training and educating it should benefit everyone except the baby and the future?
We did all that and then boo hoo, China this China that?
It's one of those things that's just so dumb you assume it's only congressional election year virtue signaling designed to get some headlines and then be quietly negotiated away during 'reconciliation', yet congressional processes are so dysfunctional there's always a risk it accidentally becomes law.