Understanding what we are talking about.
Emerging technologies are often given extremely ambiguous names. Two immediately come to mind in our hobby. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, and First Person View. Of course we immediately use an acronym to make them easier to use in conversation, so we use UAV and FPV. Often newcomers to the hobby glean their meaning from forums or Internet searches and come up with inaccurate definitions. For instance, FPV could mean either First Person View, or First Person Video, because FPV is often associated with videos posted on YouTube. Further, FPV has evolved from simply slapping a small camera on a plane so we see what the pilot would see, to controlling the plane or copter using the on-board camera.
Now if you watched
Bruce's video, You'll notice that he uses the term Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) instead of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). I've noticed that several organizations have started using this term which even further broadens the category. A "System" doesn't have to be a vehicle, but could be the electronics added to an aircraft to make it capable of unmanned flight.
Matters are made even worse, when "The Media" becomes interested. Now we have "Drone" which could mean anything including a male, non-non working bee, to a Predator aircraft, to what I seem to be doing here (as in "droning on and on".
Just look what they've done with the term "assault weapon". But I won't go into that here.
I've mentioned before in my posts that I'm kind of a stickler for semantics (partially because I'm surrounded by it, working for a newspaper), but also because I often see misunderstandings arise because of lack of understanding in communications.
So until clear, unambiguous terminology is developed for the different classes and functions of these technologies, we are going to have misunderstanding after misunderstanding, and people trying to enforce rules and policies in areas they simply don't belong.
I also applaud Trappy for forcing the issue so that we may get some real definition in this area. I just hope it doesn't backfire.