Wow, Eric Schmidt is blinded by his desire to maintain power. His greatest fear is losing his power... He says private drones should be banned and mentions nothing about the commercial use of drones by companies, especially his own company. And then he uses a small isolated example of drones being used for evil as to why they should be banned...terrorists? come on! Nothing is mentioned about drones being used for search and rescue, global natural resource tracking, travel, or even space exploration! This is clearly an attempt by a frightened individual to maintain control.<p>What we should start considering and making plans for is pooling our resources together in order to setup a system of public, open-sourced drones whose data is freely available to everyone, with an official, central repository backed up and stored at the NSA (after we open-source that and get a public API working).<p>Google's street view cars would no longer be needed. We could have a real-time digital duplicate of reality running using the NSA's resources. Anybody can plug in and 'teleport' anywhere in the world. Any crime that would happen would be recorded live, and emergency broadcast systems can be implemented.<p>Unfortunately, no person or company could profit from this publicly available data. Any monetized analysis tool would be duplicated and hosted publicly for free via the NSA web services. All open source and anyone can view and improve the code and master pulls can be voted on by the community.<p>This is great for location and mapping data, but what about taking it a step further and maybe we could use these drones as a sort of 'opt-in' activity tracker. We've heard of the military using gait detection from drones to track 'terrorists'. Well, how many people can one drone track at a time? Also, can it measure heart-rate, steps taken, breathes per minute, O2 levels, etc... There goes fitbit and fuelband...<p>This is just getting started, there's still traveling and shipping that can be freed and open-sourced...