For companies that want to use small drones, a new era began Monday. That's when rules kicked in that free them from having to request special permission from the federal government for any commercial drone endeavor -- a waiver process that often took months. Although industry experts say the Federal Aviation Administration's new rules on commercial drones largely make it easier for companies to use the unmanned aerial vehicles, there are still a lot of constraints. Under the new commercial-drone rules, operators must keep their drones within visual line of sight -- that is, the person flying the drone must be able to see it with the naked eye -- and can fly only during the day, though twilight flying is permitted if the drone has anti-collision lights. Drones cannot fly over people who are not directly participating in the operation or go higher than 400 feet above the ground.

New rules governing the operation of drones, or unmanned aerial systems (UAS) as they are formally called, in United States airspace came into effect Monday. Called Small UAS Rule (Part 107), they were finalized by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in June and cover operating rules for drones as well as regulations for their pilots, and apply to drones flown for both business and pleasure. Drones have been flying around even before Part 107 came into effect, with about 3,000 exemptions already handed out to businesses, but the new rules simplify the process of flying UAS legally. If your UAS weighs under 0.55 pounds or if you are flying it indoors only, you don't require any registration. If your drone is under 55 pounds in weight and you don't fly it at night or above 400 feet and you always keep it within line of sight, you have it simple. Head over to the registration page on the FAA website and register yourself.

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Welcome to California Inc., the weekly newsletter of the L.A. Times Business section. Pharmaceutical company Mylan is still in the news after hiking the price of life-saving EpiPens by more than 400%. But keep this in mind: Of roughly 250 million raised for and against 17 ballot measures coming before California voters in November, more than a quarter of that amount -- about 70 million -- has been contributed by deep-pocketed drug companies to defeat the Drug Price Relief Act, which would limit drug prices charged to state healthcare programs. Spending on the measure could set a state record over coming weeks. No buzz kill: New federal rules for small commercial drones go into effect Monday.

The automated aircraft are planned to work alongside Domino's current delivery fleet and will be integrated into its online ordering and GPS systems, according to the firm. Domino's Group CEO and Managing Director, Don Meij, said the company's growth in recent years had led to a "significant increase" in the number of deliveries it needs to make. "With the increased number of deliveries we make each year, we were faced with the challenge of ensuring our delivery times continue to decrease and that we strive to offer our customers new and progressive ways of ordering from us," he said. Research into different delivery methods led Domino's to Flirtey, whose success within the airborne delivery space has been "impressive", the CEO added. The two companies demonstrated their drone pizza delivery service in Auckland, New Zealand, yesterday – an event attended by the country's Civil Aviation Authority and its Minister of Transport Simon Bridges.

Famous Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, who is credited as the author of the famous war strategy guidebook Art of War had said; "know thy self, know thy enemy. Those words were from the 5th century BC. The'art of war' in the 21st century is drastically different. So much so that Christopher Coker, professor at the London School of Economics and author of Warrior Geeks in a 2013 piece declared that technology, in fact, is now making man the weakest link in warfare. India is also now looking to get into the world of advanced drone warfare. New Delhi has shown renewed interest in buying some of the top US-made drones currently proving their worth for the American military around the world.

Silicon Valley, or the Greater Bay Area, is the 18th largest economy in the world, more than half the size of Canada's economy and bigger than Switzerland, Saudi Arabia or Turkey. This is because the region has become the world leader in research and development of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, software and virtual reality. "Software is eating the world," said Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen famously in 2011. It was controversial but prescient. Five years later, software-driven machines and drones perform surgery, write news stories, compose music, translate, analyze, wage war, guard, listen, speak and entertain.

Human-robot strike teams, autonomous land mines, and covert swarms of minuscule robotic spies: the US Department of Defense's idea of the future of war seems like a sci-fi movie. In a report that dreams of new ways to destroy adversaries and protect American assets in equal portions, the DOD's science research division cements the idea that artificial intelligence and autonomous robotic systems will be a crucial part of the nation's ongoing defense strategy. US military already uses a host of robotic systems in the battlefield, from reconnaissance and attack drones to bomb disposal robots. However, these are all remotely-piloted systems, meaning a human has a high level of control over the machine's actions at all times. The new DOD report sees tactical advantages from humans and purely self-driven machines working together in the field.

Aptonomy Inc. has developed drone technology that could make prison breaks, robberies or malicious intrusions of any kind impossible for mere mortals. Dubbing it a kind of "flying security guard," the company has built its systems on top of a drone often used by movie-makers, the DJI S-1000, a camera-carrying octocopter. To that skeleton, Aptonomy adds a new flight controller, and second computer to power day- and night-vision cameras, bright lights, and loudspeakers, among other things. And more importantly than the hardware features, Aptonomy has developed artificial intelligence and navigational systems that allow its drones to fly low and fast, avoiding obstacles in structure-dense environments, and detecting human activity or faces in the area, autonomously. A user can open up a browser, get onto the Aptonomy interface, click on a point on a map to send out a drone to a particular location, then watch that flight in real time, or review a recording of it later.

A very, very small quadcopter, one inch in diameter can carry a one- or two-gram shaped charge. You can order them from a drone manufacturer in China. You can program the code to say: "Here are thousands of photographs of the kinds of things I want to target." A one-gram shaped charge can punch a hole in nine millimeters of steel, so presumably you can also punch a hole in someone's head. You can fit about three million of those in a semi-tractor-trailer. You can drive up I-95 with three trucks and have 10 million weapons attacking New York City. They don't have to be very effective, only 5 or 10% of them have to find the target. There will be manufacturers producing millions of these weapons that people will be able to buy just like you can buy guns now, except millions of guns don't matter unless you have a million soldiers. You need only three guys to write the program and launch them. So you can just imagine that in many parts of the world humans will be hunted. They will be cowering underground in shelters and devising techniques so that they don't get detected. This is the ever-present cloud of lethal autonomous weapons. Mary Wareham laughs a lot. It usually sounds the same regardless of the circumstance -- like a mirthful giggle the blonde New Zealander can't suppress -- but it bubbles up at the most varied moments. Wareham laughs when things are funny, she laughs when things are awkward, she laughs when she disagrees with you. And she laughs when things are truly unpleasant, like when you're talking to her about how humanity might soon be annihilated by killer robots and the world is doing nothing to stop it. One afternoon this spring at the United Nations in Geneva, I sat behind Wareham in a large wood-paneled, beige-carpeted assembly room that hosted the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), a group of 121 countries that have signed the agreement to restrict weapons that "are considered to cause unnecessary or unjustifiable suffering to combatants or to affect civilians indiscriminately"-- in other words, weapons humanity deems too cruel to use in war. The UN moves at a glacial pace, but the CCW is even worse.