But you were specifically instructed to not use any laws local to your jurisdiction, and that's why this can happen. The 15 countries it flew over are members of the ICAO, which delegated some of their sovereignty to the common good of easy air travel. It could have easily worked out some other way; fly over our country without stopping for immigration, and we blow up your plane. (You can see this in action if you fly your plane from Canada to do a low approach over the White House. You probably won't be home for dinner.) Similarly, in the US, the FAA decides who can fly over your property and how low. These are not universal constraints on existence, just actual laws that people wrote down because nobody could agree on the details. I'd venture a guess that if you asked the average property owner if airplanes could fly over their property and stare at them in their hot tubs, they'd say "no". However, the law simply doesn't agree with them, and a satellite is photographing your underwear as we speak!
But what if it's a single unit (no warhead) which only works via kinetic contact, then perhaps not a vehicle.
Trust me, if there weren't any laws, people would be shooting down airplanes above their farms, or at the very least, writing a lot of angry letters to the FAA. The laws that we have right now allowing the freedom of air travel were hard-won and unpopular among those affected.
Therefore, the park in this exercise would mostly like try and shoot down the International Space Station, or else risk the reputation of not being strict against surfers carrying surfboards. It's exactly the same thing.
So where do you draw the line?
Similarly a subway train passing underneath the park is not "in" the park, nor are vehicles that are at the antipode of the park on the polar opposite side of the Earth.
To me, that doesn't change the answers much. You still have to have some definition of vehicle that inevitably assumes some context.
That to me means any human-propelled thing smaller than say a motorbike is not a vehicle.
So I only said 'is indisputably a vehicle' to cars and similar (even if was an ambulance or police car)
The countries often ask for passenger lists and manifests before they allow your plane to do so and have, in the past forced planes to land to get to passengers or suspected passengers on the plane they have an interest in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident
Parks do have airspaces, obviously and literally, and more to the point, in the U.S. there’s existing legislation defining the altitudes that are considered “in” and out of the park.
Whether any airspace is included in the park is completely ambiguous in the game.
Asking intentionally ambiguous questions that existing laws already answer in order to make a point about the difficulty of moderation kind-of undermines the author’s intent here. He was trying to prove that unanswerable corner cases always exist, but it’s not true for the specific case of airlines over parks once you know the laws.
https://www.faa.gov/uas/commercial_operators/become_a_drone_...
The question in the quiz about flying airplanes over a park can be correctly answered with 3 pieces of information: the aircraft type, the park’s location, and the altitude. The question cannot be answered without that information. Contrary to the author’s attempted point, the correct answer to the question is not a matter of language ambiguity.
Is a quadcopter at 399 ft in the park then? If it's at 401 ft, then it's not?
Yeah I saw all those rules. The FAA killed flying drones as a legal hobby for me.
I would say those two things are very different. The ground (floors are inside) is the cooperating object upon which leading objects carry.
The shoes carried the person on the ground, the car carried the person on the ground, the horse carried the person on the ground, etc;
An interesting dilemma does occur if we are walking barefoot: our feet carry us but are part of our whole, so we cannot reasonably consider them or ourselves a vehicle. But in a general day-to-day sense we would say they carry us.
It is very interesting what you brought up because I think it shows some people consider their outfit as an extension of themselves. Then again, many people also do for their car :)
Since we're already taking it too far, I want to point out that you can have outside floors, and you can have floors that are not supported by the ground.
An airplanes floor in flight, or a dance floor in your backyard are examples of both.
Rollerblades, skis, snowboards, skateboards, scooters, bikes.
IMO the definition of a vehicle comes down to how wieldy, how large, and how powerful the device is - for instance car is obviously a vehicle as it's very powerful, has a large turning radius, and large area. The interesting thing about this is that there's an argument that scooters are not vehicles but skateboards are - scooters are far easier to control (i.e. more wieldy) whereas skateboards have a tendency to launch the user in one direction and the skateboard in the other, which makes it rather unwieldy.
I would only consider skates to be slightly ambiguous because they are shoes that are mounted but worn. but still, i say vehicle
Other definitions include an agent of transmission (e.g. for and infection) and a medium though which something is displayed (dance is the vehicle for my creativity). Would have been interesting to see the different definitions exploited vs more strained classification of shoes or skates or whatnot as vehicles.
Is an airplane in your park if you put a roof over it? Is an airplane in your house?
"the park" includes not only the ground, but also a certain area above the ground - otherwise someone riding a bike through the park wouldn't be in the park (as they are not touching the ground) but their bike would be. That would be absurd.
You see the issue, yah?
In at least some countries (such as the U.S., and I would speculate practically all countries in the age of commercial flight and private drones, but I don’t know that for a fact) there are laws that define whether flying “over” a public park means in our out, and the park’s bounding volume is defined with a specific altitude ceiling. (It may be different depending on the type of aircraft, e.g., civilian drone vs emergency helicopter vs commercial airliner, etc.)
The author’s trick worked. People are arguing over whether a hypothetical airplane is in the hypothetical park without knowing the altitude or location, rather than pointing at the fact that he question is intentionally under-specified and the right answer depends on important details that were left out.
Additionally strollers, wagons, and other baby or child conveyances would also qualify.
- Would anyone call it a vehicle?
- Is it in the park?
In general, no testing. Unless some people are being jackasses and doing something absurd like standing on wheelchairs jousting with long sticks holding up everyone in line.
While it might be uncommon to call a wheelchair a vehicle, it fits the literal definition. I don’t understand the ‘extension of the person’ rationale, you’re still using the word ‘wheelchair’, and it’s obviously a separate object from a person. How would that rationale differ if you were talking about cars? Can I argue a car is an extension of me as long as I’m using it while I need it?
I wouldn't say I'm entirely convinced, but it's at least convincing enough that I said that a wheelchair did not violate the "vehicle" rule. I can't define "vehicle" in a way that would satisfactorily justify that decision, but I'm comfortable with that.
A bicycle actually goes on roads, follow rules and get a ticket for jumping a red light.
You can take roller skates off, get out of a wheelchair, and get off a bicycle.
Imagine you were wearing roller skates being pulled by a dog.
Imagine you were sitting in a chair, with a roller skate bound to each leg of the chair, rolling down a hill.
Imagine you were a flea in a roller skate rolling down a hill.
Imagine you were a dog in a wheelchair rolling down a hill.
Imagine you were a flea on a dog in a chair with roller skates on its legs rolling down a hill.
I don't think that's particularly clear and I think a non-negligible number of people would disagree
After all, bicycles are clearly vehicles, and bicycles and wheelchairs are both things with metal frames, wheels and seats designed to convey humans around under their own power.
Other than the placement of the wheels, the main difference is the character of its use.
Which I guess is part of the point - the rule specifically does not say anything about use, only presence - but people (including me) are still interpreting the rule with a "usage" axis. Perfect demonstration that the "simple rules for Internet content that are easy to apply" assertion has fallen over at the first hurdle.
I think, just being overly annoying and literal, that the game shouldn't be answered by asking whether anyone would call a wheelchair a vehicle, but whether a wheelchair is a vehicle in the sense meant in the rule statement. I don't think it is, personally, though it's probably the closest non-vehicle in the list.
Strictly speaking, by the definition of "would anyone call this object a vehicle", every single thing on the list is a vehicle, because apparently at least ~2% of the quiz respondents said they were vehicles - including kites!
It might include a powered mobility scooter.
Drones and balloons I would say are in the park, whereas aircraft (at normal altitudes) I would say are not. Unfortunately: I'd like more parks to have a protected square inch of silence.
a thing used for transporting people or goods
On this basis, I conclude that wheelchairs, roller skates and carried skatebords are vehicles, and horses are not (as thing implies non-sentience).
Or if it was motorised?
I say none are vehicles but I could see how one might.
Is the correct resolution to deny (b)?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what "in the park" represents within the analogy.