Comment by jrockway
3 years ago
That's how you see it, but not how most people see it. The "corner crossing" lawsuit got a LOT of coverage on Hacker News. Landowners claimed that merely floating over their property was trespassing. The courts disagreed.
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.
Ignoring the fact that many of the corner crossing cases were bad faith arguments by landowners intentionally attempting to abuse the situation, I don't think anyone would argue that the park boundary is a prism that extends vertically to infinity.
So where do you draw the line?
It definitely extends to infinity. Why would it stop somewhere?
Why wouldn't it? If you think most people would consider a satellite passing overhead, an airplane flying high overhead, the Moon, the Sun, other objects in space etc. when directly overhead to be "in" a park, I think you'd be mistaken. And the results here bear that out, at least to the limited extent there were relevant questions.
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.
So you're saying that, for parks in there right location, for brief periods of time, parts of other plants, stars, and space are "part of the park"