"Then the same rules should apply to an individual who has access to union dues."
I've not commented on whether unions should be able to make campaign contributions. The topic is corporations.
"... its assets are held to be used only in acceptable ways to advance that purpose,
That's your opinion, but not the law. I suggest you contact Ben and Jerry's and tell them that their donations to civic causes are not allowed because they do not fall within the scope of "ice cream business"."
Can you quote Ben and Jerry's purpose as stated in their corporate bylaws? I bet you can't. I also bet the phrase "ice cream business" doesn't appear in there anywhere.
So setting your non sequitur aside, no it isn't "my opinion", it's a fact of law and has been enforced in the past by shareholder lawsuits.
A corporation does typcially have a certain amount of lattitude. Charitable efforts, to the extent that they don't financially cripple the company's direct efforts towards its state purpose, are generally accepted as an attempt to support the business through PR and buliding good will.
And certainly it is true that campaign contributions can support a corporation's mission; hence the importance of the other fact you seem to mistakenly believe is my opinion:
"... and the government has every right and interest in constraining what ways are acceptable.
Again, your opinion. In my opinion, the government has no right, and indeed no Constitutional authority, to tell me that I cannot spend the corporate assets of a company I own in any way I see fit"
Nonsense. Let's start with the obvious: the executivies making decisions about campaign contributions do not "own" their respective corporations.
Second, what you're claiming is that if you contribute some of your assets into a corporation, you should get all of the benefits the government offers you as part of that deal but should still have full personal control of your assets, which is bs on its face.
The authority the government has to regulate a corporation's actions (above and beyond those of individuals) comes from the deal that a group of individuals made with the government in forming the corporation; those are the costs for liablity shields, special tax treatment, etc. without which those corporate assets (which are not the same thing as your assets even if you "own" the company) would never have been amassed.
You claim it violates the intent or wording of the Constitution, but can you provide a citation? Or is that just your opinion?
I only ask because a lot of people (myself among them) think you're wrong, so you might want to provide some factual basis for your claim. Note that I have provided a citation for my position, that being a long history of decisions by the courts who are, in fact, an authority on the matter considerably higher than "slashdot user Chaos Incarnate". For a start, they've actually studied the intent of the clause.
You're resting on the assumption that all groupings of people are created equal. I'm not sure I agree with that.
A corporation is given specific benefits and expected to abide by specific rules. It does not transiently acqurie all the rights or responsibilities of the indivuals who make it up, and in particular an individual's right to expression cannot be exercised by leveraging corporate assets to which he or she might have access.
Each corporation has a stated purpose for existing (though typically the founders keep this as broad as is legally acceptable), its assets are held to be used only in acceptable ways to advance that purpose, and the government has every right and interest in constraining what ways are acceptable.
Use taxes don't violate the Interstate Commerce clause. Not even Amazon claims that. Here is a pretty good explanation of how state taxes interact with the Interstate Commerce clause. Note that a tax is illegal only if it discriminates against Interstate Commerce, and particularly note the heading Discriminatory Taxes May Be Valid as Complementary Taxes.
It has historically been considered an undue burden, but technology has passed the point where that reasoning could be deemed obsolete.
The question to me is at what point it becomes regulation of interstate commerce. The Courts have held that the tax itself is not such a regulation (within certain criteria), but saying "to sell here you must act as our tax agent" might cross a line even if the burden is made minimal by technology.
...except the Supreme Court, whose job it is to interpret the supreme law of the land and who serves as the higest authority on the matter, says you're wrong.
As long as the use tax on an interstate sale to someone in the state is no higher than the sales tax that would be charged for an in-state purchase, the Court does not regard it as a tarrif.
Perhaps you haven't been paying attention, but the Court already took up that issue.
Yes, a state may tax an interstate sale of goods received in its territory so long as the tax is no greater than the sales tax that would apply if the sale took place entirely within the state. If the use tax were higher, it would be an illegal restraint on interstate commerce, but up to that point it is not.
I'm not sure exactly where you're coming from, or where you think I'm coming from, so allow me to clarify this point:
As I said, I disagree with the ruling. I'm just saying that doesn't mean I'm going to jump on the bandwagon with every criticism of the ruling and those who made it, and I think GGP's comment about it being an incomplete law is out of line.
I know many people find this hard to comprehend in a society that's so immersed in the polarized bitch-fests that pass for discourse these days, but that's how I roll.
First, you're misusing the idiom of calling an occurance "convenient". Before that idiom applies, you need a coincidence of the alarms being offline with some other event such that, taken together, the two might point to a plot.
Second, to GP's question, yes they did inspect and the warheads are still in place.
Third, only certain alarms were off-line. Many other safeguards were still active and an attempt to steal a warhead would've been suicidal.
Fourth, root cause analysis is currently pointing to a mode of hardware failure that's been seen before. There is little reason to suspect malice.
Do we really need to continue with the reasons your paranoia makes no sense?
Except the ICBM complexes have far more failsafes than just the UPS you have. And (headilne and summary notwithstanding) it wasn't a power issue (nor had anything to do with a backhoe or a bottle of Jager), so a UPS is beside the point. And the missiles weren't unusable even during the brief outage, so the "free world" was at no elevated risk.
But apart from those minor details, you're spot on.
Please lay out a global strategic plan for nuclear deterrant and defense to set an upper bound on the number of ICBM's "anyone" needs. Don't forget that some nukes will probably be duds, and in many threat scenarios some will be taken out in their silos....Oh, you're not a military strategist? Then why are we listening to your estimate of how many missiles "anyone" needs?
Before you start, I'm also not a military strategist - hence I'm not citing a number of ICBM's I think we need. However, while the Cold War is in the past, it would be a foolish assumption that we'd never have a stand-off with another concentrated nuclear power.
Actually, it's not. It says 50 missiles is 1/9 of our missile stockpile; it says nothing about our total number of warheads. (In fact TFA claims that some of the ICBM's have multiple warheads. I don't know if that's true in the current configuration; others have pointed out that it isn't supposed to be.)
Saying we have 450 missiles is still vaguely inaccurate. 1/9 of our ICBM stockpile would (I believe) be correct, but those things on subs that aren't coutned in the 450 are, in many cases, also missiles.
Perhaps you're not aware, but the Supreme Court didn't "make [a law] that depend[s] upon [an]OTHER law". The Supreme Court doesn't make laws, period.
The Court did apparently make assumptions about the implications of a particular interpretation, but that's pretty much unavoidable. It speaks to the excessive complexity of our body of laws that they could not predict the outcome correctly.
While I disagree with the Court's ruling, the I do not find such severe fault as you do with the specific detail of meaning (but apparently failing to say in a binding way) "...following the same rules as everyone else".
I'm always amused by people who think 'real property rights' are anything other than legal privileges.
That fact that you can't hold this discussion without invoknig superlatives to tell me how much you disagree says everything I need to know about the value of continuing to participate. Go on believing that the rights you most prefer are the only ones that count, and wonder why your will is not reflected in the law.
TFA simplified the math a bit by showing how it would work if the numbers ran from 1 to N. But note earlier in the article it mentions that the allies had figured out the pattern of the serial numbers. There probably wasn't a German tank #1 or even #100; but there probably was a serial number that, based on their understanding of the information encoded in the serial number, the allies could estimate was the 100th built in a given timeframe (or perhaps at a given factory, etc.).
Starting at the 50th number in the sequence instead of the 1st wouldn't help much. Additional analysis could be done based on the density of the numbers seen to estimate upper and lower bounds.
What you might want to do is randomly skip numbers in your sequence with some predetermined frequency. You could either do this by a modest factor (to make the enemy over-estimate your production but in any event give them an upper bound) or by a wildly high factor (which would make it clear to your enemy that they are not getting useful information).
Or, you could use a protocol where the unique part of the serial number is actually random (provided you keep track to avoid two tanks getting the same value).
In summary - this works if the enemy hasn't thought about it or doesn't care.
Hmm... so your example of why the law as I think it should be is wrong, is a circumstance that occurs under today's law but could not happen under the law as I think it should be. Typical.
There is no reason that a content producer should have to choose between DRM and copyright protection. That's like saying that a homeowner should have to choose between locking his doors or having legal protection against home invasion.
Fundamentally the fact that I take steps to prevent someone from violating my rights should not take away my legal protection of those rights if someone figures out how to violate them anyway. I stand by my position that the fact they had to take extra steps to overcome my protections should be recognized as an aggrevating factor.
Trade secret vs. copyright is an entirely different situation. The raeson they are mutually exclusive is and always has been that they two bodies of law as originally conceived (and as they should be codified today) serve fundamentally incompatible goals.
No doubt in my mind the anti-circumvention law is broken. It was from day one, and the need for a 3-year review of exclusions demonstrates this. A better law might simply make circumvention an aggrevating factor in an underlying act of infringement. I would even be ok with assigning liability to Person X who circumvents a copyright protection for Person Y, if Person X should reasonably expect that Person Y is going to use the circumvention to infringe a copyright.
However, as of today the law is what it is. The attitude in TFS is ridiculous, and reflects an ignorance of the DMCA exemptions that is perpetuated every time we summarize this particular exemption is the "jailbreaking exemption".
First, the exemption does very specfiically talk about mobile phone handsets and software on that type of device. You can call this arbitrary, but that's the result of overy-focused lobbying.
More to the point, while the law does allow for inconsistencies, I'm not so sure this is one of them. After all, not every act of cell-phone jailbreaking is covered by the exemption, and I doubt a person running a business to jailbreak other peoples' phones would be able to shield himself with the exemption. You can argue whether that activity should be covered, but I'm willing to bet it's not.
I point this out because this guy wasn't busted for jailbreaking his own console; he was busted for selling the service of jailbreaking others' consoles. The exception that covers the "app interoperability" part of jailbreaking specifies narrowly that the purpose must be legal, and while he says (with a wink and a nudge) that he won't aid pirates, I don't know that he can state any narrow purpose when he's not the one making use of the circumvention.
And if that sounds backwards - that he should have to prove non-criminal intent - well, I believe that's the nature of an affirtmative defense, which is essentially what the exemptions are. The prosecution has to prove (beyond a reasonable doubt since this is a criminal charge) that he committed an act of circumvention, then I'm pretty sure it's up to him to prove that an exemption applied.
All of this is a symptom of the underlying broken law, of course; but that's not to say that this guy would walk if the law were "right". If circumvention were a civil matter, and if it were only illegal when linked to an underlying act of infringement, then someone wanting to offer circumvention services might be able to write up contracts requiring the client ot state a legal intent and to indemnify the business against claims resulting from infringement related to the circumvention. I don't get the sense this guy was running that thorough a shop, though, which means he might still have ended up on the hook.
doesn't the curved space-time idea require gravity to affect the body following the path?
I think you have the tail wagging the dog there. The curvature of spacetime is an affect of a single massive object being present; it does not depend on a second object "following a path" at all. Because the Sun is there, the spacetime in the Earth's neighborhood is curved. This curvature would be there with or without the Earth, and it will affect every object in that neighborhood equally.
Starting from a GR model, it's actually harder to understand how the time machine wouldn't experience the same curvature as everything else. In other words, why wouldn't it be affected by gravity?
More generally, your questions seem motivated by the idea that gravitational attraction is an interaction between two objects. According to GR, it's not. A massive object interacts with spacetime; all other objects, when they move through spacetime, are affected by spacetime's now-curved shape in such a way that they appear attracted to the first object.
This is why light, which has no mass and would be "not affected by gravity" in a Newtonian model, is in fact bent by gravity and even trapped by black holes.
I'm not sure that's implied. Even if the travel is a dimensional jump, the question remains of what spacial location you would "naturally" assume if you jumped forward or backward in time. In a relativistic universe of curved spacetime, I would still maintain that "one following the forces of gravity" is the most reasonable answer.
The time machine is affected by gravity because gravity bends spacetime, and the time machine does interact with spacetime even if it is not interacting (directly) with other matter.
Gravity isn't like other forces. Consider how dark matter is theorized to interact.
To clarify, you're pointing out that the time machine must account for Earth's gravity as well. I admit I glossed over this point.
If we assume that the time machine does not interact with proximate matter during the trip, then we do need to solve this problem. (And while that assumption isn't a slam dunk, it's probably one that most SF authors would rather work with than without, if they've really thought it through.)
But it's a much easier problem to solve than the "lost in space" issue. One solution would be to suppose that the time machine is traveling at orbital velocity relative to the Earth during the trip through time. Granted at the Earth's surface that's insanely fast (17686mph, a bit over the 88mph launch speed in BTTF), but that's open to some interpretation (regarding the time factor in your velocity) when you are traveling through time.
In any event, all the time machine needs to do is replace a single force - that of the ground offsetting its own weight - during the trip. That's much more plausible than calculating the new relative location in the Universe of a particular spot on the Earth at a different time.
Well, according to Einstein's description of gravity this may not be such an issue as you think. The Earth's movements are, after all, governed by gravity. Now gravity doesn't so much "curve" an object's course, as it bends spacetime around the object's path (which is a straight line).
And you're here on the Earth's surface, so you're moving along the same line. You hop in your car, start deviating from the straight-line path by 88mph, and then... what, exactly?
Your post (and many people's intuition) assumes that you suddenly change velocity in all dimensions, so that you move in time but stay at a fixed position in space. The problem is, the concept of a "fixed point in space" is a figment of human imagination; there's no such thing. A fixed point in space implies a prefered frame of reference, and there simply is no such thing.
So what spacial trajectory does the time machine follow? Well, why would it not continue moving at 88mph deviation from the straight-line path through curved spacetime that it's already following - that being the same line being followed by the Earth?
Gravity would cause the time machine to "follow" the Earth as it moved through time. Not the Earth's gravity, as many other posters have suggested, but rather the Sun's gravity and the other various forces that move the Earth.
There are many, many, many problems with time-travel fiction, but the idea that you would be lost in space just isn't one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
"Then the same rules should apply to an individual who has access to union dues."
I've not commented on whether unions should be able to make campaign contributions. The topic is corporations.
"... its assets are held to be used only in acceptable ways to advance that purpose,
That's your opinion, but not the law. I suggest you contact Ben and Jerry's and tell them that their donations to civic causes are not allowed because they do not fall within the scope of "ice cream business"."
Can you quote Ben and Jerry's purpose as stated in their corporate bylaws? I bet you can't. I also bet the phrase "ice cream business" doesn't appear in there anywhere.
So setting your non sequitur aside, no it isn't "my opinion", it's a fact of law and has been enforced in the past by shareholder lawsuits.
A corporation does typcially have a certain amount of lattitude. Charitable efforts, to the extent that they don't financially cripple the company's direct efforts towards its state purpose, are generally accepted as an attempt to support the business through PR and buliding good will.
And certainly it is true that campaign contributions can support a corporation's mission; hence the importance of the other fact you seem to mistakenly believe is my opinion:
"... and the government has every right and interest in constraining what ways are acceptable.
Again, your opinion. In my opinion, the government has no right, and indeed no Constitutional authority, to tell me that I cannot spend the corporate assets of a company I own in any way I see fit"
Nonsense. Let's start with the obvious: the executivies making decisions about campaign contributions do not "own" their respective corporations.
Second, what you're claiming is that if you contribute some of your assets into a corporation, you should get all of the benefits the government offers you as part of that deal but should still have full personal control of your assets, which is bs on its face.
The authority the government has to regulate a corporation's actions (above and beyond those of individuals) comes from the deal that a group of individuals made with the government in forming the corporation; those are the costs for liablity shields, special tax treatment, etc. without which those corporate assets (which are not the same thing as your assets even if you "own" the company) would never have been amassed.
You claim it violates the intent or wording of the Constitution, but can you provide a citation? Or is that just your opinion?
I only ask because a lot of people (myself among them) think you're wrong, so you might want to provide some factual basis for your claim. Note that I have provided a citation for my position, that being a long history of decisions by the courts who are, in fact, an authority on the matter considerably higher than "slashdot user Chaos Incarnate". For a start, they've actually studied the intent of the clause.
You're resting on the assumption that all groupings of people are created equal. I'm not sure I agree with that.
A corporation is given specific benefits and expected to abide by specific rules. It does not transiently acqurie all the rights or responsibilities of the indivuals who make it up, and in particular an individual's right to expression cannot be exercised by leveraging corporate assets to which he or she might have access.
Each corporation has a stated purpose for existing (though typically the founders keep this as broad as is legally acceptable), its assets are held to be used only in acceptable ways to advance that purpose, and the government has every right and interest in constraining what ways are acceptable.
Pretend all you want that anyone gets to overrule the Court on what is constitutional.
Then try to make it happen.
Good luck.
Use taxes don't violate the Interstate Commerce clause. Not even Amazon claims that. Here is a pretty good explanation of how state taxes interact with the Interstate Commerce clause. Note that a tax is illegal only if it discriminates against Interstate Commerce, and particularly note the heading Discriminatory Taxes May Be Valid as Complementary Taxes.
It has historically been considered an undue burden, but technology has passed the point where that reasoning could be deemed obsolete.
The question to me is at what point it becomes regulation of interstate commerce. The Courts have held that the tax itself is not such a regulation (within certain criteria), but saying "to sell here you must act as our tax agent" might cross a line even if the burden is made minimal by technology.
...except the Supreme Court, whose job it is to interpret the supreme law of the land and who serves as the higest authority on the matter, says you're wrong.
As long as the use tax on an interstate sale to someone in the state is no higher than the sales tax that would be charged for an in-state purchase, the Court does not regard it as a tarrif.
Perhaps you haven't been paying attention, but the Court already took up that issue.
Yes, a state may tax an interstate sale of goods received in its territory so long as the tax is no greater than the sales tax that would apply if the sale took place entirely within the state. If the use tax were higher, it would be an illegal restraint on interstate commerce, but up to that point it is not.
I'm not sure exactly where you're coming from, or where you think I'm coming from, so allow me to clarify this point:
As I said, I disagree with the ruling. I'm just saying that doesn't mean I'm going to jump on the bandwagon with every criticism of the ruling and those who made it, and I think GGP's comment about it being an incomplete law is out of line.
I know many people find this hard to comprehend in a society that's so immersed in the polarized bitch-fests that pass for discourse these days, but that's how I roll.
Riiiiight.
First, you're misusing the idiom of calling an occurance "convenient". Before that idiom applies, you need a coincidence of the alarms being offline with some other event such that, taken together, the two might point to a plot.
Second, to GP's question, yes they did inspect and the warheads are still in place.
Third, only certain alarms were off-line. Many other safeguards were still active and an attempt to steal a warhead would've been suicidal.
Fourth, root cause analysis is currently pointing to a mode of hardware failure that's been seen before. There is little reason to suspect malice.
Do we really need to continue with the reasons your paranoia makes no sense?
Right, exactly.
Except the ICBM complexes have far more failsafes than just the UPS you have. And (headilne and summary notwithstanding) it wasn't a power issue (nor had anything to do with a backhoe or a bottle of Jager), so a UPS is beside the point. And the missiles weren't unusable even during the brief outage, so the "free world" was at no elevated risk.
But apart from those minor details, you're spot on.
Please lay out a global strategic plan for nuclear deterrant and defense to set an upper bound on the number of ICBM's "anyone" needs. Don't forget that some nukes will probably be duds, and in many threat scenarios some will be taken out in their silos. ...Oh, you're not a military strategist? Then why are we listening to your estimate of how many missiles "anyone" needs?
Before you start, I'm also not a military strategist - hence I'm not citing a number of ICBM's I think we need. However, while the Cold War is in the past, it would be a foolish assumption that we'd never have a stand-off with another concentrated nuclear power.
You can't put the genie back in the bottle.
Actually, it's not. It says 50 missiles is 1/9 of our missile stockpile; it says nothing about our total number of warheads. (In fact TFA claims that some of the ICBM's have multiple warheads. I don't know if that's true in the current configuration; others have pointed out that it isn't supposed to be.)
Saying we have 450 missiles is still vaguely inaccurate. 1/9 of our ICBM stockpile would (I believe) be correct, but those things on subs that aren't coutned in the 450 are, in many cases, also missiles.
Right, 450 missiles; and while I doubt that we're really only loading one warhead per missile, surely we're not loading an average of over 12.
However, not every U.S. warhead is on an ICBM.
Perhaps you're not aware, but the Supreme Court didn't "make [a law] that depend[s] upon [an]OTHER law". The Supreme Court doesn't make laws, period.
The Court did apparently make assumptions about the implications of a particular interpretation, but that's pretty much unavoidable. It speaks to the excessive complexity of our body of laws that they could not predict the outcome correctly.
While I disagree with the Court's ruling, the I do not find such severe fault as you do with the specific detail of meaning (but apparently failing to say in a binding way) "...following the same rules as everyone else".
I'm always amused by people who think 'real property rights' are anything other than legal privileges.
That fact that you can't hold this discussion without invoknig superlatives to tell me how much you disagree says everything I need to know about the value of continuing to participate. Go on believing that the rights you most prefer are the only ones that count, and wonder why your will is not reflected in the law.
TFA simplified the math a bit by showing how it would work if the numbers ran from 1 to N. But note earlier in the article it mentions that the allies had figured out the pattern of the serial numbers. There probably wasn't a German tank #1 or even #100; but there probably was a serial number that, based on their understanding of the information encoded in the serial number, the allies could estimate was the 100th built in a given timeframe (or perhaps at a given factory, etc.).
Starting at the 50th number in the sequence instead of the 1st wouldn't help much. Additional analysis could be done based on the density of the numbers seen to estimate upper and lower bounds.
What you might want to do is randomly skip numbers in your sequence with some predetermined frequency. You could either do this by a modest factor (to make the enemy over-estimate your production but in any event give them an upper bound) or by a wildly high factor (which would make it clear to your enemy that they are not getting useful information).
Or, you could use a protocol where the unique part of the serial number is actually random (provided you keep track to avoid two tanks getting the same value).
In summary - this works if the enemy hasn't thought about it or doesn't care.
Hmm... so your example of why the law as I think it should be is wrong, is a circumstance that occurs under today's law but could not happen under the law as I think it should be. Typical.
There is no reason that a content producer should have to choose between DRM and copyright protection. That's like saying that a homeowner should have to choose between locking his doors or having legal protection against home invasion.
Fundamentally the fact that I take steps to prevent someone from violating my rights should not take away my legal protection of those rights if someone figures out how to violate them anyway. I stand by my position that the fact they had to take extra steps to overcome my protections should be recognized as an aggrevating factor.
Trade secret vs. copyright is an entirely different situation. The raeson they are mutually exclusive is and always has been that they two bodies of law as originally conceived (and as they should be codified today) serve fundamentally incompatible goals.
No doubt in my mind the anti-circumvention law is broken. It was from day one, and the need for a 3-year review of exclusions demonstrates this. A better law might simply make circumvention an aggrevating factor in an underlying act of infringement. I would even be ok with assigning liability to Person X who circumvents a copyright protection for Person Y, if Person X should reasonably expect that Person Y is going to use the circumvention to infringe a copyright.
However, as of today the law is what it is. The attitude in TFS is ridiculous, and reflects an ignorance of the DMCA exemptions that is perpetuated every time we summarize this particular exemption is the "jailbreaking exemption".
First, the exemption does very specfiically talk about mobile phone handsets and software on that type of device. You can call this arbitrary, but that's the result of overy-focused lobbying.
More to the point, while the law does allow for inconsistencies, I'm not so sure this is one of them. After all, not every act of cell-phone jailbreaking is covered by the exemption, and I doubt a person running a business to jailbreak other peoples' phones would be able to shield himself with the exemption. You can argue whether that activity should be covered, but I'm willing to bet it's not.
I point this out because this guy wasn't busted for jailbreaking his own console; he was busted for selling the service of jailbreaking others' consoles. The exception that covers the "app interoperability" part of jailbreaking specifies narrowly that the purpose must be legal, and while he says (with a wink and a nudge) that he won't aid pirates, I don't know that he can state any narrow purpose when he's not the one making use of the circumvention.
And if that sounds backwards - that he should have to prove non-criminal intent - well, I believe that's the nature of an affirtmative defense, which is essentially what the exemptions are. The prosecution has to prove (beyond a reasonable doubt since this is a criminal charge) that he committed an act of circumvention, then I'm pretty sure it's up to him to prove that an exemption applied.
All of this is a symptom of the underlying broken law, of course; but that's not to say that this guy would walk if the law were "right". If circumvention were a civil matter, and if it were only illegal when linked to an underlying act of infringement, then someone wanting to offer circumvention services might be able to write up contracts requiring the client ot state a legal intent and to indemnify the business against claims resulting from infringement related to the circumvention. I don't get the sense this guy was running that thorough a shop, though, which means he might still have ended up on the hook.
doesn't the curved space-time idea require gravity to affect the body following the path?
I think you have the tail wagging the dog there. The curvature of spacetime is an affect of a single massive object being present; it does not depend on a second object "following a path" at all. Because the Sun is there, the spacetime in the Earth's neighborhood is curved. This curvature would be there with or without the Earth, and it will affect every object in that neighborhood equally.
Starting from a GR model, it's actually harder to understand how the time machine wouldn't experience the same curvature as everything else. In other words, why wouldn't it be affected by gravity?
More generally, your questions seem motivated by the idea that gravitational attraction is an interaction between two objects. According to GR, it's not. A massive object interacts with spacetime; all other objects, when they move through spacetime, are affected by spacetime's now-curved shape in such a way that they appear attracted to the first object.
This is why light, which has no mass and would be "not affected by gravity" in a Newtonian model, is in fact bent by gravity and even trapped by black holes.
I'm not sure that's implied. Even if the travel is a dimensional jump, the question remains of what spacial location you would "naturally" assume if you jumped forward or backward in time. In a relativistic universe of curved spacetime, I would still maintain that "one following the forces of gravity" is the most reasonable answer.
The time machine is affected by gravity because gravity bends spacetime, and the time machine does interact with spacetime even if it is not interacting (directly) with other matter.
Gravity isn't like other forces. Consider how dark matter is theorized to interact.
To clarify, you're pointing out that the time machine must account for Earth's gravity as well. I admit I glossed over this point.
If we assume that the time machine does not interact with proximate matter during the trip, then we do need to solve this problem. (And while that assumption isn't a slam dunk, it's probably one that most SF authors would rather work with than without, if they've really thought it through.)
But it's a much easier problem to solve than the "lost in space" issue. One solution would be to suppose that the time machine is traveling at orbital velocity relative to the Earth during the trip through time. Granted at the Earth's surface that's insanely fast (17686mph, a bit over the 88mph launch speed in BTTF), but that's open to some interpretation (regarding the time factor in your velocity) when you are traveling through time.
In any event, all the time machine needs to do is replace a single force - that of the ground offsetting its own weight - during the trip. That's much more plausible than calculating the new relative location in the Universe of a particular spot on the Earth at a different time.
Well, according to Einstein's description of gravity this may not be such an issue as you think. The Earth's movements are, after all, governed by gravity. Now gravity doesn't so much "curve" an object's course, as it bends spacetime around the object's path (which is a straight line).
And you're here on the Earth's surface, so you're moving along the same line. You hop in your car, start deviating from the straight-line path by 88mph, and then... what, exactly?
Your post (and many people's intuition) assumes that you suddenly change velocity in all dimensions, so that you move in time but stay at a fixed position in space. The problem is, the concept of a "fixed point in space" is a figment of human imagination; there's no such thing. A fixed point in space implies a prefered frame of reference, and there simply is no such thing.
So what spacial trajectory does the time machine follow? Well, why would it not continue moving at 88mph deviation from the straight-line path through curved spacetime that it's already following - that being the same line being followed by the Earth?
Gravity would cause the time machine to "follow" the Earth as it moved through time. Not the Earth's gravity, as many other posters have suggested, but rather the Sun's gravity and the other various forces that move the Earth.
There are many, many, many problems with time-travel fiction, but the idea that you would be lost in space just isn't one of them.
Hmm... how much energy does time travel take? What makes you sure this is cheaper than a booster?
Even if it is, finding a more efficient path through spacetime does not necessarily violate conservation of energy.