What the carriers are doing is horrible, no doubt. They should be stopped from selling location data to anyone, full stop.
I think it is kinda rare when we agree, but this. They should be stopped. But the summary is blaming Pai for not ending unauthorized sales. The FCC cannot end the sales. They can make them unauthorized (illegal), and then they can levy fines. That's all. They can't shoot the people who are about to hand over the data. If they are already unauthorized, then the rules already exist. Now they need STAFF to start the NAL (notice of apparent liability) process.
It's something that should be addressed when the government is re-opened.
Pai is pointing out, in a very direct manner, that as a government employee, he is legally prohibited from volunteering his time, even if that time is at the request of the congress. And his staff is legally prohibited from volunteering their time to prepare a report for him to deliver, even if the report is at the request of congress. Providing a report to congress is, as Pai claims, hardly a matter of life and death.
As for the claim the he is "giv[ing] carriers free pass", that's just stupid. He's unable to do anything about it right now, but they'll still be liable for their actions once staff is back at work, even actions that take place "during FCC shutdown".
The House has passed numerous budgets. The Speaker of the Senate, Mitch McConnell,
There is no "Speaker of the Senate". There is a President of the Senate, who is the Vice President of the US, Mike Pence. There is a majority leader, who is Mitch McConnell.
No. That just sets a new standard that if the President refuses to sign a CR then eventually they will get their way.
Perhaps you are too young to remember that the government budget isn't supposed to be a string of "continuing resolutions", but instead a real budget with real plans and real numbers.
And maybe we should remember that "failing to sign a bill" is called a "pocket veto", and Congress can overturn a veto if they have enough votes.
If Congress has the will, they could end this. Not today, but they have the power.
Which if you might remember Trump was going to veto. First President I've known of who had exactly what they wanted and then threaten to veto it.
As if every bill passed by Congress contained only one thing and dealt with only one issue. It is quite common, in fact a standard practice these days, for Congress to put multiple things in a single bill, some of which they want but the President doesn't, expecting the President to sign the whole thing so he gets the things he wants. You must be very young indeed not to have seen this before Trump.
But sometimes this backfires on Congress when the President stands up to them and vetoes the bill. The standard response is then to claim the President vetoed the bill because of something he himself wanted, when the truth is he vetoed it because of all the extra crap that Congress stuffed into it.
The solution to this is called "line item veto", where the President can veto certain things in a bill while keeping the rest. This is a HIGHLY partisan option, however, and one of the places where reasonable people realize that giving one President that option when they like the guy means the guys they don't like also have that option. The version that we did have in the US was ruled unconstitutional and a legal replacement has yet to be enacted.
in the 2018 Omnibus spending
The word "omnibus" is a dead giveaway that the bill was a "lump everything into one bill and hope it gets signed" attempt. You blame the current President for not signing the lumped together concoctions, why not blame Congress for lumping everything together?
Plenty of millennials in the Coast Guard, who aren't getting paid.
These are truly people who are doing it for the job and not the money.
Why is the USCG not under DOD who are still being paid? It now looks stupid that they aren't. Every person who is pointing at the Coast Guard and using them as a talking point against the shutdown is calling them a necessary coastal defense. Why not Department of Defense, then?
"The shutdown could hurt the reputation of the government as a good place to work..."
Isn't that just what conservatives have been working toward for decades?
No.
If the only reason you work for the government is because the pay and promotion is (was) a guaranteed thing, then maybe you need to look for a different job.
If, OTOH, you are working there because you want to do the work and do something you feel is beneficial to your fellow citizens and all that, then the government is still a good place to work, because it is doing a lot of things that aren't done in private enterprise.
For now in order to get better identification and exploit the new commercial opportunities afforded by net neutrality
This has nothing at all to do with net neutrality.
As for what is spam BY DEFINITION, there is no official and universal definition of this slang term
I'm sorry you came late to the party. Unsolicited commercial email. UCE. Unsolicited.
and no amount of foaming at the mouth and asserting otherwise will make it so.
That's right. Your foaming at the mouth about how you get spam after you signed up for a mailing list in exchange for a coupon for something doesn't make the email spam. It make it solicited.
Opt-in, out-opt, at what point have you authorized it?
I'm sorry that English is not your first language. At the point you authorized the email or contact. That is opting-in. When you sign up for it.
Hell, messages from a script you yourself wrote blasting to your screen at annoying frequency is generally referred to as "spam."
Only by morons who want to get worked up into a lather about all the spam they get.
Pretty much any annoying and unwanted or bulk communication is considered spam.
I emphasized the important bit. So you agree, if you have authorized it, thus saying you want it, it isn't spam. Good. Good bye.
Just imagine if the banks had said to themselves, "you know, 0% down and picture of the person's dog isn't actually a viable credit check"
Then the Justice Department would have started investigating them for violations of civil rights and the CRA, because doing a real credit check discriminates against poor people. They would have had groups like ACORN and PUSH breathing down their necks for racism. Barney Frank and Chris Dodd would have gotten up on the floor of Congress and started ranting about the awful rich bastards who run the banks keeping their jackboots on the necks of the poor and keeping them from achieving the American dream of home ownership. And we know that would have happened because it did.
and none of the terrible new regulations would have been required in the first place.
Son, it was the terrible new regulations trying to force equality of results onto a system that had real, valid, serious reasons to discriminate against poor people that caused the problem, not a lack of regulation. When the regulations say you must have equal percentages of approved loans in every demographic and zip code you serve, you either make no loans and go out of business, or you make bad loans to keep the feds off your back.
The sad, appalling truth is that the root cause of regulation is failure to regulate,
No, the sad appalling truth is that in many cases, the root cause of regulation is because someone in power doesn't think the current situation is "fair", even if there are perfect reasons for it being the way it is. "I'm sorry, you have no income and three kids, have lived in the rental you have for a very short time, and no savings. You can't have a loan for a house" is very unfair, isn't it? Or "you could afford a $100,000 house, but you are asking for a loan on a $250,000 house, which we cannot approve" is really unfair. Turns out the regulations that solved that unfairness created a great deal of unfairness for the rest of us.
From my experience the spam calls almost never leave voicemail,
From mine, it is a semi-regular occurrence. I walk out of work and see voicemail with no missed call to go with it.
The spam calls don't want to be called back as it could potentially lead to them being identified.
Nothing about leaving voicemail requires leaving a valid callback number. Perhaps the callers who do this do, I don't know. It's usually Chinese gibberish.
No, it was precisely the point. Spam is UNAUTHORIZED, always. As soon as you authorize the contact, it is no longer spam BY DEFINITION. It may be commercial, it may be bulk, but it not unsolicited.
T-Mobile on the other hand would argue that they own the network and that mass and commercial messages THEY don't authorize constitute abusive and possibly a form of unauthorized systems access.
Oh for Christ's sake. There is nothing about them authorizing the messages, it has everything to do with the claimed SOURCE of the message (the caller ID data) matching the SOURCE of the message (the actual calling number as they know it from their own system information.) They can't authorize unsolicited junk messages to you, they don't have the authority, and THEY AREN'T CLAIMING THEY DO.
Disagree, if I don't want to see it, it's spam whether I signed up for it or not.
You are schizophrenic. If you signed up for the contact, then you authorized it and it is not spam. By definition. You may not want to see that specific message, but you did solicit it.
while taking a tone that suggests you are arguing.
Both of us are telling you that there is no such thing as "the authorized sort" of spam. Calling any spam "unauthorized spam" and then referring to "spam in general" means you think there is, indeed, authorized spam. This is IMPOSSIBLE. It does not exist.
And what T-Mobile is doing is not blocking spam -- of any kind. They make no such distinction. They are labeling some calls as likely scams because the caller ID data doesn't match their own verifiable caller source data. That's all. If you want to answer such calls, you are free to do so. If you don't want to, don't. Just don't fuck around with the definition of spam and try to argue that some spam is authorized and some is not.
Oh, are you one of those who thinks the authorized sort isn't spam?
The authorized sort of what? By DEFINITION, spam is unsolicited. If you authorize the contact, it is no longer spam. That means that calling something "unauthorized spam" is redundant, and implies you think there is "authorized spam". There is not.
If I'm a business who pays t-mobile to let me blast their customers is that not still spam to their users?
Of COURSE it is spam, because it is unauthorized, unsolicited contact.
What, are you one of those who thinks that the MEDIUM provider can authorize unsolicited commercial contacts to you? Why do you give them that authority?
If I've signed up for texts about the latest sales from company x would you still classify that as spam?
Of course not. And solicited texts are not the topic of this discussion.
Personally, I'm of the opinion that carriers should transit everything,
Unless they are instructed not to by the user. But this, too, is offtopic, because T-Mobile is not blocking anything with this new system.
Why do you want to waste time listening to spam voicemail? It's bad enough that there is a flaw in the system that allows spammers to dump directly into voice mail, saving them the few seconds per call for the system to forward their unanswered calls there.
For the GGP who talks about this blocking calls, no, it's pretty clear from TFS that this doesn't block anything. It marks verified calls as such, on the one model of phone that it works on. It really solves nothing.
Now businesses expect office workers to have saddled themselves with tens of thousands in debt in order to get a job pushing paper around.
They expect people with a college degree. It is the choice of the student to saddle themselves with tens of thousands (the summary says that the average is $20k) in debt to get those low paying jobs.
In all seriousness, there is a public benefit to K-12, primarily in that 'we' can assume everyone else can read.
The large number of remedial college classes designed to keep Johnny and Suzie from failing due to lack of basics disproves the validity of this assumption.
As for the value of college, there is a current advertising campaign in this area pointing out the large number of jobs begging for workers that don't need even one day of college, like welders and electricians and carpenters.
Lastly, if you read the summary carefully (I know), you will see that this money is to expand the "education company" so it provides HALF-YEAR programs for high demand occupations. This is not "college", it is trade school.
Comcast would save having to pay the local carriage fees for that customer,
It would never work that way. There is no way to audit who actually had an antenna and who didn't, and the carriage contracts would never include a nebulous "he said he had an antenna" exemption.
They're not raising their prices, they're passing along the increasing costs they pay for sports and broadcast content. It's the broadcasters who are demanding more for their product, and sports channels paying ridiculous amounts for exclusive coverage deals. From TFA:
It's common for pay-TV providers to raise prices in the new year. They are passing on the rising costs they pay to carry networks like CBS and ABC, as well as regional sports channels, which are shelling out more and more for broadcast rights.
and like 1/2 or 1/3 as many people wanted the status quo.
Impossible. The "status quo" was not an option. The same US Constitution which defines the method of electing the President (which is the process we follow here and which Trump won), also prohibited Obama (the "status quo") from being elected again.
I do agree that there are a huge number of ignorant people (like those who keep complaining about the fictional "popular vote" for President) but I doubt that the number of people you claim "voted" for the status quo by not voting at all really thought they were "voting" for the status quo. I'd say they were admitting that they simply didn't care enough to vote.
but a computer can add numbers together for days on end, much faster then a person can, because it doesn't get board,
Well, technically, someone does have to pay for the electricity that computers "eat", so yes, they do get board. And "room" in the computing center.
The human brain is actually really good at correlations that is why when we see an Apple, we know it is an Apple,
Apples are a ubiquitous object, and food. Lots of people have lots of incentive to recognize "apple". Where to dig for gold based on drill holes and previous mining operations is a much less common task, and the number of people who have spent much of their lives learning the correlations is much smaller and it takes a long time to replace those who retire. It takes much less time to feed the data into a computer.
So when an airliner overflies Oregon, does it become un-piloted?
Only if the pilot became an Oregon resident just because he overflies the state. I don't think that happens, do you?
As for the other comment about FAA regulating this, no, sorry. The state isn't issuing pilot's licenses, they just required residents with one to register and pay a fee. Whether it ever faced a court challenge I cannot say.
USAF pilots do not hold FAA pilot certificates as such (although they may have one), and thus were not covered by the Oregon law.
Let me translate that: "I have no argument so I'm going to veer off into some utterly irrelevant grammar-nazism,
You, as well, need to learn the difference between a proper noun and a regular noun. I'll give you a hint: "Engineer" is a title as a proper noun (similar to "President"), while "engineer" is not. It's called "language" and it is how people communicate.
Or do you think "Pilots" need an Oregonian licence to call themselves "Pilots"?
Fun fact. Until July of 2017 Oregon was one of the states that did require aircraft pilots to register with the state and pay an annual fee for the privilege of being a pilot.
The guy is a legitimate Engineer.
You might want to figure out the difference between a proper noun and a run of the mill regular old noun before you start capitalizing words at random.
You are implicitly lying and guilty of libel when you say he's "acting like an engineer",
That's the first time I've heard "acting like an engineer" used in a pejorative manner. which is what it would need to be to be slander or libel. Also, the truth is an affirmative defense against charges of libel, and he in truth was acting like an engineer.
The man did not overstep any authority by criticizing a system that malfunctions,
There was no question on that. Of course not.
and he described himself as an engineer in the course of actually documenting/supporting his work.
The clear intent of his use of the term was to impart special importance and credibility to his statements because he is "an engineer" and thus has more knowledge about such technical stuff than normal folks do. I don't think there is any question as to his intent in calling himself an engineer. Had his being an engineer been irrelevant to him and the issue at hand he would have not said it in the first place.
But that's not dealing with the issue the court dealt with. I have long questioned the ability of the state to keep people from claiming to be an engineer, since a lot of people work in jobs with that specific title while not requiring any certifications from the state.
Slashdot Mirror
What the carriers are doing is horrible, no doubt. They should be stopped from selling location data to anyone, full stop.
I think it is kinda rare when we agree, but this. They should be stopped. But the summary is blaming Pai for not ending unauthorized sales. The FCC cannot end the sales. They can make them unauthorized (illegal), and then they can levy fines. That's all. They can't shoot the people who are about to hand over the data. If they are already unauthorized, then the rules already exist. Now they need STAFF to start the NAL (notice of apparent liability) process.
It's something that should be addressed when the government is re-opened.
Pai is pointing out, in a very direct manner, that as a government employee, he is legally prohibited from volunteering his time, even if that time is at the request of the congress. And his staff is legally prohibited from volunteering their time to prepare a report for him to deliver, even if the report is at the request of congress. Providing a report to congress is, as Pai claims, hardly a matter of life and death.
As for the claim the he is "giv[ing] carriers free pass", that's just stupid. He's unable to do anything about it right now, but they'll still be liable for their actions once staff is back at work, even actions that take place "during FCC shutdown".
The House has passed numerous budgets. The Speaker of the Senate, Mitch McConnell,
There is no "Speaker of the Senate". There is a President of the Senate, who is the Vice President of the US, Mike Pence. There is a majority leader, who is Mitch McConnell.
No. That just sets a new standard that if the President refuses to sign a CR then eventually they will get their way.
Perhaps you are too young to remember that the government budget isn't supposed to be a string of "continuing resolutions", but instead a real budget with real plans and real numbers.
And maybe we should remember that "failing to sign a bill" is called a "pocket veto", and Congress can overturn a veto if they have enough votes.
If Congress has the will, they could end this. Not today, but they have the power.
Which if you might remember Trump was going to veto. First President I've known of who had exactly what they wanted and then threaten to veto it.
As if every bill passed by Congress contained only one thing and dealt with only one issue. It is quite common, in fact a standard practice these days, for Congress to put multiple things in a single bill, some of which they want but the President doesn't, expecting the President to sign the whole thing so he gets the things he wants. You must be very young indeed not to have seen this before Trump.
But sometimes this backfires on Congress when the President stands up to them and vetoes the bill. The standard response is then to claim the President vetoed the bill because of something he himself wanted, when the truth is he vetoed it because of all the extra crap that Congress stuffed into it.
The solution to this is called "line item veto", where the President can veto certain things in a bill while keeping the rest. This is a HIGHLY partisan option, however, and one of the places where reasonable people realize that giving one President that option when they like the guy means the guys they don't like also have that option. The version that we did have in the US was ruled unconstitutional and a legal replacement has yet to be enacted.
in the 2018 Omnibus spending
The word "omnibus" is a dead giveaway that the bill was a "lump everything into one bill and hope it gets signed" attempt. You blame the current President for not signing the lumped together concoctions, why not blame Congress for lumping everything together?
Plenty of millennials in the Coast Guard, who aren't getting paid.
These are truly people who are doing it for the job and not the money.
Why is the USCG not under DOD who are still being paid? It now looks stupid that they aren't. Every person who is pointing at the Coast Guard and using them as a talking point against the shutdown is calling them a necessary coastal defense. Why not Department of Defense, then?
"The shutdown could hurt the reputation of the government as a good place to work..."
Isn't that just what conservatives have been working toward for decades?
No.
If the only reason you work for the government is because the pay and promotion is (was) a guaranteed thing, then maybe you need to look for a different job.
If, OTOH, you are working there because you want to do the work and do something you feel is beneficial to your fellow citizens and all that, then the government is still a good place to work, because it is doing a lot of things that aren't done in private enterprise.
For now in order to get better identification and exploit the new commercial opportunities afforded by net neutrality
This has nothing at all to do with net neutrality.
As for what is spam BY DEFINITION, there is no official and universal definition of this slang term
I'm sorry you came late to the party. Unsolicited commercial email. UCE. Unsolicited.
and no amount of foaming at the mouth and asserting otherwise will make it so.
That's right. Your foaming at the mouth about how you get spam after you signed up for a mailing list in exchange for a coupon for something doesn't make the email spam. It make it solicited.
Opt-in, out-opt, at what point have you authorized it?
I'm sorry that English is not your first language. At the point you authorized the email or contact. That is opting-in. When you sign up for it.
Hell, messages from a script you yourself wrote blasting to your screen at annoying frequency is generally referred to as "spam."
Only by morons who want to get worked up into a lather about all the spam they get.
Pretty much any annoying and unwanted or bulk communication is considered spam.
I emphasized the important bit. So you agree, if you have authorized it, thus saying you want it, it isn't spam. Good. Good bye.
Grocery stores don't hide name-brand items on the shelf behind their own.
They don't have to. They just don't give them any shelf space at all.
You didn't think that every grocery store sells every brand of every item, did you?
Just imagine if the banks had said to themselves, "you know, 0% down and picture of the person's dog isn't actually a viable credit check"
Then the Justice Department would have started investigating them for violations of civil rights and the CRA, because doing a real credit check discriminates against poor people. They would have had groups like ACORN and PUSH breathing down their necks for racism. Barney Frank and Chris Dodd would have gotten up on the floor of Congress and started ranting about the awful rich bastards who run the banks keeping their jackboots on the necks of the poor and keeping them from achieving the American dream of home ownership. And we know that would have happened because it did.
and none of the terrible new regulations would have been required in the first place.
Son, it was the terrible new regulations trying to force equality of results onto a system that had real, valid, serious reasons to discriminate against poor people that caused the problem, not a lack of regulation. When the regulations say you must have equal percentages of approved loans in every demographic and zip code you serve, you either make no loans and go out of business, or you make bad loans to keep the feds off your back.
The sad, appalling truth is that the root cause of regulation is failure to regulate,
No, the sad appalling truth is that in many cases, the root cause of regulation is because someone in power doesn't think the current situation is "fair", even if there are perfect reasons for it being the way it is. "I'm sorry, you have no income and three kids, have lived in the rental you have for a very short time, and no savings. You can't have a loan for a house" is very unfair, isn't it? Or "you could afford a $100,000 house, but you are asking for a loan on a $250,000 house, which we cannot approve" is really unfair. Turns out the regulations that solved that unfairness created a great deal of unfairness for the rest of us.
From my experience the spam calls almost never leave voicemail,
From mine, it is a semi-regular occurrence. I walk out of work and see voicemail with no missed call to go with it.
The spam calls don't want to be called back as it could potentially lead to them being identified.
Nothing about leaving voicemail requires leaving a valid callback number. Perhaps the callers who do this do, I don't know. It's usually Chinese gibberish.
That is begging the question.
No, it was precisely the point. Spam is UNAUTHORIZED, always. As soon as you authorize the contact, it is no longer spam BY DEFINITION. It may be commercial, it may be bulk, but it not unsolicited.
T-Mobile on the other hand would argue that they own the network and that mass and commercial messages THEY don't authorize constitute abusive and possibly a form of unauthorized systems access.
Oh for Christ's sake. There is nothing about them authorizing the messages, it has everything to do with the claimed SOURCE of the message (the caller ID data) matching the SOURCE of the message (the actual calling number as they know it from their own system information.) They can't authorize unsolicited junk messages to you, they don't have the authority, and THEY AREN'T CLAIMING THEY DO.
Disagree, if I don't want to see it, it's spam whether I signed up for it or not.
You are schizophrenic. If you signed up for the contact, then you authorized it and it is not spam. By definition. You may not want to see that specific message, but you did solicit it.
while taking a tone that suggests you are arguing.
Both of us are telling you that there is no such thing as "the authorized sort" of spam. Calling any spam "unauthorized spam" and then referring to "spam in general" means you think there is, indeed, authorized spam. This is IMPOSSIBLE. It does not exist.
And what T-Mobile is doing is not blocking spam -- of any kind. They make no such distinction. They are labeling some calls as likely scams because the caller ID data doesn't match their own verifiable caller source data. That's all. If you want to answer such calls, you are free to do so. If you don't want to, don't. Just don't fuck around with the definition of spam and try to argue that some spam is authorized and some is not.
Oh, are you one of those who thinks the authorized sort isn't spam?
The authorized sort of what? By DEFINITION, spam is unsolicited. If you authorize the contact, it is no longer spam. That means that calling something "unauthorized spam" is redundant, and implies you think there is "authorized spam". There is not.
If I'm a business who pays t-mobile to let me blast their customers is that not still spam to their users?
Of COURSE it is spam, because it is unauthorized, unsolicited contact.
What, are you one of those who thinks that the MEDIUM provider can authorize unsolicited commercial contacts to you? Why do you give them that authority?
If I've signed up for texts about the latest sales from company x would you still classify that as spam?
Of course not. And solicited texts are not the topic of this discussion.
Personally, I'm of the opinion that carriers should transit everything,
Unless they are instructed not to by the user. But this, too, is offtopic, because T-Mobile is not blocking anything with this new system.
or sends straight to voicemail.
Why do you want to waste time listening to spam voicemail? It's bad enough that there is a flaw in the system that allows spammers to dump directly into voice mail, saving them the few seconds per call for the system to forward their unanswered calls there.
For the GGP who talks about this blocking calls, no, it's pretty clear from TFS that this doesn't block anything. It marks verified calls as such, on the one model of phone that it works on. It really solves nothing.
I'm fascinated that someone thinks there is such a thing as "authorized spam", as opposed to "unauthorized spam".
If it's worth it, I don't know. It's more expensive than my ex-wife,
It sounds like your ex-wife gave you a bargain education in real life compared to college.
But educating everyone (or as close to everyone as we will ever get) is a noble pursuit.
Given the number of problems you admit it causes, is it really?
Now businesses expect office workers to have saddled themselves with tens of thousands in debt in order to get a job pushing paper around.
They expect people with a college degree. It is the choice of the student to saddle themselves with tens of thousands (the summary says that the average is $20k) in debt to get those low paying jobs.
In all seriousness, there is a public benefit to K-12, primarily in that 'we' can assume everyone else can read.
The large number of remedial college classes designed to keep Johnny and Suzie from failing due to lack of basics disproves the validity of this assumption.
As for the value of college, there is a current advertising campaign in this area pointing out the large number of jobs begging for workers that don't need even one day of college, like welders and electricians and carpenters.
Lastly, if you read the summary carefully (I know), you will see that this money is to expand the "education company" so it provides HALF-YEAR programs for high demand occupations. This is not "college", it is trade school.
Comcast would save having to pay the local carriage fees for that customer,
It would never work that way. There is no way to audit who actually had an antenna and who didn't, and the carriage contracts would never include a nebulous "he said he had an antenna" exemption.
Shouldn't they be raising Internet rates instead,
They're not raising their prices, they're passing along the increasing costs they pay for sports and broadcast content. It's the broadcasters who are demanding more for their product, and sports channels paying ridiculous amounts for exclusive coverage deals. From TFA:
That, and if you're in the city, get a simple unidirectional antenna;
The word you are looking for is "omnidirectional". A "unidirectional" antenna points one direction.
and like 1/2 or 1/3 as many people wanted the status quo.
Impossible. The "status quo" was not an option. The same US Constitution which defines the method of electing the President (which is the process we follow here and which Trump won), also prohibited Obama (the "status quo") from being elected again.
I do agree that there are a huge number of ignorant people (like those who keep complaining about the fictional "popular vote" for President) but I doubt that the number of people you claim "voted" for the status quo by not voting at all really thought they were "voting" for the status quo. I'd say they were admitting that they simply didn't care enough to vote.
but a computer can add numbers together for days on end, much faster then a person can, because it doesn't get board,
Well, technically, someone does have to pay for the electricity that computers "eat", so yes, they do get board. And "room" in the computing center.
The human brain is actually really good at correlations that is why when we see an Apple, we know it is an Apple,
Apples are a ubiquitous object, and food. Lots of people have lots of incentive to recognize "apple". Where to dig for gold based on drill holes and previous mining operations is a much less common task, and the number of people who have spent much of their lives learning the correlations is much smaller and it takes a long time to replace those who retire. It takes much less time to feed the data into a computer.
So when an airliner overflies Oregon, does it become un-piloted?
Only if the pilot became an Oregon resident just because he overflies the state. I don't think that happens, do you?
As for the other comment about FAA regulating this, no, sorry. The state isn't issuing pilot's licenses, they just required residents with one to register and pay a fee. Whether it ever faced a court challenge I cannot say.
I'm sure the USAF would be thrilled for instance.
USAF pilots do not hold FAA pilot certificates as such (although they may have one), and thus were not covered by the Oregon law.
Let me translate that: "I have no argument so I'm going to veer off into some utterly irrelevant grammar-nazism,
You, as well, need to learn the difference between a proper noun and a regular noun. I'll give you a hint: "Engineer" is a title as a proper noun (similar to "President"), while "engineer" is not. It's called "language" and it is how people communicate.
Or do you think "Pilots" need an Oregonian licence to call themselves "Pilots"?
Fun fact. Until July of 2017 Oregon was one of the states that did require aircraft pilots to register with the state and pay an annual fee for the privilege of being a pilot.
The guy is a legitimate Engineer.
You might want to figure out the difference between a proper noun and a run of the mill regular old noun before you start capitalizing words at random.
You are implicitly lying and guilty of libel when you say he's "acting like an engineer",
That's the first time I've heard "acting like an engineer" used in a pejorative manner. which is what it would need to be to be slander or libel. Also, the truth is an affirmative defense against charges of libel, and he in truth was acting like an engineer.
The man did not overstep any authority by criticizing a system that malfunctions,
There was no question on that. Of course not.
and he described himself as an engineer in the course of actually documenting/supporting his work.
The clear intent of his use of the term was to impart special importance and credibility to his statements because he is "an engineer" and thus has more knowledge about such technical stuff than normal folks do. I don't think there is any question as to his intent in calling himself an engineer. Had his being an engineer been irrelevant to him and the issue at hand he would have not said it in the first place.
But that's not dealing with the issue the court dealt with. I have long questioned the ability of the state to keep people from claiming to be an engineer, since a lot of people work in jobs with that specific title while not requiring any certifications from the state.