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Comment: Re:Legally questionable, doomed to fail! (Score 4, Insightful) 427

by fizzup (#46950089) Attached to: In SF: an App For Auctioning Off Your Public Parking Spot

Ultimately, this is an example of government not charging a high enough fee for use of a common public resource. There are lots of examples of this. Usually governments do this in order to provide the resource equally to all people, which is a noble and understandable goal. The downside risk is a tragedy of the commons, where common resources are used to depletion because there is no signal to the users that they are causing harm by depleting it.

In our economic system, we use price as a scarcity signal for buyers and sellers. Price is a ham-fisted signal that is only marginally better than rationing but without using it at all, or by using it poorly, government has opened the door for a private company to create a market in something valuable - parking turnover. Should this application take off (a big "if") government's only practical response is to raise the price of parking to the point that turnover is so high that you can usually find a parking spot quickly without paying somebody to leave. That will be a really high price which will obliterate the goal of providing access to parking for people regardless of their economic situation.

Comment: Re:Still need atmospheric pressure to syphon (Score 1) 360

You are completely incorrect. The liquid may need vapour pressure to remain a liquid, but a siphon manifestly does not require any pressure to run. All you need is a full U-shaped tube and a downward force. Gravity is convenient. The U-shaped tube is often filled by using atmospheric pressure to start the siphon, but this is not a necessary condition. The way the tube gets filled in the first place has no impact on the steady state operation of the siphon.

Comment: Re:Nope. People will deny that they are robots. (Score 1) 246

by fizzup (#45750805) Attached to: Will You Even Notice the Impending Robot Uprising?

Well, I'll admit that the train is, in fact, in communication with a central server that controls the trains. I guess that makes them remote-controlled. I'll even admit that humans monitor the performance of the train system. However, humans only drive the trains in exceptional circumstances. I've seen it happen a few times, and you can watch up close because there is no enclosed space or seat for the driver. They just unlock the cabinet that's in the passenger compartment and tell the control center that they're taking over using their handheld radio. This is what it looks like.

As it happens, I toured the control center with my son's cub pack (younger than scouts). I asked if they employed more or fewer monitors/controllers than a system with human-driven trains. They said they had about the same number. There were less than 10 people in the control center, including supervisors and the tour guide with a few to several dozen trains running at any one time on two lines.

During the last transit strike, the trains kept running with a normal schedule. Driverless. Really, truly. Nobody there. Crickets.

You could say that the entire system is a robot (rather than each individual train), but I don't think these trains are drones under any meaningful definition. They are not driven by people. They are autonomous machines monitored by people, and the monitoring is about as rigorous as for the New York Subway.

Comment: Re:waste of helium. (Score 1) 92

by fizzup (#44842813) Attached to: Man Trying To Fly Across the Atlantic On Helium Balloons

...even if wastefully vented just stays in the atmosphere where it can be recovered by other means.

Nope. Helium and hydrogen get fast enough at altitude to achieve escape velocity. Due to atmospheric escape, the concentration of helium in the atmosphere is relatively constant at about 5 ppm. That is a ridiculously low concentration. It is absolutely not economic to extract helium from the atmosphere. Liquid helium is less expensive than scotch, and you wouldn't try to extract a cask after it was poured into a swimming pool.

Comment: Re:Trying Again (Score 1) 399

by fizzup (#44530351) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How Do I Request Someone To Send Me a Public Key?

You should not let a missing explanation bother you. You will never get an explanation for any moderation. When you moderate a comment and then submit a comment on the same post, the system undoes your moderation. However, Slashdot's moderation is slightly less ham fisted than most. The system lets you pick a single word that lets the commenter know why his comment is moderated the way it is.

Your previous comment was moderated "Offtopic." Kudos to the moderator that did it. From the original post,

My question is, what is the proper wording for such a request?

You haven't answered his simple question. You haven't done it twice. In two tries.

I have mod points and I was about to give your second comment the same moderation, but I won't be able to do it now because of this explanation. Enjoy it, but expect another moderator to give you "Offtopic" on your second comment, too.

Comment: I think it's a neat idea, but no semantics (Score 1) 478

by fizzup (#44300733) Attached to: Describe Any Location On Earth In 3 Words

Without meaning, it's hard to ever find a place. The obvious way to use it is to find a memorable 3x3 spot near where you want to record. However, similar names are a long way apart. For example, fired.hotel.resident is in Papua, New Guinea; however, the semantically similar fired.hotel.dweller is in Germany.

Without similar names referring to similar places, like does naturally, the service is not that helpful. Even if you had more words to remember, it would be better to have a hierarchical representation of places so that nearby names referred to nearby places.

Comment: Re:Yes! (Score 4, Funny) 1774

I have a similar story from my own childhood. One summer, when we were driving through Osoyoos, the VW Rabbit overheated and we needed to stop and get it repaired. This was in the late '70s, and "foreign" cars breaking down in small towns was cause for a serious over-charging at the service station. A thousand dollars later, we're back in the Rabbit heading up the steep hill on the Crowsnest Highway heading east. It's a steep climb out of the desert, so we're all on tenterhooks to see if the car is actually repaired. Mom is seriously pissed about the overcharging, but when she looked back at the evil city she turned into a telephone pole.
