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.

I take a train to work (and home again) that has no driver. Yet, to a person, everybody disagrees with me that a robot drives me to work.

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.

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,

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.

Don't do this. It basically puts your passwords (their building blocks, really) in clear text in your command history. It's not any greater security than Chrome has when someone has physical access, and it is significantly less convenient.

Closest I could come: http://what3words.com/aged.loose.mother

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 country.region.city.street.house 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.

Close. That's in the Pacific ocean off the coast of Oregon.

I dunno. I'm having some fun with it: "another.useless.service" is on Outtrim Avenue in the southern suburbs of Canberra, Australia.

For what it's worth, that's a spot on the shore of God's Lake in northern Manitoba. Not a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there either.

Requirements:

1. 300 liters per hour.
2. 100% duty cycle.
3. 75 year MTBF.

Go!

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.

Could you imagine? You'd have to collect all that condensed air...

Option 1. Accelerate half the way there at 9.81 m/s/s, then turn around and decelerate at 9.81 m/s/s.

Option 2. Travel at a constant speed, but spin the craft about it's axis such that the outside shell of the craft has centripetal acceleration of 9.81 m/s/s. Live on the inside using the craft's wall as a floor.