That's why you use a normally closed switch, rather than a normally open. By default, the switch is in the "ON" position, actuating it causes it to break the circuit, thus indicating the actuation. In emergency stop type buttons, mashing the big red mushroom breaks the circuit, causing the equipment to be de-energized. These are extremely reliable.
Otherwise, e-tailers in Canada or other overseas places will have an edge over US e-tailers who will have to collect the tax. Also, once you pay sales tax, you cant deduct it. If your tax liability hits "0" on your income tax and you have deductions which are not refundable, then you lost out because of where the collection and reporting happens.
I live in Canada, and if you think that our retailers are ever going to have an advantage over US retailers, you're delusional. The cost of doing business here is simply higher.
However, when it comes to bringing in stuff in internationally, that's not so hard. When I buy something and have it shipped to Canada, the tax due is assessed at the border, and along with my package, i'm assessed both federal and provincial sales tax. The federal customs authorities collect that tax on behalf of the province, and hand it over. No reason why something similar couldn't be done in the US.
The real reason why this is problematic in the US is the crazy patchwork when it comes to sales tax. Not only does each of the 50 states have its own sales tax regime, so do smaller regions/counties and even cities. Unless someone provides a single large database and remittance system that covers all of that, it's not practical for a small electronic retailer to know that he needs to pay the county of bumfuck Louisiana 1.5% sales tax on items sent to an address in that county.
How is this not automated? Should just be a computer program that does "find the N points such that each point is the closest point to exactly P/N people."
The issue is that it also makes a certain amount of sense for electoral district boundaries to respect real-world boundaries to a certain extent. The algorithm should be finding the most compact districts possible, centered on neighbourhoods (in urban areas), that respect real-world boundaries as best as possible. Real-world boundaries include things like rivers/ravines/bays/lakes, as well as major highways/arterial roads, municipal boundaries, and so forth. It's a delicate balancing act, but done properly it helps to ensure good results.
Gerrymandering is one of the many reasons why I'm glad to live in a country where the establishment of electoral boundaries is done by a non-partisan organization, based on a set of rules and census data. The rules are basically:
1) The riding must be as compact as possible 2) Where reasonable, the boundaries should follow natural boundaries (rivers, bays, ravines, etc...) and/or major man-made boundaries (Major roads, highways, municipal borders, etc...) 3) in urban centres, the boundaries should try and respect neighbourhood boundaries
All in all, it actually works, and is part of the check and balances on the power of the politicians.
More so than this, what Apple was doing was performance capping. The iPhone is already aggressive when it comes to keeping the CPU as slow as possible to achieve the tasks at hand. The issue is that as batteries age, not only does their capacity go down, the amount of current they can supply at a given voltage also goes down. You get into a state where doing something CPU intensive will draw enough current to under-volt the system, causing the phone to "Crash" and reboot itself. What apple was doing was putting a limit on the CPU so that it wouldn't cause a brownout/reboot.
To be blunt, if I had an old phone, I'd rather have it act a little slow from time to time, then for it to reboot itself seemingly randomly.
That said, it's in the ass end of nowhere east of Seattle, in some of the most rugged terrain you've ever seen. Bringing in fixed wireless would require probably close to a million bucks just to construct (plus an act of congress, no joke), and fiber would be akin to laying an oceanic cable, through a lake. So satellite it is.
But seriously, yes, going on public WiFi without a VPN is like having casual sex without condoms: Sooner or later, you're gonna get infected with something nasty.
People keep saying this, but it's simply not true. Anything of any import, even damned cat videos, are secured by https these days. If someone sniffs your packets, all they see is cyphertext, basically indistinguishable from line noise. If they try to inject something your browser should be throwing up a big SSL violation warning. Besides, even if the wifi is secure, is the AP? The router? the next hop after that? Once it gets off the air, it's in the clear anyway.
The first thing I do on an open WiFi network is connect to a VPN.
For better or worse, you do that on my network, you're going to to get QoS'd to hell. Not because I'm against VPNs, but just due to the nature of the QoS I'm running. At my choke point, I'm running weighted fair queuing. There are something like 2000 queues, and packets get dumped in a queue based on a hash of the source/destination ip and port number combos. Since all your traffic is goign through the VPN, it's all going through a single connection, and thus winds up in a single queue, while my https request winds up in 5 or 10 queues simultaneously. Of course, I'm doing this because I have 70 to 100 people hanging off a 3.3Mbps satellite link, but that's the way it goes.
VPNs are great and all, but you need to understand the ramifications and limitations.
It depends on intent, I think. You could argue the same thing for John Cage's 4'33" (Four Minutes, 33 seconds) which is a orchestral piece comprising completely of rests. The basic idea is that it turns the orchestra into a performance piece, with the orchestra paging through their scores, and the only sounds present are the ambient sounds within the performance venue.
The copyright over that score has been successfully defended, and rightfully so imho. The only problem is that it should have expired at some point.
Nope, it's pretty common for countries to prohibit cabotage. Canada won't allow it, which caused a diplomatic Tiff with the UAE as they wanted Emirates to be able to fly YVR->YYZ->DXB and carry domestic pax between YVR and YYZ. Pretty much the only place you'll see it is within the EU, and then only from airlines that are registered within the EU.
I think they're still flying some in revenue service in Canada, in the high arctic, along with 737-200s. Both of these are among the only midsized western (aka not soviet) jets suitable for operating off the gravel runways you find in places like Resolute Bay and Cambridge Bay. Similar for servicing the diamond mines and so forth.
In the case of the 727s, the engines are up high enough that they won't suck in the gravel. They also have the advantage of the integrated air stair (DB Cooper Special), so they can board and deplane without outside assistance.
The 737-200s are the ones with the skinny engines, and can be fitted with a gravel kit that includes a ski for the front wheel to deflect spraying gravel away from the aircraft, and bleed air devices which replace the cowlings on the engine to direct some of the bleed air forwards and break up vortices that would otherwise cause the engines to vacuum up the runway.
As these aircraft age out, it's going to become harder and harder to service the north; the solution will be to return back to turboprops, but none of them have the cargo or passenger capacity of a 737, except for the (civilian) Hercs, and those are old and aging out as well.
This was Boeing's prediction from 25 years ago. There is just less travel between huge hubs, and there is a lot more point to point travel between smaller airports. The growth of asian and gulf airlines cut into labour costs so it was more economic to operate smaller aircraft.
One of the half-jokes in the aviation world is that the A380 is the single greatest marketing coup on the part of Boeing. Many years ago, both Boeing and Airbus were proposing the concept of these super-jumbos, how they would reduce cost per passenger mile, and so forth. The two builders wound up in a marketing race... but the difference is that Boeing never booked an order, so they never actually had to build the thing. Airbus did.
The 747 production line won't see the 2020s, its dead in the water right now.
Which you can't book due to rules related to Cabotage. I once got shit from Air Canada because I booked two tickets back-to-back, to fly HOU->YYZ->DCA (Hey, I was doing a mileage run, and it was cheaper than HOU->DCA due to sales). They sent me a nastygram citing the regulations prohibiting them from offering flights like that. It didn't matter that it was two separate tickets; or that it touched down in Toronto... They were a foreign airline, carrying a passenger between two US cities. I suppose I might have gotten away with it, had I not checked in for the YYZ->DCA flight in HOU, and/or not checked a bag all the way through.
The 747 production line won't see the 2020s, its dead in the water right now.
I've flown on one of the Lufthansa 747-800is, and it is a glorious bird. (Of course, it helped that I splurged and spent 90,000 points on a first class seat). Even business class and economy was really nice on them, much more spacious than other aircraft I've been on. It's really too bad the economics of these don't work any more.
Most people prefer aisle seat. But there is nothing wrong in preferring window seat.
As someone who used to do 100,000+ miles a year, I could never figure this one out. Window seats are infinitely preferable to aisle seats... you don't have to get up when someone else in your row needs to use the loo, and you have a nice, convenient wall that you can lean against and fall asleep. My usual routine when boarding an aircraft was to get into my seat ASAP, buckle up, and sack out.
The Canadian and US coast guards did a bunch of experiments with volunteers (and proper medical and dive support) in moderately cold water. Even though the volunteers knew they were going to hit cold water, so a lot of the shock was reduced, the results were pretty dramatic. Since then, both coast guards have added the concept of cold shock to boating safety and certification courses in addition to hypothermia.
2 summers ago, I helped a friend deliver a 46 foot sailboat from Los Angeles to Seattle. As a recreational sailor from the Pacific Northwest, it shocked me how lax people were down there when it came to safety and safety equipment. We're used to being out in the foulest of weather, always being in proper PFDs and clothing, and tethering ourselves to the boat on anything other than a nice day. As we pulled into the fuel dock before heading north, it really shocked me that we were the only people in sight wearing any kind of reasonable safety equipment.
Except that recalabration of data points based on new knowledge isn't cooking data, but rather valid adjustments.
The one that many of the doubters trot out is the adjustment that was made to the global seawater temperature data sets. For decades, sea surface temperatures were measured by ships, using a temperature sensor on the seawater intake used to cool the engines. As ships crisscrossed the ocean, they would record the temperature and location as part of their normal record keeping, and these have been compiled into large data sets.
In more modern times, the sea water temperature measurement has been supplemented by data recorded by buoys, which in turn report their data automatically. The trouble is that the two data sets didn't jive. The buoy data was showing things were slightly cooler (I think on the order of 0.25 to 0.5C) than what the data from the ships showed. If you took the temperatures at face values, it would make it appear that there had been a slight global cooling of the oceans rather than an ongoing increase, the so-called "Pause."
So what happened? Well, the scientists went back and looked at how the data was collected on ships, and realized that even with properly calibrated thermometers, they would read slightly high due to factors from the ship itself as it travels through the water. The ship's hull, engine room, plumbing, etc... slightly warms the water before it hits the temperature sensor, causing them to read high.
Once these factors were calibrated out, the "pause" largely disappeared. Is this cooking the books? I don't think so, but many people claimed it was.
The PFD will keep your head above water, thus preventing the muscle spasms and other lack of coordination from causing you to drown. All that still happens, you just are suddenly more buoyant, thus have a higher probability of survival.
It's what we do with beer bottles in British Columbia. The Brewery Standard bottle is used by most of the breweries in the province. The bottle return centres separate out the standard bottles, and send them back into the distribution system. The bottles are washed, inspected, and then put on flats and sent back to the breweries who in turn fill it with beer again, paste on a label, box it, and sell it.
On average, each beer bottle makes it through the system an average of a dozen times, before it breaks or otherwise fails inspection.
There is about a 90% return rate on the bottles due to the $0.10 deposit, and for the breweries (even the small ones), being a member of the system is much cheaper than doing their own thing. The only thing is that they have to stick with the standard long-neck twist-off beer bottle, they can only paste on a paper label and their own fancy cap.
We have deposit on all non-essential beverage containers (ie no deposit on milk jugs, and basic food containers), and we have curb-side recyling. Other than beer bottles (which are handled by a brewery consortium, as the bottles are refilled dozens of times), the same company handles both the deposit system and the curb-side system. Higher recovery rates, fewer empties being left around and entering the waste stream.
If you have a stupid system, you fix it. You don't keep digging the hole deeper.
While we can make a glass bottle over and over again from the same pieces of glass, we cannot do this with plastic bottles - so most plastic bottles are made out of "virgin" plastic.
Glass bottles are also refillable. In British Columbia, most breweries use the Brewery Standard bottle (think your typical long-neck dark brown beer bottle). They can stick on whatever paper label they want, but the bottles themselves are all identical. They also have a $0.10 deposit on them.
The beer bottles get returned, cleaned, and sent back to the breweries. On average, each bottle makes it through the system about 10 to 12 times before it breaks, or doesn't pass inspection.
What you actually do is burn them in two stages, same thing with burning wood. It's much more efficient. You burn it at high temperature, in an oxygen reduced atmosphere. This causes the plastic to decompose and off-gas hydrogen, light hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide and so forth. These gasses are also extremely hot. You direct them through the second part of your boiler, and inject air which burns the gasses, releasing more heat. Lastly, you recirculate part of your flue gasses back into the first stage combustion chamber, reducing the oxygen levels, and providing the heat to decompose the materials.
YVR (which I've been on as well) is a really great monorail because it connects two places tons of travelers will be going to or from - cruiser terminal, and airport.
Well, technically speaking, SkyTrain isn't a monorail. Both systems (Canada Line and Expo/Millenium Lines) operate on standard-gauge rails. The only really comparable thing is that they're both (mostly) elevated/grade separated systems.
The big issue with actual monorails, such as the one in Vegas, is that you can't switch tracks easily, can't have Ys, and all the other things that you can do with reasonably standard rail technology. Even if they wanted to expand the Vegas monorail, it's an incredibly inflexible system. Skytrain, on the other hand, if they have an issue at a given station, they can short run the trains at the stations on either side and run a bus bridge or similar.
All of the rocket motors fire at once, and they don't do full power right at startup. So I think the idea is to ease in to it right at liftoff.
Actually no, the 27 Merlin 1Ds will be starting sequentially, in balanced pairs, much like was done with the Saturn V or the space shuttle. Once the engines are all running, it will throttle up to max, the systems will check the engines to make sure they're all performing properly, then the launch clamps will be released. I don't know the exact sequence, obviously, but shortly after launch the engines on the center core will be throttled deeply to conserve propellant, while the engines on the side boosters run at full power.
Basically, with a rocket, you want your engines operating at max thrust just prior to launch as that is your final check on them. As you fly, you also need them at max throttle because of how much propellant you still have on board. As you burn your propellant, you then start throttling the engines back to keep the g-forces within the limits of what your rocket (and payload) can handle.
Once the side boosters separate, the center core will throttle back up again, and continue the mission as though it were a single stick Falcon 9, just going faster and higher than it would have had it flown the mission solo.
The SRB on the Space Shuttle was full power as soon as it was lit and it only had a problem... once
Yes, and that was by design as they had to lift the contents of the ET at launch. The fuel grain of the SRBs was cast such that the thrust of the SRBs would change through the mission, and basically fall off as they got towards the end. So yes, in fact, you can control the thrust profile of a solid motor, by controlling its chemistry and physical layout.
Slashdot Mirror
That's why you use a normally closed switch, rather than a normally open. By default, the switch is in the "ON" position, actuating it causes it to break the circuit, thus indicating the actuation. In emergency stop type buttons, mashing the big red mushroom breaks the circuit, causing the equipment to be de-energized. These are extremely reliable.
Otherwise, e-tailers in Canada or other overseas places will have an edge over US e-tailers who will have to collect the tax. Also, once you pay sales tax, you cant deduct it. If your tax liability hits "0" on your income tax and you have deductions which are not refundable, then you lost out because of where the collection and reporting happens.
I live in Canada, and if you think that our retailers are ever going to have an advantage over US retailers, you're delusional. The cost of doing business here is simply higher.
However, when it comes to bringing in stuff in internationally, that's not so hard. When I buy something and have it shipped to Canada, the tax due is assessed at the border, and along with my package, i'm assessed both federal and provincial sales tax. The federal customs authorities collect that tax on behalf of the province, and hand it over. No reason why something similar couldn't be done in the US.
The real reason why this is problematic in the US is the crazy patchwork when it comes to sales tax. Not only does each of the 50 states have its own sales tax regime, so do smaller regions/counties and even cities. Unless someone provides a single large database and remittance system that covers all of that, it's not practical for a small electronic retailer to know that he needs to pay the county of bumfuck Louisiana 1.5% sales tax on items sent to an address in that county.
Somewhere there must have been an emperor who ensured that Mandarin was going to be the hardest language to learn ever.
I see your Mandarin, and raise you Finnish. No one can speak Finnish except the Finns.
How is this not automated? Should just be a computer program that does "find the N points such that each point is the closest point to exactly P/N people."
The issue is that it also makes a certain amount of sense for electoral district boundaries to respect real-world boundaries to a certain extent. The algorithm should be finding the most compact districts possible, centered on neighbourhoods (in urban areas), that respect real-world boundaries as best as possible. Real-world boundaries include things like rivers/ravines/bays/lakes, as well as major highways/arterial roads, municipal boundaries, and so forth. It's a delicate balancing act, but done properly it helps to ensure good results.
Gerrymandering is one of the many reasons why I'm glad to live in a country where the establishment of electoral boundaries is done by a non-partisan organization, based on a set of rules and census data. The rules are basically:
1) The riding must be as compact as possible
2) Where reasonable, the boundaries should follow natural boundaries (rivers, bays, ravines, etc...) and/or major man-made boundaries (Major roads, highways, municipal borders, etc...)
3) in urban centres, the boundaries should try and respect neighbourhood boundaries
All in all, it actually works, and is part of the check and balances on the power of the politicians.
More so than this, what Apple was doing was performance capping. The iPhone is already aggressive when it comes to keeping the CPU as slow as possible to achieve the tasks at hand. The issue is that as batteries age, not only does their capacity go down, the amount of current they can supply at a given voltage also goes down. You get into a state where doing something CPU intensive will draw enough current to under-volt the system, causing the phone to "Crash" and reboot itself. What apple was doing was putting a limit on the CPU so that it wouldn't cause a brownout/reboot.
To be blunt, if I had an old phone, I'd rather have it act a little slow from time to time, then for it to reboot itself seemingly randomly.
3.3 shared by 50+ people. ;)
That said, it's in the ass end of nowhere east of Seattle, in some of the most rugged terrain you've ever seen. Bringing in fixed wireless would require probably close to a million bucks just to construct (plus an act of congress, no joke), and fiber would be akin to laying an oceanic cable, through a lake. So satellite it is.
But seriously, yes, going on public WiFi without a VPN is like having casual sex without condoms: Sooner or later, you're gonna get infected with something nasty.
People keep saying this, but it's simply not true. Anything of any import, even damned cat videos, are secured by https these days. If someone sniffs your packets, all they see is cyphertext, basically indistinguishable from line noise. If they try to inject something your browser should be throwing up a big SSL violation warning. Besides, even if the wifi is secure, is the AP? The router? the next hop after that? Once it gets off the air, it's in the clear anyway.
The first thing I do on an open WiFi network is connect to a VPN.
For better or worse, you do that on my network, you're going to to get QoS'd to hell. Not because I'm against VPNs, but just due to the nature of the QoS I'm running. At my choke point, I'm running weighted fair queuing. There are something like 2000 queues, and packets get dumped in a queue based on a hash of the source/destination ip and port number combos. Since all your traffic is goign through the VPN, it's all going through a single connection, and thus winds up in a single queue, while my https request winds up in 5 or 10 queues simultaneously. Of course, I'm doing this because I have 70 to 100 people hanging off a 3.3Mbps satellite link, but that's the way it goes.
VPNs are great and all, but you need to understand the ramifications and limitations.
It depends on intent, I think. You could argue the same thing for John Cage's 4'33" (Four Minutes, 33 seconds) which is a orchestral piece comprising completely of rests. The basic idea is that it turns the orchestra into a performance piece, with the orchestra paging through their scores, and the only sounds present are the ambient sounds within the performance venue.
The copyright over that score has been successfully defended, and rightfully so imho. The only problem is that it should have expired at some point.
Nope, it's pretty common for countries to prohibit cabotage. Canada won't allow it, which caused a diplomatic Tiff with the UAE as they wanted Emirates to be able to fly YVR->YYZ->DXB and carry domestic pax between YVR and YYZ. Pretty much the only place you'll see it is within the EU, and then only from airlines that are registered within the EU.
This is also known as the eighth freedom.
I think they're still flying some in revenue service in Canada, in the high arctic, along with 737-200s. Both of these are among the only midsized western (aka not soviet) jets suitable for operating off the gravel runways you find in places like Resolute Bay and Cambridge Bay. Similar for servicing the diamond mines and so forth.
In the case of the 727s, the engines are up high enough that they won't suck in the gravel. They also have the advantage of the integrated air stair (DB Cooper Special), so they can board and deplane without outside assistance.
The 737-200s are the ones with the skinny engines, and can be fitted with a gravel kit that includes a ski for the front wheel to deflect spraying gravel away from the aircraft, and bleed air devices which replace the cowlings on the engine to direct some of the bleed air forwards and break up vortices that would otherwise cause the engines to vacuum up the runway.
As these aircraft age out, it's going to become harder and harder to service the north; the solution will be to return back to turboprops, but none of them have the cargo or passenger capacity of a 737, except for the (civilian) Hercs, and those are old and aging out as well.
This was Boeing's prediction from 25 years ago. There is just less travel between huge hubs, and there is a lot more point to point travel between smaller airports. The growth of asian and gulf airlines cut into labour costs so it was more economic to operate smaller aircraft.
One of the half-jokes in the aviation world is that the A380 is the single greatest marketing coup on the part of Boeing. Many years ago, both Boeing and Airbus were proposing the concept of these super-jumbos, how they would reduce cost per passenger mile, and so forth. The two builders wound up in a marketing race... but the difference is that Boeing never booked an order, so they never actually had to build the thing. Airbus did.
The 747 production line won't see the 2020s, its dead in the water right now.
Which you can't book due to rules related to Cabotage. I once got shit from Air Canada because I booked two tickets back-to-back, to fly HOU->YYZ->DCA (Hey, I was doing a mileage run, and it was cheaper than HOU->DCA due to sales). They sent me a nastygram citing the regulations prohibiting them from offering flights like that. It didn't matter that it was two separate tickets; or that it touched down in Toronto... They were a foreign airline, carrying a passenger between two US cities. I suppose I might have gotten away with it, had I not checked in for the YYZ->DCA flight in HOU, and/or not checked a bag all the way through.
The 747 production line won't see the 2020s, its dead in the water right now.
I've flown on one of the Lufthansa 747-800is, and it is a glorious bird. (Of course, it helped that I splurged and spent 90,000 points on a first class seat). Even business class and economy was really nice on them, much more spacious than other aircraft I've been on. It's really too bad the economics of these don't work any more.
Most people prefer aisle seat. But there is nothing wrong in preferring window seat.
As someone who used to do 100,000+ miles a year, I could never figure this one out. Window seats are infinitely preferable to aisle seats... you don't have to get up when someone else in your row needs to use the loo, and you have a nice, convenient wall that you can lean against and fall asleep. My usual routine when boarding an aircraft was to get into my seat ASAP, buckle up, and sack out.
The Canadian and US coast guards did a bunch of experiments with volunteers (and proper medical and dive support) in moderately cold water. Even though the volunteers knew they were going to hit cold water, so a lot of the shock was reduced, the results were pretty dramatic. Since then, both coast guards have added the concept of cold shock to boating safety and certification courses in addition to hypothermia.
2 summers ago, I helped a friend deliver a 46 foot sailboat from Los Angeles to Seattle. As a recreational sailor from the Pacific Northwest, it shocked me how lax people were down there when it came to safety and safety equipment. We're used to being out in the foulest of weather, always being in proper PFDs and clothing, and tethering ourselves to the boat on anything other than a nice day. As we pulled into the fuel dock before heading north, it really shocked me that we were the only people in sight wearing any kind of reasonable safety equipment.
Lots of cooking of data
Except that recalabration of data points based on new knowledge isn't cooking data, but rather valid adjustments.
The one that many of the doubters trot out is the adjustment that was made to the global seawater temperature data sets. For decades, sea surface temperatures were measured by ships, using a temperature sensor on the seawater intake used to cool the engines. As ships crisscrossed the ocean, they would record the temperature and location as part of their normal record keeping, and these have been compiled into large data sets.
In more modern times, the sea water temperature measurement has been supplemented by data recorded by buoys, which in turn report their data automatically. The trouble is that the two data sets didn't jive. The buoy data was showing things were slightly cooler (I think on the order of 0.25 to 0.5C) than what the data from the ships showed. If you took the temperatures at face values, it would make it appear that there had been a slight global cooling of the oceans rather than an ongoing increase, the so-called "Pause."
So what happened? Well, the scientists went back and looked at how the data was collected on ships, and realized that even with properly calibrated thermometers, they would read slightly high due to factors from the ship itself as it travels through the water. The ship's hull, engine room, plumbing, etc... slightly warms the water before it hits the temperature sensor, causing them to read high.
Once these factors were calibrated out, the "pause" largely disappeared. Is this cooking the books? I don't think so, but many people claimed it was.
The PFD will keep your head above water, thus preventing the muscle spasms and other lack of coordination from causing you to drown. All that still happens, you just are suddenly more buoyant, thus have a higher probability of survival.
It's what we do with beer bottles in British Columbia. The Brewery Standard bottle is used by most of the breweries in the province. The bottle return centres separate out the standard bottles, and send them back into the distribution system. The bottles are washed, inspected, and then put on flats and sent back to the breweries who in turn fill it with beer again, paste on a label, box it, and sell it.
On average, each beer bottle makes it through the system an average of a dozen times, before it breaks or otherwise fails inspection.
There is about a 90% return rate on the bottles due to the $0.10 deposit, and for the breweries (even the small ones), being a member of the system is much cheaper than doing their own thing. The only thing is that they have to stick with the standard long-neck twist-off beer bottle, they can only paste on a paper label and their own fancy cap.
Well, that's a stupid system, fix it.
We have deposit on all non-essential beverage containers (ie no deposit on milk jugs, and basic food containers), and we have curb-side recyling. Other than beer bottles (which are handled by a brewery consortium, as the bottles are refilled dozens of times), the same company handles both the deposit system and the curb-side system. Higher recovery rates, fewer empties being left around and entering the waste stream.
If you have a stupid system, you fix it. You don't keep digging the hole deeper.
While we can make a glass bottle over and over again from the same pieces of glass, we cannot do this with plastic bottles - so most plastic bottles are made out of "virgin" plastic.
Glass bottles are also refillable. In British Columbia, most breweries use the Brewery Standard bottle (think your typical long-neck dark brown beer bottle). They can stick on whatever paper label they want, but the bottles themselves are all identical. They also have a $0.10 deposit on them.
The beer bottles get returned, cleaned, and sent back to the breweries. On average, each bottle makes it through the system about 10 to 12 times before it breaks, or doesn't pass inspection.
What you actually do is burn them in two stages, same thing with burning wood. It's much more efficient. You burn it at high temperature, in an oxygen reduced atmosphere. This causes the plastic to decompose and off-gas hydrogen, light hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide and so forth. These gasses are also extremely hot. You direct them through the second part of your boiler, and inject air which burns the gasses, releasing more heat. Lastly, you recirculate part of your flue gasses back into the first stage combustion chamber, reducing the oxygen levels, and providing the heat to decompose the materials.
YVR (which I've been on as well) is a really great monorail because it connects two places tons of travelers will be going to or from - cruiser terminal, and airport.
Well, technically speaking, SkyTrain isn't a monorail. Both systems (Canada Line and Expo/Millenium Lines) operate on standard-gauge rails. The only really comparable thing is that they're both (mostly) elevated/grade separated systems.
The big issue with actual monorails, such as the one in Vegas, is that you can't switch tracks easily, can't have Ys, and all the other things that you can do with reasonably standard rail technology. Even if they wanted to expand the Vegas monorail, it's an incredibly inflexible system. Skytrain, on the other hand, if they have an issue at a given station, they can short run the trains at the stations on either side and run a bus bridge or similar.
All of the rocket motors fire at once, and they don't do full power right at startup. So I think the idea is to ease in to it right at liftoff.
Actually no, the 27 Merlin 1Ds will be starting sequentially, in balanced pairs, much like was done with the Saturn V or the space shuttle. Once the engines are all running, it will throttle up to max, the systems will check the engines to make sure they're all performing properly, then the launch clamps will be released. I don't know the exact sequence, obviously, but shortly after launch the engines on the center core will be throttled deeply to conserve propellant, while the engines on the side boosters run at full power.
Basically, with a rocket, you want your engines operating at max thrust just prior to launch as that is your final check on them. As you fly, you also need them at max throttle because of how much propellant you still have on board. As you burn your propellant, you then start throttling the engines back to keep the g-forces within the limits of what your rocket (and payload) can handle.
Once the side boosters separate, the center core will throttle back up again, and continue the mission as though it were a single stick Falcon 9, just going faster and higher than it would have had it flown the mission solo.
The SRB on the Space Shuttle was full power as soon as it was lit and it only had a problem... once
Yes, and that was by design as they had to lift the contents of the ET at launch. The fuel grain of the SRBs was cast such that the thrust of the SRBs would change through the mission, and basically fall off as they got towards the end. So yes, in fact, you can control the thrust profile of a solid motor, by controlling its chemistry and physical layout.