Rotundus.com

Canada to allow small scissors and tools onboard planes

Today's earth-shattering news: your tweezers aren't too likely to make the plane you're flying on crash.

Better in than out: African country set to make breaking wind a crime

"The government of Malawi plan to punish persistent offenders 'who foul the air' ... [b]ut locals fear that pinning responsibility on the crime will be difficult - and may lead to miscarriages of justice as 'criminals' attempt to blame others for their offence."

S.E.C. Hurt by Disarray in Its Books

"Since the commission began producing audited statements in 2004, the Government Accountability Office has faulted its reporting almost every year. ... the fact that basic accounting continually bedevils the agency responsible for guaranteeing the soundness of American financial markets could prove especially awkward just as the S.E.C. is saying it desperately needs money to increase its regulatory power."

Define Gender Gap? Look Up Wikipedia’s Contributor List

"About a year ago, the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs Wikipedia, collaborated on a study of Wikipedia’s contributor base and discovered that it was barely 13 percent women." The article states that Sue Gardner, who heads the foundation "has set a goal to raise the share of female contributors to 25 percent by 2015, but she is running up against the traditions of the computer world and an obsessive fact-loving realm that is dominated by men and, some say, uncomfortable for women." Basically the problem she argues is that there's conflict, and that women as a minority group amongst contributors feels intimidated. Still, given the short lengths of article on areas of interest that are particularly female, makes me wonder just how much this is the case. Or are the short lengths of these articles a result of a contributor base only 13% female?

I kind of like this commercial and how it attempts to get its point across. Just how much sugar is in a typical bottle of soda pop? Quite a bit.

I wonder how much sugar there is in the 2L bottle of Coke in my fridge. No doubt oodles of the stuff. Still I'm more comfortable consuming sugar than aspartame and its ilk.

Here's what Netflix said in a letter to their shareholders:

Wired ISPs have large fixed costs of building and maintaining their last mile network of residential cable and fiber. The ISPs’ costs, however, to deliver a marginal gigabyte, which is about an hour of viewing, from one of our regional interchange points over their last mile wired network to the consumer is less than a penny, and falling, so there is no reason that pay-per-gigabyte is economically necessary. Moreover, at $1 per gigabyte over wired networks, it would be grossly overpriced.

It should be noted that Netflix uses a content-distribution network, which more or less means that they pay your ISP (or someone very close by) to store data there, meaning that they pay for this as well as for the costs to push data from their central servers to here. All this examines is the last mile costs - from your ISP to you. Otherwise costs would be a little higher, but I doubt they would be immensely so.

(HT: Ars Technica)

There's been a lot about these riots in Egypt in the news the last while. I also know a bunch of Egyptians who are quite excited about this movement. Yet I'm not sure that I share their sense of optimism. Here's one article that seems to articulate some of what I thinking:

What if the most likely alternatives are either an Arab-nationalist dictatorship or an Islamist dictatorship? First, the moderate democratic forces are weak, disorganized, and few in number compared with their two rivals. Second, in Egypt especially, many of the “moderate democrats” are quite extremist, even if they are leftist or radical-nationalist rather than Islamist in doctrine.

We also have some precedents: Iran’s revolution (Islamism); Palestinian elections (Hamas); Lebanese democracy (Hezbollah); Algerian free elections (bloody civil war); Turkish democracy (Islamist regime at present). This pattern cannot be ignored, there are reasons for it.

- Cold Water on the Frenzy: Cautions about Egypt