The Harper government will repeal the ban on communicating election results while polls are still open, bringing the law into harmony with the realities of today's instant communications.

The election night blackout was adopted in 1938, to prevent western voters from knowing the results of the election in the east when they cast their ballots.

Minister of State for Democratic Reform Tim Uppal announced via Twitter Friday that the antiquated law will been repealed in time for the next election.

With the G22 rifle, the RCMP has at least a flimsy excuse for the reclassification— it says because the rifle can be easily shortened by removing the back end, it’s too easily concealable to be a non-restricted rifle (the blame still lies with the government for making the mistake in the first place, but at least that’s something). The decision to ban the AP-80, however, has no logic behind it at all. The RCMP claims that it was “incorrectly registered” as non-restricted because the AP-80 is a “variant of the design of the firearm commonly known as the AK-47 rifle” — a Soviet-designed military combat rifle.

Except … it isn’t. At all. The AP-80 fires an entirely different (and much weaker) kind of ammunition, using a different internal mechanism and is built from completely different materials and components (precisely zero of the parts of the AP-80 and AK-47 are compatible or interchangeable). The only thing the AP-80 has in common with the AK-47 is its silhouette — when the AP-80 was designed, the manufacturer decided to make it look like the famous AK-47, for purely marketing reasons. As a rifle, the AP-80 is a completely unremarkable low-caliber plinker. Only by making it look like a famous military rifle could the company hope to sell many copies, so that’s what they did. The RCMP is banning the AP-80 because it looks scary.

The shell is where I live most days, and the shell has pipes. Pipes simply transmit plain text, and many pieces of data I deal with are structured data where staples like grep and sed are not the best.

Fortunately, there are lots of tools available to help you deal with these structured formats.

Bolivians were never prevented by their government from buying burgers; they simply chose not to do so. This is not a victory over capitalism, it is capitalism.

When Arunachalam Muruganantham hit a wall in his research on creating a sanitary napkin for poor women, he decided to do what most men typically wouldn’t dream of. He wore one himself--for a whole week. Fashioning his own menstruating uterus by filling a bladder with goat’s blood, Muruganantham went about his life while wearing women’s underwear, occasionally squeezing the contraption to test out his latest iteration. It resulted in endless derision and almost destroyed his family. But no one is laughing at him anymore, as the sanitary napkin-making machine he went on to create is transforming the lives of rural women across India.

I love this story. Somebody sees a need, invents a ground breaking, low cost solution and has a way to live tens of thousands of people out of poverty. I hope that it catches on and he - and they - succeed.

It's something so radical that it would have been considered crazy had it been pushed by the Bush administration,

Plenty of soaps are made with natural ingredients. Usually what that means is that they're made of ground-up flowers and tropical fruits.

If you’re going to shower, be a man about it. Introducing the only soap made with electrolytes, caffeine, and punching. Don’t waste your time with anything less. 

There are many, many reasons to use Chef but the main reason you should use chef is this: You, System Administrator, are too damn smart to spend the rest of your professional life reinventing the wheel.

Even as the crisis was nearing the flashpoint, banks were searching for ways to help Greece forestall the day of reckoning. In early November — three months before Athens became the epicenter of global financial anxiety — a team from Goldman Sachs arrived in the ancient city with a very modern proposition for a government struggling to pay its bills, according to two people who were briefed on the meeting.

The bankers, led by Goldman’s president, Gary D. Cohn, held out a financing instrument that would have pushed debt from Greece’s health care system far into the future, much as when strapped homeowners take out second mortgages to pay off their credit cards.

It had worked before. In 2001, just after Greece was admitted to Europe’s monetary union, Goldman helped the government quietly borrow billions, people familiar with the transaction said. That deal, hidden from public view because it was treated as a currency trade rather than a loan, helped Athens to meet Europe’s deficit rules while continuing to spend beyond its means.