One of the recent non-internet and non-homicidal news story that keeps coming up in my usual medium scoutings is the news of "toxic" materials in plastic bottles. Plastic number 7. You can find that number on the bottom of most plastic bottles.

*waits while you check your water bottle's bottom*

See? How creepy is that?

Anyhow, chances are high that your refillable clear water bottle is a number 7 regardless if it is a Nalgene or not. In fact, even baby bottles are affected by this. One of the materials to make number 7 plastic is "Bisphenol A" or BPA. BPA has been found to negatively affect your health. source

There are plenty of 'healthy' alternatives. Glass and stainless steel. If you still fancy plastic, you can always go with a not-so-cool-as-clear unclear plastic. These plastics should have a number other than 7.

Yes, Nalgene does have bottles that don't contain BPA.

After listing to a brief sessions of CBC Radio One's Ontario Today, I learned of the up-and-coming plan of Canada's monopolistic jerks super-telecommunications networks, Rogers and Bell, to start charging Internet users higher rates if they exceed a certain bandwidth. On top of this, they already have an undocumented cap (or maximum) per month. Readers of the Globe and Mail may have seen this article a few days ago that outline the changes. What interested me was the table at the bottom sporting a new price guide:

Paying for speed Rogers' usage fees and speed according to service level:

Service level	Regular monthly Subscriber rate	Download speed	Usage allowance	Additional usage charge
Extreme Plus	$99.95	18 Mbps*	95 GB**	$1.25/GB
Extreme	$54.95	10 Mbps	95 GB	$1.50/GB
Express	$44.95	7 Mbps	60 GB	$2.00/GB
Lite	$34.95	1 Mbps	25 GB	$2.50/GB
Ultra-Lite	$24.95	500 Kbps	2 GB	$5.00/GB

*Megabits per second **Gigabytes SOURCE: THOMSON DATASTREAM

To put things into perspective: 2 GBs a month is roughly 2.8 downloaded movies AND NOTHING ELSE. Do you rent movies online from NetFlix or even Xbox Live? Now, I'm not big city lawyer, but it seems to me that there are two main companies wanting to cash in on Internet trend. In other words, "Price Gouging or Profiteering"

As a result, questions are being raised about whether Canada's major service providers are prepared to handle the future of the Internet as bandwidth-gobbling activities such as downloadable videos and file-sharing go mainstream. The exploding popularity of online video is causing headaches for ISPs. Much of that traffic is facilitated through peer-to-peer networks. SOURCE: Globe and Mail

The world is into downloading massive amounts of data for entertainment, information or otherwise. And yes, "YouTube" is considered bandwidth use because even if you are "streaming it", it is still a bunch of 1s and 0s running through the tubes. Rogers and Bell want a larger cut. All is fair in the corporate world. It looks like the Internet Service Providers are taking a note from Canada's Long Distance Plan Providers. Oh wait, same jerks companies, my bad. At least we don't see price gouging in the oil industry. Those guys are class acts.