When I was in my last year of high school, a person from the admissions office of a local college came in to give a conference on applying for college. He told us this story about hesitating when choosing a program:
A student came to me and asked: “I don’t know what to choose between programs X and Y! Which one is better?”
I replied: “Well, just flip head or tails.”
“You’re kidding me, right? My future depends on this, and you’re telling me to flip a coin?”
“It works. Here’s a coin, flip. Heads is X, tails is Y.”
“Okay. (flips) Aw crap, it’s Y.”
“Well there you have your answer. Your gut just told you you preferred program X. Apply for X instead.”
Sometimes you know in your gut you want to do something, but you just don’t want to allow yourself to. Maybe there’s some idea or reason that’s keeping you from choosing the option you want. Maybe there’s an insecurity holding you back. This can sometimes help uncover it.
An alternative set of rules is you flip the coin, and the special rule is that you’re allowed to flip the coin over and modify the result if you want to. If you’re happy with the initial result then it stays that way, but if not you just flip it around.
This can be a good way to reveal a suppressed gut feeling, but why should you trust your gut? Why would that be such a good indicator? Or maybe your gut is indifferent too. Which brings me to my next point.
You don’t care. When you have a dilemma, it means, by definition, that option A is practically equal to option B. This situation has pretty useful properties.
Namely, you can go and nitpick on the smallest little benefit or drawback of either side to make your decision. Go ahead, pick a silly or fickle reason to choose option A. There you have it. The options aren’t equal anymore. Option A is now marginally better than the other one.
I use this when ordering food, for example. I’ll typically hesitate between two plates. Both seem equally good. Since I’ll be satisfied with either of the two, I decide to pick the cheapest one. And further, if they’re the same price, (or price was already factored in) I just choose the first in alphabetical order. Unhappy? Switch! It’s a dilemma, you can do anything you want.
Sometimes, the options won’t be truly equal. In that they’re seemingly equal, but one way is better for you than the other.
For example, you might hesitate in striking up a conversation with someone you haven’t met. You’ll be faced with staying in your place while keeping your rejection chances at zero (perceived benefit), or running the risk of meeting someone valuable, but exposing yourself to a bad experience. Seemingly equal. (Being rational and removed from the situation, we can see why this reasoning is flawed, but in practice this would be a perceived dilemma when faced with the situation.)
However, you might have as a personal objective that you’d like to get more out of your comfort zone. Then go ahead and err on the side of getting out of comfort zone. There are some “sides” like this you’re better to err on. There are sometimes some motives or objectives in life which you have identified as a way you want to get towards.
In my personal list, I have getting out of my comfort zone, but also moving inertia, living experiences, and so on. You might want to err on the side of safety. Or err on the side of benefiting someone else. It all comes down to your personal objectives. Which option has the marginal benefit of advancing something you know in the bigger picture will be better for you.
What is your marginal benefit?
]]>Le fonctionnement du péage est relativement simple: vous passez sur le pont avec votre véhicule, chaque véhicule a une plaque, et une caméra se charge de noter chaque numéro de plaque pour vous envoyer la facture.
Pour les utilisateurs fréquents, ils peuvent s’abonner au préalable auprès de A25 pour “ouvrir un compte”. Ouvrir un compte permet de recevoir de la part d’A25 un transpondeur, qui identifie les véhicules par le biais des ondes. Cependant, ouvrir un compte comporte une multitude de “frais de gestion” comme un frais initial de 50$, des frais mensuels de 1$ ou 2.50$, selon si le compte est en mode “réapprovisionnement automatique”, en plus de devoir maintenir un solde minimal. J’ai déjà hâte d’en avoir un.
Chaque passage coûte autour de 1.80$, selon la période de pointe. Cependant, si vous avez le malheur de ne pas ouvrir de compte avant votre passage (avec tous les avantages que ça a), on vous facture cinq dollars (5$) additionnels de, vous l’aurez deviné, frais d’administration. Ces frais sont, en apparence, pour faire l’identification par l’entremise de la SAAQ de votre plaque.
L’objet du recours collectif, ce sont justement ces frais. La Loi sur la protection du consommateur québécoise force les commerçants à afficher le prix total, frais inclus, de façon la plus prédominante. Or, c’est le prix par passage sans les frais qui est affiché, le 1.80$.
Ce qui me choque personnellement, c’est qu’on puisse justifier des frais de 5$ pour un vulgaire “lookup”, une simple consultation.
Au voir des documents sur le site d’A25, même s’ils ne font pas de consultation à la SAAQ, c’est 3$ (ce qu’ils appellent un “passage vidéo”, si je ne me trompe). La partie SAAQ coûterait donc, en théorie, 2$.
Ce qui ne me revient pas, c’est comment A25 peut s’en tirer à facturer 3$ pour entrer un numéro de plaque dans la base de données et en ressortir avec un nom et une adresse. Même cri d’alarme du côté de la SAAQ. L’opération dont on se parle, pour A25, est la suivante:
En SQL, simplement, on exécuterait potentiellement:
SELECT * FROM vehicles WHERE plaque = '123ABC';
Rien qui justifie 2$, encore moins 3$, pour cette consultation, qui en coûte vraisemblablement quelques cents pour chaque véhicule additionnel. J’exclus bien entendu les coûts de développement et d’implantation du système.
Il y a certes des contraintes de sécurité et d’audit qui font partie de l’équation, mais encore là, rien qui justifie un tel coût.
Pour l’identification visuelle des caractères, c’est-à-dire la conversion de données photographiques en une chaîne de caractères, dans les faits je ne sais pas si ce travail est fait manuellement.
On a entendu parler dans les dernières années, d’un dispositif qui fait exactement ce travail pour les policiers. Un appareil était installé sur le toit de leur auto-patrouille, qui détectait en temps réel si untel qui passait devant avait payé ses droits d’immatriculation ou de permis, peut-être.
Et même si c’était fait manuellement, une heure d’un travailleur à salaire minimum arriverait à en lire une à chaque trente secondes. Pour un espèce de 0.10$ la pièce.
J’arrive donc à la conclusion que c’est un montant disproportionné pour une telle opération. Alors, à ce moment, le capitalisme dicte qu’un consommateur faisant face à un prix trop cher ira voir la compétition. Ceci est assumant qu’il connaît le prix. Si le prix est trop haut mais qu’on cherche à le camoufler, un recours collectif n’est peut-être pas étonnant.
]]>(F-32) ÷ 2
However, the accurate formula being multiplying by 5/9 instead of 1/2 (or 5/10),
(F-32) × 5/9
we introduce a relative error of 10% (we arrive at 10% below our real figure).
To compensate, we could multiply by 10/9 (1.111…), but dividing by 9 isn’t so convenient. We can however appoximate this to 11/10 (which is 1.1, vs. 1.1111…).
So really all you have to do, is after your division by 2, add 10% of the result to itself. We then end up at 99% of our real figure, undershooting by 1% only. Nice improvement over our 10%-error estimation.
(F-32) ÷ 2 * (1 + 1/10)
So if we have 72°F:
72 - 32 = 40
40 ÷ 2 = 20
10% × 20 = 2
20 + (10% × 20) = 22
About 22°C, the real figure being 22.2°C (much better than our initial 20°C estimation!)
]]>The kids had to choose a number while the teacher wasn’t looking (she waited out in the hallway). She would then come back and show the class each board and ask them if the number was on it. Yes, yes, no, no, yes… After we had gone through all the boards, she would tell us the number. Magic!
For the second grader that I was, it was pretty impressive. After the five boards or so, she knew. She must have had a damn good memory!
But I suspected something was off. There had to be a trick, of course. The whole group thought she must have been reading the erasures of the black board we were writing the number on, or looking through the door window. And they made damn sure she didn’t. But this wasn’t it.
Time after time, I observed. And figured it out. When I asked to try at her place, I managed the same feat. The class was pretty stunned.
Not counting computer science and math majors, can a college-educated adult, with or without a science background, crack the puzzle?
I’ve fashioned the following “boards” on scraps of paper:
+-------------------+ +-------------------+ +-------------------+
| Board 2 | | Board 1 | | Board 8 |
+-------------------+ +-------------------+ +-------------------+
| 2 14 15 11 18 19 | | 1 3 11 13 19 27 | | 8 10 12 14 15 26 |
| 3 6 7 10 22 23 | | 15 5 9 21 33 29 | | 9 11 13 24 28 25 |
| 26 27 30 31 34 35 | | 17 7 25 23 31 35 | | 30 31 40 41 27 29 |
| 38 39 42 43 46 47 | | 47 39 53 45 37 | | 44 45 43 42 47 46 |
| 50 51 54 55 58 59 | | 41 43 49 51 | | 56 57 59 63 |
| 62 63 | | 63 55 61 57 59 | | 58 60 61 62 |
+-------------------+ +-------------------+ +-------------------+
+-------------------+ +-------------------+ +-------------------+
| Board 32 | | Board 4 | | Board 16 |
+-------------------+ +-------------------+ +-------------------+
| 32 33 39 40 47 46 | | 4 5 12 13 20 21 | | 16 17 20 21 24 25 |
| 37 34 38 41 48 45 | | 6 7 14 15 22 23 | | 18 19 22 23 26 27 |
| 36 35 49 42 43 44 | | 28 29 36 37 44 45 | | 28 29 48 49 52 53 |
| 52 51 50 56 57 58 | | 30 31 38 39 46 47 | | 30 31 50 51 54 55 |
| 53 54 55 61 60 59 | | 52 53 60 61 | | 56 57 60 61 |
| 62 63 | | 54 55 62 63 | | 58 59 62 63 |
+-------------------+ +-------------------+ +-------------------+
and had my housemates choose a number between 1 and 60. Then show them each card successively and ask them if their number was there. Half a second after we were done through the six cards, I would tell them their number.
Can you?
I made a point of hiding the cards before and after the trick, while we were discussing, and to distract them a bit with some talking at some points.
We discussed the trick afterwards, and in between runs.
Some of their observations:
Mathieu and Gabrielle are studying psychology at Université de Montréal. They studied social science in Cegep.
Iké is studying environment at McGill University. He studied Pure Science in Cegep.
Coming back to second grade, I noticed a strange thing: the boards aren’t numbered sequentially. They are numbered 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32. What a strange sequence for numbering boards. Something’s up.
There was still a mystery to me: how did she make those boards? Because they were clearly handmade.
What if somehow, those numbers meant something? What if they… added up to the magical number? Correct.
My teacher was using the same logic as the one behind the binary numeral system. Either the number is one a board, or it is not. With each successive board, we go bit by bit (literally bits). Each board represents a binary digit (bit!) in the number. Over six boards, we could select one number out of 64 (or 2^6 ). So the number 37, 100101 in binary, the sum of positions 32, 4 and 1, would appear on boards 32, 4 and 1!
In second grade, it was magic. Well, math-magic. It wasn’t until I was much (much!) older, that I uncovered the link with combinatorics and binary, and thus solved the real mystery. I interested myself to binary in a research project of our choice in secondary One (age 13), where I became acquainted with it for the first time. Had it not been for that, the educational system would have teached me those in Cegep (age 18), as part of my post-secondary Pure Science program.
]]>Premièrement, la gauche au Québec n’est pas que purement souverainiste. À mesure que la question nationale vieillit, en effet, comme Benjamin dit, on retourne à l’axe traditionnel gauche-droite. En fait, quelqu’un qui a voté NPD au fédéral pourrait aussi bien le faire au provincial. Le NPD a déclaré en 2006, dans sa “fameuse” déclaration de Sherbrooke, qu’il reconnaîtrait un référendum oui à 50% plus un comme une majorité claire et suffisante. C’est une conviction personnelle un peu rare, mais le choix d’un gouvernement du Québec ne devrait pas nécessairement être “empoisonné” par la question nationale. Regardez la politique du parti vert en matière de souveraineté pour un exemple. Le NPD peut faire la même chose selon moi qu’au fédéral: former une coalition d’électeurs pragmatiques de centre-gauche, au delà de la question nationale.
Les gauches fédéralistes (on pense par exemple à l’ouest de l’île de Montréal) ne votent généralement pas pour QS ou PQ de peur d’avoir un référendum. Un référendum est quelque chose d’indésirable et de risqué pour eux, et juste d’en avoir un est un risque. D’ailleurs, les politiques de nationalisme exclusif des péquistes, je pense par exemple aux anglophones ici, ont l’effet d’une douche froide. Jetez un coup d’oeil aux résultats de la provinciale de 2008 dans Notre-Dame-de-Grâce: Libéraux 68%, Verts 14%. On cherchait désespérément à voter fédéraliste sans voter libéral.
L’électorat québecois n’est pas satisfait du choix qu’on lui donne. Le paysage politique est loin d’être saturé, et justement, il y a un immense vide. Dans la campagne actuelle [2012], on n’exprime d’enthousiasme pour aucun des chefs, et on va “au moins pire.” C’est d’ailleurs pourquoi Legault et la CAQ ont reçu tant de support à leurs débuts, alors qu’on les voyait diriger un gouvernement majoritaire dans les sondages. Le vide avait été comblé avec quelque chose qui parlait au Québécois. Par contre, à mesure qu’on a connu Legault, l’enthousiasme s’est évanoui et nous a ramené au même état d’apathie qu’on était. Un nouveau parti est encore possible et désirable.
La réalité de l’interne du NPD, depuis la vague orange, est que c’est devenu un parti avec une base très importante au Québec. 58% de ses députés sont Québecois, la base de membres est passée de 2 000 à 14 000 dans la dernière année. Le chef en est québécois, la directrice nationale adjointe, Chantal Vallerand, est québécoise, la présidente, Rebecca Blaikie s’est impliquée pendant des années dans l’aile du parti au Québec (alors dans des temps difficiles; elle avait notamment opposé Paul Martin dans Lasalle—Émard en 2004), et la vice-présidente se doit d’être francophone d’office (si la présidente ne l’est pas) et est actuellement une québécoise.
Le NPD est excessivement conscient qu’il doit sa position au Québec, et fera en sorte de le garder, et ça se ressent chez les membres et dans le parti, d’un océan à l’autre. On a besoin du Québec, on veut plaire au Québec, le Québec est la pierre d’assise du NPD.
Post scriptum (2014): En fait, au congrès de Vancouver en 2011, dans une séance de priorisation (rencontre secondaire), il est survenu un moment où on a manqué de dispositifs de traduction en direct alors que la séance se tenait en anglais. J’ai pu voir un chef adjoint Thomas Mulcair indigné, soulever un point de privilège au fait qu’il était inacceptable que des gens ne puissent pas pleinement participer en français. À Vancouver. L’opinion a fait consensus, et la séance a été suspendue jusqu’à ce que les dispositifs soient disponibles.
Je sais que ça pourra irriter certains solidaires, péquistes, option-nationalistes (?), qui perdront des votes des leurs, et même libéraux et caquistes, qui comptent sur la division de la gauche, en fait tout le monde, de voir la gauche former une telle coalition. Mais coudonc, travaillons ensemble.
Là est le pari: le NPD, en créant un parti provincial, gage qu’il peut unir les fédéralistes et souverainistes pragmatiques sous la tente de centre-gauche fédéraliste, au provincial comme on l’a fait au fédéral. Qu’une option fédéraliste de centre-gauche est possible en politique Québécoise. Pour une fois, on ne serait pas pris entre voter pour gouverner sur un référendum et basher les anglophones, et on ne voterait pas pour un gouvernement de droite à la Charest/Legault. Parlez-moi de quelque chose d’inspirant!
(Correction: L’article faisait initialement référence à la “directrice nationale Chantal Vallerand”. J’avais confondu la directrice nationale intérimaire et maintenant directrice adjointe Chantal Vallerand avec le directeur national actuel Nathan Rotman. Celle-ci occupait la direction pendant la course à la chefferie, celle-ci se devant de rester neutre.)
Pour les intéressés, au moment d’écrire ces lignes, je suis vice-président des communications chez les Jeunes néodémocrates du Québec. (Je suis aussi allé au secondaire avec Benjamin et ai eu le député péquiste sortant Gilles Robert dans Saint-Jérôme comme prof d’histoire) Vous me verrez peut-être partisan, mais j’ai tenté de demeurer objectif dans mon analyse. L’opinion que je partage est la mienne et non celle du parti.
]]>@gmail.com
or @hotmail.com
in their email, or
worse, an internet provider, like @sympatico.ca
.
When trying to establish a personal brand or even professional brand, these providers get in the way of having a streamlined, “clean” brand.
For example, what does having @hotmail.com
or @yahoo.com
in your
email say about you? Would you write this on a resumé, how would that
affect your reputation for an employer? Maybe Gmail users are generally
more tech-savvy than Yahoo Mail users. You see how that fragment can
taint your image.
Email addresses also suffer from another caveat. Were one to change providers, the email address will have to change. The email address is, by design, tied to a provider.
Tod Maffin explains other problems with our email solution.
Why are email addresses tied to a server in first place? It seems unrealistic that everyone would register and setup their own domain just to have an email. Which is basically everyone on the Internet. Which is basically everyone.
In the olden days of Internet dinosaurs, there were fewer users, servers and so registering under one employer that had the Internet was rare enough it did the job.
Our relationship with the Internet has evolved. We no longer are tied to one server anymore. Most of the time you’ll a have a personal email, (or two, if you decided to change it) one for work, one for college, and it goes on. Now, what if I change jobs? Volunteer? Change names? Grow a beard?
So, to be free from the woes of being tied to a webmail provider name, I’ve registered my own domain name, and used it to provide a namespace for my email address. It looks more professional, and I can switch providers (who are being forwarded mail) whenever I want.
Down with the domain names! It makes sense. But like domain names (oh the irony) themselves, a small namespace will fill up quickly.
So basically, we need a way to reference people (or fake people, entities) in a namespace. In the “real world”, we use names. But they are far from being unique. Just lookup your name on Facebook.
What can we discriminate on? Gender? Birth? Favorite color? This brings up privacy issues. Numbers? We’d feel rather insignificant.
My least worst is nationality. We already do it with domain names. Hell,
I’m doing it, as I write. jonathanallard.ca
: “Jonathan Allard from
Canada” Still, my name is not unique in Canada. And what if I move?
What if I don’t feel Canadian?
How do you identify a single human on a seven-billion-human Earth?
Besides, eliminating domain names creates another problem: to whom (what server) should email be sent, now that the server domain is absent from the address?
One solution would be to have it encrypted and broadcasted across a peer-to-peer network, in a similar fashion to Bitcoin. Depending on the size of email, this would however put more strain on the network.
What is convenient, right now, is that we can use a simple string to represent a mailbox.
Let’s design email 2.0.
ben@scott.com
isn’t, because there are millions of Scotts, but only a few scott.tld
owners)I have indicated that to my browser, Firefox. French first, English second. Which in turn it indicates to all web servers when I request their content.
The classic case: I visit a website in native English, that has been translated into French. The translation is adequate, but I prefer the original version, as often translations aren’t perfect. As I’ve encountered many sites of this breed, I switched my locale to English first, French second, to be able to view English websites un-translated. So far so good.
The caveat: translations are rarely pefect. On the reverse, when I visit a website originally in French, that happens to have a translation in English, I don’t want the translation. I’m thinking of the Government of Québec, for instance. I always get the English page, even though it’s a little ridiculous for a francophone to get the Gov. of Québec’s pages in English.
The thing about translation is that it’s just that: translation. Most resources are crafted in a certain language first, and then, translated, which will be adequate, sure, but often isn’t exactly faithful to the original version. In that sense, there is some content degradation.
How do I get rid of translations? How do I get the best content possible I can understand?
I hate translations. Okay, I don’t hate translations, but I dislike them when they are presented to me instead of a language I am fluent in.
The lack of translations in The Sims, when I was younger, prompted me
to adapt and learn English. In the early 2000s, websites were mainly
English, and you had no choice but to learn it if you wanted to have
access to most material. Besides, the larger the (language) community
is, the more extensive and more up-to-date the information will be,
right? That’s why I still use English to research knowledge even today.
But, as a site’s userbase for foreign languages grows, it makes more sense to include translations for its interface and content. What pretty much everyone started doing. But how does that translation reflect the original content?
What I want is pretty simple: I want the best content that I can understand. I don’t have an absolute priority for languages. The one I want not only depends on the language I prefer, but also on the quality of the resource in that language, what we seem to be missing.
Browsers allow me to pick my languages. Not assign quality values to them, like the HTTP spec would like us to do, but merely rank them.
The resulting request locale:
en-ca,en-us;q=0.8,en;q=0.5,fr-ca;q=0.3
RFC 2616, the (beloved) specification for HTTP/1.1, defines how browser preferences (request headers) can ask for content in a language clients can understand.
In HTTP terms, that would mean “send me en-ca
if you have it, then en-us
” and so on.
However, to take back that government example, sending me en-ca
doesn’t really make
sense if the site was first and foremost in fr-ca
, and then translated into English,
to which there might be some material or sections missing.
How should we deal with the problem?
A good beginning is how HTTP deals with content formats (eg. mp3 vs. wav). File formats are analogous to languages. They are representations of the same content, which can vary in quality rating.
The Accept
header is used for content-negotiation,
to determine in what format (media type, language, …) the user wants
their resource. Content negotiation is meant to determine which format the
client would accept at what quality.
Each media-range MAY be followed by one or more accept-params, beginning with the
q
parameter for indicating a relative quality factor. The firstq
parameter (if any) separates the media-range parameter(s) from the accept-params. Quality factors allow the user or user agent to indicate the relative degree of preference for that media-range, using the qvalue scale from 0 to 1 (section 3.9). The default value isq=1
.[…] The example
Accept: audio/* ; q=0.2, audio/basic
SHOULD be interpreted as “I prefer audio/basic, but send me any audio type if it is the best available after an 80% mark-down in quality.”
It is asking clients to identify which contents are acceptable after a mark-down in quality. In other terms, it is asking clients to identify in a binary fashion, is such a format at such a quantity is acceptable.
There is no optimization suggested, only a binary test of if the content is acceptable. Which is a limited tool.
But further, in practice, content negotiation, in today’s web applications, often only happens in a shortcut way where the only thing taken into account is the ranking of languages. The app algorithm just goes on to serve the first language it has available in the client ranking, and then, if no suitable language is found, just gives the default.
Or, from another perspective, all language contents have the same quality. If you do make this assumption, negotiation becomes trivial.
I suggest a new metric: content appreciation.
I can understand French perfectly, English almost so, and some amount of Spanish.
Accept-language: fr; q=1, en; q=0.95, es; q=0.4
Here is this website, that was originally designed in English, but also offers French and Spanish translations, among others.
Content: en; q=1, fr; q=0.7, es; q=0.7
Right now, a server would say: “They prefer French first. I have French. They’ll have that.”
And yes, the content would be acceptable. But would I appreciate it the most? No.
Our objective should be to give the client, not the one acceptable, but the format they will appreciate the most.
content appreciation = format comprehension * format quality
Content-appreciation: en: 0.95, fr: 0.7, es: 0.28
Hence, the server should serve me English.
Taking back our Government of Québec example,
Content: fr; q=1, en; q=0.7
Content-appreciation: fr: 1, en: 0.66
Which I’d receive in the original français.
Now, the only thing remaining is to implement that into every web server.
Revision 2 · October 2016
]]>No, amazingly, postal codes are not public domain in Canada. They appear to bear some sort of copyright held by Canada Post. If you want, for example, to make a nice API so a website user, for example, has only to type his postal code to have his adress almost all filled in, and in bonus the data being awesomely more consistent and error-free.
To do that, you either have to purchase the DB from Canada Post at an awesome price of $5000, or have to figure out a solution on your own. I learned today Geocoder.ca provides that kind of API.
I spent many hours trying to find a way to get to Canada Post’s own API (over its horrible Java site), or find my way screen-scraping them from their odd webpage (horrible Java, bis).
Turns out, CPC (Canada Post, not another CPC that we know of) doesn’t seem to like competition, so they are suing Geocoder.ca in federal court for that. The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC), has apparently taken upon itself to represent Geocoder.ca before the Federal court. Thanks to them.
If everyone — stores, mail, apps, hell, even UPS — uses postal codes, then why the hell is this still copyrighted and kept locked up by Canada Post?
I have written a little something to my beloved public servants (and home-translated too, yay for canadian bilingualism!). Feel free to use my words to describe your sentiments in a similar way.
(For more discussion, see the comments on Hacker News.)
]]>L’honorable Denis Lebel, ministre responsable de la Société canadienne des postes,
The honourable Steven John Fletcher, Minister of State (Transport), as assistant to M. Lebel on CPC matters,
The honourable James Moore, Minister of Heritage and Official Languages,
Charlie Angus, Official Opposition critic in the matters of Ethics, Access to Information, Privacy & Copyright and Digital Issues,
Pierre Dionne Labelle, porte-parole adjoint de l’opposition officielle, en matière du CRTC, de droits d’auteur, et de questions numériques,
(Version française plus bas)
Sirs,
It is with deep anger that I have learned today that the Canada Post Corporation was suing Geocoder.ca for providing postal codes freely on their website. Not only should never the CPC blackmail organizations for providing public interest information, but postal codes should be outright diffused as public domain. Postal codes are not the property of CPC, they are property of the taxpayers and citizens who have paid taxes for CPC to organize Canada into regions and so that system can be used by consumers, and corporations, big and small. Keeping postal codes locked up prevents efficient systems being put in place, prevent economies of scale, prevents competition, and prevents innovation. Postal codes have plenty of usages in our daily lives in Canada, often quick ways to summarize an address, such as finding a nearby branch of a local store, or even for a constituent to find their riding and MP. CPC suing Geocoder.ca and keeping that information private, and letting it be sold is a slap in the face to Canadians. I ask from you that you intervene to stop this litigation immediately, and free postal codes to Canadians without delay.
Messieurs,
C’est avec une colère profonde que j’ai appris aujourd’hui que la Société canadienne des postes poursuivait en justice Geocoder.ca pour avoir fournir des codes postaux librement sur leur site. Non seulement la SPC ne devrait jamais faire du chantage à des organisations pour avoir fourni de telles informations d’intérêt public, mais les codes postaux devraient carrément être diffusés dans le domaine public. Les codes postaux ne sont pas la propriété de la SPC, ils appartiennent aux contribuables et citoyens qui ont payé des impôts à la SPC pour organiser le Canada en différentes régions, et pour que ce système puisse servir aux consommateurs et compagnies, grandes et petites. De garder les codes postaux enfermés empêche des systèmes efficaces d’être mis en place, empêche les économies d’échelle, empêche la compétition, empêche l’innovation. Les codes postaux ont une foule d’usages dans nos vies quotidiennes au Canada, souvent des manières rapides d’indiquer une adresse, comme par exemple en trouvant une succursale d’une chaîne nationale, ou même pour un citoyen de trouver leur circonscription et député. La SPC poursuivant Geocoder.ca et gardant ces informations privées, et les laisser être vendues, sont une claque à la face des canadiens. Je vous demande d’intervenir pour cesser ce litige immédiatement, et pour libérer les codes postaux aux canadiens sans délai.
Jonathan Allard
Montréal QC
J’ai choisi Octopress, un module de blog basé sur Jekyll, le tout monté en Ruby. Je voulais initialement arranger (amancher) quelque chose de plus complexe, mais la simplicité a fini par l’emporter. Le gros plus, c’est que je puisse hoster le tout sur Github Pages, ce qui me semble très bien.
Mes activités sur Internet sont bilingues. Anglais, français. Je ne sais pas encore trop comment faire une solution qui plaît à tout le monde. On pourrait devenir condescendent et dire que “ceux qui parlent français parlent anglais, mais pas le contraire”, de quoi j’écrirais en anglais seulement, mais j’ai un amour particulier pour ma langue maternelle. Ce devrait donc être un méli-mélo. Pour les plus importants, je prévois installer un quelconque mécanisme de deux-langues-pour-un- post, que je traduirai moi-même.
Allez, c’est parti! En espérant que vous trouverez le tout intéressant.
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