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Is she above the average? She became astronaut only because at the time they needed someone from the province of Quebec in the crew and a female as well. All other already chosen candidates were males from outside the province of Quebec and the HQ of the Canadian Space Agency was to be build in St-Hubert, Quebec. There was a strong political bias in her nomination. There was much more qualified candidates in the pool the Canadian Space Agency choose from. She was having a Master degree while everyone else in the last round was having a PhD. And something you shouldn't neglect, a very near friend of her father was at the time the head of the Canadian Space Agency.

I used to. The Canadian employment insurance website for some inexplicable reason checked the browser and demanded either netscape or IE they fixed that but then inexplicably locked you out if your OS wasn't mac or Windows. My choices were either travel for 45 minutes and file my reports in person, install windows, or spoof my browser ID. Thankfully they have since come to their senses.

St-Hubert ordering system had the same IE or netscape (I need my rotisserie chicken) as did several other food ordering systems. They all got fixed as Firefox gained market share.

I've been looking for the Réso map for a while just because it makes me think of a metroid or some other game's map.

With a missile silo on 1250 Rene Levesque (IBM), the ice gun on McGill univ, and a boss on Phillips Square.

The maps around montreal are have the areas a bit rounder, a bit more "videogame-like". Still.. Nice map.
http://www.voyagezfute.ca/download/document/r%C3%A 9so.PDF
The map covers from Atwater to St-Hubert on this map, to give an idea of the distance covered.
http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&om=1&z=14&ll=45.50 1956,-73.563766&spn=0.028996,0.058365
(about five kilometers wide.. westmount square to st-hubert street)

what references did you add? Apparently they weren't as inoccuous as you've implied...

• Hubert Selby Jr.
• Mount Washington Cog Railway
• Colonization of the Moon
• Sea level rise
• Kyoto Protocol
• Battle of Singapore

I like this one better because it's a small general aviation plane: St. Hubert, Quebec

I am about to spend way too much time on this, but this is an argument I've had before and I want to end it here and now.

"I suspect the difference is due to the use of "metropolitan area" versus city."

"Metropolitan area" is a very vague definition. The Canadian census folks talked about it being a city and the surrounding area that economically relies on the city blah blah blah... I'm sure the relatively arbitrary definition of these "metropolitan areas" is usefull for bureocratic statisticians, but I don't find it useful here. For example, your areaconnect.com link claims that all of New Jersey is a "metropolitan area," even though I know for a fact that there are farms in New Jersey.

"The largest population centre, Toronto, has a density of 603 p/sqkm. Compare this to the entire state of New Jersey: 437p/sqkm. That is a "high density" city compared to a state. New York state is better at 155p/sqkm. But this is still higher then the density of southern Ontario and Quebec."

But looking at the population density for an area the size of even the relatively small New Jersey is meaningless. The scale is too great; the people of New Jersey aren't spread out uniformly. And of course you'll find higher numbers when you consider there are about ten Americans for every Canadian. I think something a bit more meaningful is needed.

Information on New Jersey can conveniently be found here. According to the numbers on this page, about 14.1% of New Jersey's population live in its ten most populous cities. For the three most populous states, New York has 45.5%, California has 24.8% and Florida has 22.1%.

Unfortunately, Canada doesn't seem to have such an easy-to-follow presentation of information, so I needed to go digging. For Ontario, I went here and went digging through for the ten most populous cities (not "metroplitain areas" not "regional municipalities," honest to God cities). They are:

Toronto 2,481,494
Ottawa 774,072
Mississauga 612,925
Hamilton 490,268
London 336,539
Brampton 325,428
Windsor 208,402
Kitchener 190,399
Vaughan 182,022
Greater Sudbury 155,219

This means 50.5% of the people in Ontario live in Ontario's ten most populous cities. Not only is this ratio more than New York, it's also a numerical majority.

Moving on to Quebec, we have:

Montreal 1,039,534
Laval 343,005
Quebec 169,076
Longueuil 128,016
Gatineau 102,898
Montreal-Nord 83,600
Saint-Laurent 77,391
Sherbrooke 75,916
Saint-Hubert 75,912
LaSalle 73,983

So Quebec has 29.9%. Nowhere near as bad as Ontario, but still more than California and Florida by a comfortable margin.

More numbers to chew on include:

Rhode Island: 48.3%
Connecticut: 27.4%
Massachusetts: 23.8%
PEI: 34.7% live in either Charlottetown or Summerside

And what if we look at just the three most populous cities?

New York: 41.8%
California: 16.9%
Florida: 14.7%

Ontario: 33.9%
Quebec: 21.4%

(rant mode ON)
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Canadians are a heck of a lot more concentrated than Americans! You have fewer meters of phone lines to upgrade per capita! You have fewer kilometers of road to burn gas on per capita! You have less area cell towers need to cover! So don't give me all this crap about how good everything is in Canada compared to the US because it's amazing what you can accomplish when y'all freakin' live next door to one another!

Ontario has slightly fewer people than New York, is about 4 to 5 times larger, and yet the average Ontarian can't throw a rock without hitting another one! Come on people! You live in the second largest country in the world! Don't you want a freakin' back yard?!?! New York's numbers are skewed by having one of the most populous cities in the world, what's Ontario's excuse?

No wonder so many of the links I found when looking up this info talked about Canadian city-states...
(rant mode OFF)

Saint-Hubert, Quebec, November 20, 2001 - The Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and Eurockot Launch Services of Bremen, Germany, today announced the signing of a Launch Service Agreement for Canada's MOST (Microvariability & Oscillations of STars) microsatellite.MOST, carrying Canada's first space telescope, is scheduled to be launched in October 2002 as part of a multiple payload mission from Plesetsk, Russia, on an SS-19 based launch vehicle called Rockot.

"MOST is a unique and exciting space astronomy mission involving Canadian government, scientists and industry," said Mr. Barry Wetter, Director General of the CSA's Space Science Branch. "The signing of this launch agreement with Eurockot is a major step toward seeing this project to fruition."

The MOST project uses innovative Canadian technology to enable a cost-effective space science mission involving a small telescope no bigger in diameter than a pie plate, carried on a microsatellite about the size of a small suitcase. The total weight is only 60 kilograms.The telescope will help set a limit on the age of the Universe and probe the properties of planets around other stars.

Funded and managed by the CSA's Space Science Branch under its Small Payloads Program, the MOST project is a co-operative Canadian scientific partnership. Dynacon Enterprises Limited of Mississauga, Ontario, is the prime contractor. The telescope is being developed by the University of British Columbia (UBC) while the satellite is being assembled at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS). Other key partners include the Centre for Research in Earth and Space Technology (CRESTech) of Toronto, Spectral Applied Research of Concord, Ontario, the Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation (AMSAT) and the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada (RASC).The Principal Investigator, Prof. Jaymie Matthews of UBC, leads a team of scientists from across Canada, the United States and Austria.

The Canadian Space Agency is providing $8.5 million to fund the development of the satellite and ground control station, the launch and operations. An additional $1.2 million in support to UTIAS was provided by the Ontario government through its Ontario Research and Development Challenge Fund.

** DISCLAIMER **
Even though I work for Videotron, I am in no way related with the cable business
** DISCLAIMER **


The 15kb limit reason really _is_ technical. Most cable cells are oversold. A place like St-Hubert is 180% oversold. Whatever they had planned for got shot to shit. In order to maintain decent service on the downstream (average mom and pop web downloads) they cut back on the upstream.

If you live in a non-crowded cell (like I do , 6 modems in one cell, on brand new fiber)you will have an uplink restriction, but it'll be around 30k second. Downlink is extremely fast at anywhere between 500 and 800k per second.

As far as bandwidth quota goes, you can cough up an extra 20$, get a second IP and 6Gb of extra bandwidth (which can be up or down, they dont regulate.) This should be more then enough for _anyone_ doing _LEGAL_ stuff with the box. I've been running a web/mail/ftp/ssh server for 15 months now, and never have I busted my quota.

On the Bell DSL side, the sad truth is that they're so full of shit it smells a mile around. I ordered DSL the second day it became available in my area, and tested it side by side (on identical hardware) with the cable modem. They have 100K uplink and 10K downlink _IF_ you're lucky. And they make you go through ATM authentification and their shitty Fastproxy.sympatico.ca . Not worth 50$ / month.

And a lot of useful algorithms.

That would be nice, but one of the key features of the new deep learning stuff is that you can't extract the algorithms from the weights and connections of the neural network. They also have little value as mathematical objects, since they offer no formal proof of correctness. The networks, like many other mathematical phenomenon, work on everything that falls in some domain, but they might fail tomorrow.

And a lot of useful algorithms.

In 1972 Hubert Dreyfus wrote: "AI workers, however, want their machines to interact with people in present real-life situations in which objects have special local significance. But computers are not involved in a situation. Every bit of data always has the same value. True, computers are not what Kant would call "transcendentally stupid"; they can apply a rule to a specific case if the specific case is already unambiguously described in terms of general features mentioned in the rule. They can thus simulate one kind of theoretical understanding. But machines lack practical intelligence. They are "existentially" stupid in that they cannot cope with specific situations. Thus they cannot accept ambiguity and the breaking of rules until the rules for dealing with the deviations have been so completely specified that the ambiguity has disappeared. To overcome this disability, AI workers would have to develop an a-temporal, nonlocal, theory of ongoing, situated, human activity."

Elsewhere Hubert refers to this Theory of Practical Activity, which artificial general intelligence would need in order to function. No one is working on this, everyone is chasing after "deep learning" solutions. The question is what will happen when people wake up from this dream of the AI future? What kind of hangover will we have, all that money invested on dead-end projects, and a glut of "AI technicians" with vanishing careers? There will be a lot of anger and denial.

In 1972 Hubert L. Dreyfus wrote:

"AI workers, however, want their machines to interact with people in present real-life situations in which objects have special local significance. But computers are not involved in a situation. Every bit of data always has the same value. True, computers are not what Kant would call "transcendentally stupid"; they can apply a rule to a specific case if the specific case is already unambiguously described in terms of general features mentioned in the rule. They can thus simulate one kind of theoretical understanding. But machines lack practical intelligence. They are "existentially" stupid in that they cannot cope with specific situations. Thus they cannot accept ambiguity and the breaking of rules until the rules for dealing with the deviations have been so completely specified that the ambiguity has disappeared. To overcome this disability, AI workers would have to develop an a-temporal, nonlocal, theory of ongoing, situated, human activity."

I keep hearing about machine learning and deep neural nets, but no one talks about the Theory of Practical Activity that would allow AI to be... intelligent. And without that, there is no AI that is going to take my job at the bank, or drive me to the airport, or help me solve a crossword puzzle.

The Democrats are just as bad, but since the Republicans are "in control" they consider their own malice justified at the moment. It's what Prof. Hubert Farnsworth would call "perfectly symmetrical violence" or something along those lines.

The problem is that political parties, and more importantly their mouthpieces, are pushing members towards the extremes. They're constantly promoting the lie that you have to accept the ideology in its entirety or your opinion simply does not matter. You can't support gun rights and be pro-choice and be taken seriously by Republicans or Democrats. Your peers will berate and exclude you until you agree, and nobody wants to be picked on.

Initial concepts of wide area networking originated in several computer science laboratories in the United States, United Kingdom, and France. Donald Davies first demonstrated packet switching in 1967 at the National Physics Laboratory (NPL) in the UK. Cerf credits Hubert Zimmermann and Louis Pouzin, both French, with the fundamentals for TCP/IP. The first stored program computer was built in in Manchester, UK and the first *computer* by Babbagein the UK. So there :-)

OK, here are some facts:

1. Nobody is claiming that this is a health risk, or that the Cs-137 in the wine is a problem.
2. The question posed by Dr. Hubert is simple - can he detect the presence of the Fukushima disaster in post-Fukushima California wine? The answer is yes.
3. Dr. Hubert is perhaps the world expert on low-background radiation measurements.
4. Similar work has put people in jail. Wine fraud is big business, but Dr. Hubert can tell that that "1923" Chateau Whatever was produced after the nuclear bomb tests of the late 40s and 50s.

So, what other essentially pointless activities can video cards perform that might raise their prices again? How about... deep learning? What's wrong with video rendering? Buy a whole bunch of them and send them to Ian Hubert so he can get the next episode of "Dynamo" out of the way more quickly.

Yes, Hubert

I like how Slashdot truncated the post title.

People worry about AI taking their jobs, but they'll never replace you if you just change your name to "Adolph Blaine Charles David Earl Frederick Gerald Hubert Irvim John Kenneth Loyd Martin Nero Oliver Paul Quincy Randolph Sherman Thomas Uncas Victor Willian Xerxes Yancy Zeus Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorffvoralternwarengewissenhaftschafers wesenchafewarenwholgepflegeundsorgfaltigkeitbeschutzenvonangereifen duchihrraubgiriigfeindewelchevorralternzwolftausendjahresvorandieer scheinenbanderersteerdeemmeshedrraumschiffgebrauchlichtalsseinu rsprungvonkraftgestartseinlangefahrthinzwischensternartigraumaufde rsuchenachdiesternwelshegehabtbewohnbarplanetenkreisedrehensichund wohinderneurassevanverstandigmenshlichkeittkonntevortpflanzenundsiche rfreunanlebenslamdlichfreudeundruhemitnichteinfurchtvorangreifenvon andererintlligentgeschopfsvonhinzwischensternartigraum”

"Alexa, as CEO, how can I save the company money"
"Ok Hubert, I googled some responses for you the first one reads: "BEST BUYS MOBILE PHONE STORE SUX0RS"
"Alexa, Stop! That's a brilliant idea!"

Stories like this always make me think of the following clip from Futurama A Clone of My Own:

Professor Hubert Farnsworth: And this is my Universal Translator. Unfortunately, so far it only translates into an incomprehensible dead language.
Cubert J. Farnsworth: [into the translator's microphone] Hello.
Translator Machine: Bonjour!
Professor Hubert Farnsworth: Crazy gibberish!