The "Société de Transport de Montréal" (Montreal Public Transit) has had a public transit planner called "Tous Azimuts" (All directions) on their website since 1997. You can access the planner here. The planner is a collaboration between STM and the Ecole Polytechnique's Intelligent Transport Research Group (in french, english version is incomplete).
Your commute can be planned different ways. You can choose your start and end points using a map, through a text search (street address or street corner) or with lists of important landmarks (tourist, hospitals, schools, government and everything in the middle). It will plan your commute either with your start time or specifying an arrival time. There are options to minimize walk time, exclude taking the train and what not. All in all it's pretty complete and extremely useful.
The author of the article (Osman Ratib) is one of the software developpers. He even appears on the photo of TFA, look at the caption. This is some kind of publicity stunt for their software.
We can also use Apple's Dot Mac system as a shared disc for storing images, for back up. You pay $100 a year and you get 80GB of space. In the same way my mother can access photos of my children if I give her access to my personal Dot Mac system, my colleagues can access images of my patients.
Any medical department that uses.Mac for sharing or backing up patient images is not serious. You should already have a PACS or some sort of network to share your digital images, using.Mac is redundant and unsafe.
The anonymizer functions in Osirix are a good step towards security but this is only of value when doing research studies over a lot of patients (like population studies). To do diagnostic work, you need to be able to identify the image set to a given patient. You don't send two three sets of images to a doctor saying, image set #1 is patient X so on and so forth. The risk of error is too great. Plus, anyone who has worked with dicom knows it's close to impossible to identify a patient by it's dicom file name (a CT slice would look like CT.1.3.45.123456.20051024.1.100.01) if the metadata has been anonymized.
We wanted to create something for non-radiologists to use, for surgeons or general physicians to view images.
We chose to create the software for Macs, as it's no secret that they are known for their graphic ability. They have huge processing power for 3D and 4D images.
Whatever. Most physicians have a PC on their desk, so the tool is not accessible to them thus negating the "huge processing power" of the Mac.
Still, every time I see agruments about how the UN should do something, and why isn't it, I always want to shout: They Can't. It is against their charter. Therefore, they resort to diplomacy. Because it is all they are allowed to do.
This is so true. Furthermore, the UN is or has been used as the ultimate bogeyman by pretty much anyone at this point. It's such an easy target. Some elected represantative from country X whines because the UN isn't doing sh*t on that issue and gets front page attention while country X's ambassador to the UN vetoed (or voted down) the resolution on that same issue (without any press attention). Replace country X with any country on the Security Council and you get a pretty good picture of how it goes. It is that easy to make political gains on the back of the UN by playing on both sides.
People don't want to see and accept that the ineffectiveness of the UN on some issues results directly from the unwillingness of the member-countries to do the right thing (or just plain something). And that includes our governements.
The UN is being asked to uphold a higher (humanitarian/moral/ethical) standard than its member-countries. Therein lies the problem.
They are a have-not province. That alone is ridiculous. That means basically that they're a fcking welfare state, that makes our laws, takes our money and shits on our flag.
Now don't you get too american on us.
You can't get any government job of note without being bi-lingual which is BLATANT DISCRIMINATION!
Well, this worlks both ways. In Quebec, you also have to be bilingual to get a federal job of note even though the anglo population is small. But your frustation is understandable.
We shoulda shipped them back to france over a 100 years ago.
Like when Alberta did not even exist yet?
America got that part right. Speak english or get out.
I don't remember the americans doing that. You just get assimilated into the great melting pot although language laws have been creeping up in the last decades. The British did deport 10 to 12 thousand acadians between 1755-1762.
If the damn easterners vote in another corrupt liberal gov't after this last fiasco, Alberta will separate.
Quebec has been voting Bloc for the last ten years or so. You can't blame us for voting in the liberal government for that last decade. The Rest of Canada has been doing a great job at that without our help. It's not as if we liked Chrétien anyway.
We don't need Canada for anything. We have NO DEBT, billions in the bank, good healthcare and people that want to work.
And none of that is of your doing. I wonder how rich was Alberta before they started investing in the oil fields after the 1947 discovery of oil in Leduc (a french name by the way). Only because you're sitting on an oil field doesn't make you any better at administration or government (see the Middle East, not that i'm comparing Alberta to Saudi Arabia). Give me a pile of cash from oil and i'll make my province the richest.
Of course you're not allowed to KNOW how AdScam is going.
How can you not know how it's going? We are swimming in a sea of AdScam info in Canada.
All proceedings are closed while they figure out how they're going to get out of this one.
The proceedings are not closed. They've just finished hearing all the witnesses. They even extended the witness period so they could re-hear some people. Now judge Gomery has to write his report and that will take him to around november. All this is not a ploy from the liberals to stay in power or some other conspiracy, the commission is following it's own timeline.
Maybe you are talking about the publication ban that was in effect for some days (one or two months ago). That was bizarre for sure. But the ban has been repealed and everything is public again.
Say what you want about the American court system but that situation's just bullshit!
That's where you are wrong. This has nothing to do with the judicial system. It is NOT a trial. Nobody will get thrown in jail by judge Gomery.
Although trials about AdScam have started parallel to the commission. Paul Coffin (involved in AdScam) has pleaded guilty on counts of frauds of up to 1.7 million dollars. He is awaiting his sentencing. That is the judicial system at work, it's not the AdScam Commission's job.
I don't get why Spain is bitching so bad about the refereeing against Korea. If they had longer term memory they would remember they stole the game against Slovenia in the first round. The referee did not call a blatant foul against a slovenian player which would have resulted in a penalty and then the ref issued a penalty for Spain 1 minute later on an excellent slovenian tackle that got the ball but not the player(i guess the theatrical dive by the spanish player helped). I didn't hear Spain complain about that. If they had lost against Slovenia (which they should have) they wouldn't have qualified for the semis... What goes around comes around. That's karma my spanish friends.
As for Italy, they got so many chance to put the game away. They lost because they just couldn't capitalize. No evil plan there. As for Portugal, I can't say. I did not see that game.
" Its kinda funny how the Middle East folk that are considered to be our adversaries are celebrating in light of these attacks. One has to ask, where would those nations be without the US? "
So what did the US do lately apart from vetoing every vote at the UN security council that would have sent observers or peace keeping troops in Palestine? Of course, the US gov. tried to get negociations going but does not want to take tough decisions take could anger Israel, it's strategic ally in the middle east.
Don't get me wrong. I do not agree with today's events, it's the worst act of terrorism ever. But comments like the "eye opener" are just dumbing down huge geopolitical issues. Saying "where would they be without us" is just looking at one side of the story. You can't look at the middle east situation without looking at those who had a hand in it (in no particular order and i'm forgetting some im sure): Israel, Palestine, Syria, England, France, Egypt, the US. All these countries had something to do with the development of the region and its conflicts and not one of them is an angel, and as hard as it may sound for some, even the US.
It's a fine line between what's ok and what's racist. Some of the content of the parody will offend some people, but i don't think that was the intent.
I was trying to explain some of the cultural background of this parody and in no way making an apology of it. It's hard to judge something when you don't know the context and it is harder on the internet because local content is often judged by international standards. Some of the posts here have been very harsh on quebec in terms of racism etc. I wanted to put a little balance in all this chaos.
Anyways, it's good reading some moderate comments on sensitive topics like this one.
As you probably know, there are around 6 million french-speaking persons in Quebec. Wich is very small compared to the anglophones in N-America. The government of Quebec promulgated in the 70's different laws to protect the french language in Quebec(french is the language at work if you cie has more than x employees, signs with french double the size of other languages, etc). Altough some of these laws seem ludicrous they did work. Montreal is the biggest city of Quebec. Before the 60's and the 70's, most of the bussiness, publicity, public signs were in English and you couldn't be served in french in boutiques altough the majority of Montrealers were french. Now, Montreal is more of a french city than it was back then. Of course, this power shift has caused some friction between the anglos and the francos. I would tell you that on a day-to-day basis no troubles arise between the two communities. On a political level though...
I think these problems will (hopefully) go away with time, when people will be more bilingual. I think the extremists are unilingual. The bilingual population is often more moderate.
>>Why exactly should there be a law saying when one can and cannot use a particular language in the first place?
Ask the people in Texas. The Americans (forgive me for putting everyone in the same basket) seem to think we are retarded bastards because of our language laws but they freak out when a small border town of Texas makes spanish it's official language. Then government thinks about making english the official language of the state to protect its cityzens against spanish.
Well some of the slashdot readers have been making a fuss about "racist" jokes being on this parody web site. I think a little bit of quebec pop culure is in order here. To put the record straight i am a french-speaking montrealer.
Most of those "racist" comments are in the yahoo's of the world section. All the links pointing to Asia saying "chinois" (chinese) and the links pointing to european countries have names like "maudit francais" (damn french), boches (germans), blokes (english), wops (italian?) and more. At first glance this may seem quite racist, but this is a parody people. Most of these racist comments are from a quebec movie from the 80's called "Elvis Gratton". This movie is a parody of the "average" (more like mediocre) Quebecer. It makes fun of our bad habits. Always looking up to the Americans for economic success (eux autres ils l'ont l'affaire les Amaricains!), feeling inferior to the French (France), our "colourful" spoken french, our political indecision, our habit of putting down "successful" Quebecers and the anti-intellectualism that permeates some levels of our society. "Elvis Gratton" is a parody of the french-speaking population of Quebec and it has become a cult movie in the 90's.
In light of this movie and in the context of Quebec (pop) culture, the "racist" comments have been written so we can laugh of ourselves. An example is the link "tabarnacos". Tabarnacos is the name we give to the flock of quebecers that travel to Florida (or any other sunny destination) to escape winter. It comes from "tabarnak" (f*** is a good first level translation) and the preconceived idea that every spanish word ends in o.
The rest of the topics are quite funny. Under miscellaneous you get "unite canadienne" wich translates into Candian Unity and points to a site dedicated to Quebec independance.At least it's funny for Quebecers and Canadians!
Slashdot Mirror
The "Société de Transport de Montréal" (Montreal Public Transit) has had a public transit planner called "Tous Azimuts" (All directions) on their website since 1997. You can access the planner here.
The planner is a collaboration between STM and the Ecole Polytechnique's Intelligent Transport Research Group (in french, english version is incomplete).
Your commute can be planned different ways. You can choose your start and end points using a map, through a text search (street address or street corner) or with lists of important landmarks (tourist, hospitals, schools, government and everything in the middle). It will plan your commute either with your start time or specifying an arrival time. There are options to minimize walk time, exclude taking the train and what not.
All in all it's pretty complete and extremely useful.
Any medical department that uses
The anonymizer functions in Osirix are a good step towards security but this is only of value when doing research studies over a lot of patients (like population studies). To do diagnostic work, you need to be able to identify the image set to a given patient. You don't send two three sets of images to a doctor saying, image set #1 is patient X so on and so forth. The risk of error is too great. Plus, anyone who has worked with dicom knows it's close to impossible to identify a patient by it's dicom file name (a CT slice would look like CT.1.3.45.123456.20051024.1.100.01) if the metadata has been anonymized. Whatever. Most physicians have a PC on their desk, so the tool is not accessible to them thus negating the "huge processing power" of the Mac.
People don't want to see and accept that the ineffectiveness of the UN on some issues results directly from the unwillingness of the member-countries to do the right thing (or just plain something). And that includes our governements.
The UN is being asked to uphold a higher (humanitarian/moral/ethical) standard than its member-countries. Therein lies the problem.
They represent less than 25% of the population but somehow every damn government we get seems to pander to them and pay them off.
From a statistical point of view, that's already better than pandering to the 9.9% of the population that is Alberta .
They are a have-not province. That alone is ridiculous. That means basically that they're a fcking welfare state, that makes our laws, takes our money and shits on our flag.
Now don't you get too american on us.
You can't get any government job of note without being bi-lingual which is BLATANT DISCRIMINATION!
Well, this worlks both ways. In Quebec, you also have to be bilingual to get a federal job of note even though the anglo population is small. But your frustation is understandable.
We shoulda shipped them back to france over a 100 years ago.
Like when Alberta did not even exist yet?
America got that part right. Speak english or get out.
I don't remember the americans doing that. You just get assimilated into the great melting pot although language laws have been creeping up in the last decades. The British did deport 10 to 12 thousand acadians between 1755-1762.
If the damn easterners vote in another corrupt liberal gov't after this last fiasco, Alberta will separate.
Quebec has been voting Bloc for the last ten years or so. You can't blame us for voting in the liberal government for that last decade. The Rest of Canada has been doing a great job at that without our help. It's not as if we liked Chrétien anyway.
We don't need Canada for anything. We have NO DEBT, billions in the bank, good healthcare and people that want to work.
And none of that is of your doing. I wonder how rich was Alberta before they started investing in the oil fields after the 1947 discovery of oil in Leduc (a french name by the way). Only because you're sitting on an oil field doesn't make you any better at administration or government (see the Middle East, not that i'm comparing Alberta to Saudi Arabia). Give me a pile of cash from oil and i'll make my province the richest.
damn french
You're funny.
Maybe you are talking about the publication ban that was in effect for some days (one or two months ago). That was bizarre for sure. But the ban has been repealed and everything is public again. That's where you are wrong. This has nothing to do with the judicial system. It is NOT a trial. Nobody will get thrown in jail by judge Gomery. Although trials about AdScam have started parallel to the commission. Paul Coffin (involved in AdScam) has pleaded guilty on counts of frauds of up to 1.7 million dollars. He is awaiting his sentencing. That is the judicial system at work, it's not the AdScam Commission's job.
I don't get why Spain is bitching so bad about the refereeing against Korea. If they had longer term memory they would remember they stole the game against Slovenia in the first round. The referee did not call a blatant foul against a slovenian player which would have resulted in a penalty and then the ref issued a penalty for Spain 1 minute later on an excellent slovenian tackle that got the ball but not the player(i guess the theatrical dive by the spanish player helped).
I didn't hear Spain complain about that. If they had lost against Slovenia (which they should have) they wouldn't have qualified for the semis...
What goes around comes around. That's karma my spanish friends.
As for Italy, they got so many chance to put the game away. They lost because they just couldn't capitalize. No evil plan there.
As for Portugal, I can't say. I did not see that game.
____
" Its kinda funny how the Middle East folk that are considered to be our adversaries are celebrating in light of these attacks. One has to ask, where would those nations be without the US? "
So what did the US do lately apart from vetoing every vote at the UN security council that would have sent observers or peace keeping troops in Palestine? Of course, the US gov. tried to get negociations going but does not want to take tough decisions take could anger Israel, it's strategic ally in the middle east.
Don't get me wrong. I do not agree with today's events, it's the worst act of terrorism ever. But comments like the "eye opener" are just dumbing down huge geopolitical issues. Saying "where would they be without us" is just looking at one side of the story. You can't look at the middle east situation without looking at those who had a hand in it (in no particular order and i'm forgetting some im sure): Israel, Palestine, Syria, England, France, Egypt, the US. All these countries had something to do with the development of the region and its conflicts and not one of them is an angel, and as hard as it may sound for some, even the US.
>How many people here lose a third of their salary every year?
Of course you never used a road, the aqueduc system or went to school.
_
It's a fine line between what's ok and what's racist. Some of the content of the parody will offend some people, but i don't think that was the intent.
I was trying to explain some of the cultural background of this parody and in no way making an apology of it.
It's hard to judge something when you don't know the context and it is harder on the internet because local content is often judged by international standards. Some of the posts here have been very harsh on quebec in terms of racism etc. I wanted to put a little balance in all this chaos.
Anyways, it's good reading some moderate comments on sensitive topics like this one.
PedroReish
As you probably know, there are around 6 million french-speaking persons in Quebec. Wich is very small compared to the anglophones in N-America. The government of Quebec promulgated in the 70's different laws to protect the french language in Quebec(french is the language at work if you cie has more than x employees, signs with french double the size of other languages, etc). Altough some of these laws seem ludicrous they did work. Montreal is the biggest city of Quebec. Before the 60's and the 70's, most of the bussiness, publicity, public signs were in English and you couldn't be served in french in boutiques altough the majority of Montrealers were french. Now, Montreal is more of a french city than it was back then. Of course, this power shift has caused some friction between the anglos and the francos. I would tell you that on a day-to-day basis no troubles arise between the two communities. On a political level though...
I think these problems will (hopefully) go away with time, when people will be more bilingual. I think the extremists are unilingual. The bilingual population is often more moderate.
>>Why exactly should there be a law saying when one can and cannot use a particular language in the first place?
Ask the people in Texas. The Americans (forgive me for putting everyone in the same basket) seem to think we are retarded bastards because of our language laws but they freak out when a small border town of Texas makes spanish it's official language. Then government thinks about making english the official language of the state to protect its cityzens against spanish.
Nobody's perfect.
Pedro Reish
Well some of the slashdot readers have been making a fuss about "racist" jokes being on this parody web site. I think a little bit of quebec pop culure is in order here. To put the record straight i am a french-speaking montrealer.
Most of those "racist" comments are in the yahoo's of the world section. All the links pointing to Asia saying "chinois" (chinese) and the links pointing to european countries have names like "maudit francais" (damn french), boches (germans), blokes (english), wops (italian?) and more. At first glance this may seem quite racist, but this is a parody people. Most of these racist comments are from a quebec movie from the 80's called "Elvis Gratton". This movie is a parody of the "average" (more like mediocre) Quebecer. It makes fun of our bad habits. Always looking up to the Americans for economic success (eux autres ils l'ont l'affaire les Amaricains!), feeling inferior to the French (France), our "colourful" spoken french, our political indecision, our habit of putting down "successful" Quebecers and the anti-intellectualism that permeates some levels of our society. "Elvis Gratton" is a parody of the french-speaking population of Quebec and it has become a cult movie in the 90's.
In light of this movie and in the context of Quebec (pop) culture, the "racist" comments have been written so we can laugh of ourselves. An example is the link "tabarnacos". Tabarnacos is the name we give to the flock of quebecers that travel to Florida (or any other sunny destination) to escape winter. It comes from "tabarnak" (f*** is a good first level translation) and the preconceived idea that every spanish word ends in o.
The rest of the topics are quite funny. Under miscellaneous you get "unite canadienne" wich translates into Candian Unity and points to a site dedicated to Quebec independance.At least it's funny for Quebecers and Canadians!
PedroReish
Ain't nobody saying my nick is racist!
>It seems that the higher you go in math the more bland and unapproachable the subject becomes and the more difficult (difficulty!) it becomes.
Yes, higher maths do have a high barrier to entry...