Up until today, I was under the impression that the options for someone wanting raw Canadian road data were quite limited. Yahoo and Google maps are great, but their terms of use prevent creative and novel use (it's against their terms of use create a derived work). OpenStreetMap is free of these restrictions, but its coverage can be kind of spotty ( Read more... )

I guess I deserve every one of them for being such a smart ass.

Date: Thu, 1 Nov 2007 10:07:57 -0300
From: William Lachance
To: Air Canada
Subject: Re: Air Canada - Booking confirmation

On 10/31/07, Air Canada wrote:
>
>
>
> ****** PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS E-MAIL ******

Ok.

--
William Lachance
wrlach@gmail.com

I just posted an article to advogato on the proper use of assertions. Perhaps I'm wrongheaded, but I truly believe that the software I use on a regular basis would be of much higher quality if people actually read and used the advice contained therein. If you want to comment, but don't have an advogato account, you may do so here.

apenwarr: Your bit of economic theory is interesting, but I'm still pretty certain the key driver here is supply and demand, not price optimization. See, for example, the testimony by Paul Sankey before the U.S. congress on the subject: "Gouging is an Idiotic Explanation"The facts are simple: domestic demand in the U.S. for gasoline (refined crude ( Read more... )

apenwarr: The lack of informed discussion on Global Warming is frustrating. Even granting the fact that temperature has been increasing over the last few decades, I haven't yet heard a convincing explanation on why this is necessarily due to carbon emissions as opposed to any number of other things. It seems like a probable explanation (CO2 is a ( Read more... )

After announcing Pathfinder a week or so ago, it occurred to me that most people might not know what it's good for (or at least the subtleties thereof). I certainly wouldn't have before I started working on this project, and the information on its more esoteric features is sort of dispersed across the Internet (if available at all). I figured I ( Read more... )

What I've been working onFor the past while, I've been telling people that I've been working on some "security software" using WvStreams. Unfortunately, I couldn't say exactly what at the time. But that's all over now. Allow me to introduce PathFinder, the next-generation solution for certificate path validation. To my knowledge, Pathfinder is the ( Read more... )

After hearing about Zero Footprint several times in the press (they've inked deals with both Air Canada and the city of Toronto), I decided to check out their site the other day. After considerable digging, I could find absolutely no documentation on the economic or scientific model they were using for calculating an individual's carbon footprint. ( Read more... )

Just read through the study that the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives published on "gas price gouging". As usual, the blamed party is the oil companies, who apparently are pricing gasoline in excess of the cost of production. What's missing in the report is any analysis of SUPPLY. You don't need to be an energy economist to realize that ( Read more... )

Avery just posted a pretty interesting article comparing the cultural institutions of the United States with those of France. The conclusion that he draws is that the states is an "unstable" society while France is a "flow" society. While I haven't spent enough time in Europe to really comment on the latter (although I suspect he may be somewhat ( Read more... )