I currently work at Manwin and we are looking for mathematicians to help optimise ad revenue. http://manwinjobs.com/ for more, it would probably be in the Montreal office.

Recently a consumer interest show in Quebec did a report on private cord banks.
One of the big sticking point is that the window of actual usefulness is relatively short as there is only a small quantity of stem cells available, and usually once someone is over 50kg there is not enough stem cells for treatment.

Here is the link in french
http://www.radio-canada.ca/emissions/la_facture/2011-2012/Reportage.asp?idDoc=208988

There is an 8 year warranty on the pack.

As for the cost of electricity, too much data is missing, but it would be less then 350$ in any case

Well let's do more math. I'm driving an Altima, that costed about 29k new.

40k - 29k = 11k for gasoline.
I'm spending about 60$ per week on gasoline, so that comes out to 3120$ per year.
I always lease for 4 years ( I just don't have the time to always fix the car ) so that comes to 12480$ overall.
The average price I pay for gas is probably around 1.28$/liter. The prices in QC tend to follow a sin wave of +/- 10c on a graph, trending up or down. Not only that, but the supply for Montreal comes from the Brent barrel, which tends to be more expensive then regular oil.

Most of my commute is (return) well within the 35 miles EV range, and from what I understand the heating is electric.

This is before the subsidy in QC for the Volt (not sure how much, but afaik it's in the 5 to 7k range).

So in my case it would make sense to switch to a Volt or even a LEAF once the lease on my current car finishes.

One of the problem with the Prius in Montreal is that you need heating 6 months in a year. Last I heard, the heater was still powered through the gas engine which means that I'm using fuel most of time. Also having to use gas to go about 30kph is retarded.

There is a lot of copyright management companies out there that do the work for the *AA. There is no provided way to validate a specific takedown. Say you run a site like MegaUpload and you receive a takedown notice from a gmail account. Could you really beleive in the email as being done in good faith? What about all those companies that don't even take the time to publish SPF records.

As reported by MegaUpload, 70% of fortune 500 companies had accounts linked to them. How would you sort out what is infringing from what isn't? It could happen that works in progress and final works get distributed internally that way.

What about remixes?

As for just having a bunch of regexes, Hotfile lawsuits against Warner show how it can fail (see: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/09/hotfile-turns-tables-accusing-warner-brothers-of-dmca-abuse.ars )

There is also the the matter of volume. In the indictment, it says that Carpathia (a hosting provided) provided 25PB to megaupload. This would be a lot of files to verify. And even then you could make a lot of false positive and a lot of false negative. It is not specified how much data capacity was at Leaseweb, however the amount of servers was similar.

As for deleting the files, the DMCA doesn't require that. It says:

"(iii) upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness, acts expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material;"

Removing the link in question would disable access to the material, which is what MegaUpload did.

I usually open up the cover, power it the drive up so it spins (so a platter is exposed), use a dremel with a grinder attachment to damage the first layer. This will already make it unrecoverable.

After that I take the bunch of platters and bring it to a scrap metal dealer so it can be recycled / smelted.

Instead of spending so much money on the hopeless white elephant of online voting, they should just give out 50 to 100$ cash at the polling station to everyone who actually votes.

Even an online voting system where the whole software stack is open source, hardware is standard commodity hardware, with feeds of the votes cast provided live to all political parties, and with the software stack and hardware specs provided to the parties and independent observers, it would still be impossible to protect against the gazillions of issues on the voter's computers that could still affect the results.

Even though it looks like one issue, these issues reach deep into the other more mainstream issues.
Just in Quebec, faster generics can save at least 3 billion$ (that's a pessimistic estimate) on the cost of providing the publicly funded drug plan. That's all money that can be reused elsewhere.

It will be our own SSL CA, initially the launch will only support OpenVPN, but other technologies might be added later if we're confident that they are secure.

I've started the canvassing to be the candidate in Laval - Les Îles
I figured that I can't just wait for someone else to do it for me.

I've just opened a twitter account if anyone cares to follow me.
http://twitter.com/stephanebakhos