...I just log in and book with my account and it's automatically associated) because you always get a better deal if you're a member. I don't really understand why...

If one books through a third-party/reseller/OTA, the hotel pays a hefty commission - typically on the order of 20% - to the OTA. If I pay $100 through Expedia or Booking.com, the hotel only gets $80. If I book direct with the hotel for the Special Members-Only Price of $90, the hotel gets to keep all $90. In addition, they get my contact info and track my spending habits for marketing purposes, and they encourage me to check their website first in the future. Between those factors, then, they want customers to sign up and book directly, and they really want it to become an ingrained habit.

Perhaps the biggest reason for the special member pricing, though, is that many agreements between hotels and OTAs contain "rate parity" clauses that prevent hotels from offering rates lower than the OTA's price to the general public. Creating a members-only rate lets hotels circumvent these sorts of restrictions, as OTA contracts generally allow rate-parity exceptions for offers to members of "closed groups".

...Bruce Perens is the bridge between lawyers and engineers, helping one to understand the other. He instructs engineers in how to comply with legal requirements and how to deal with intellectual property issues in their own work, and produces clarity for attorneys who are working on issues of computer software.

He may well have had attorneys with suitable expertise already on retainer. Even if not, the marketing value of being on the "right" side of a dispute like this could have tremendous promotional value for him, his brand, and his company--the sort of advertising that no amount of money could buy.

I'm not saying that it's fair that Perens was out any time, money, or inconvenience, or that Grsecurity wasn't trying to abuse the system by filing a spurious lawsuit. But this isn't an instance of a lone blogger's David bravely duking it out against all odds against a giant corporate Goliath. Perens definitely has the knowledge, contacts, and resources to effectively respond to this sort of threat, and is almost certainly one of the dumbest possible choices Grsecurity could have made to sue. Of all possible defendants, Perens is among those with the most to gain from successfully defending against this flimsy suit.

Two things:

Hopefully it is rare, because hopefully most people followed instructions and stayed safe. And some of those who didn't probably managed to be lucky near-misses. (Ahem, Mr. President.)

It actually wasn't very long at all for a scientific article to come out. Publication of peer-reviewed journal articles has a much more measured pace. Consider--the eclipse was on 21 August, and the paper briefly discusses the results of a six-week follow-up visit. (That would be around 2 October.) The paper was accepted for publication on 18 October, a couple of weeks later. That's a fairly brisk turnaround for manuscript submission, peer review, final revisions, and editorial acceptance. The next few weeks get eaten up by layout and proofreading, which brings us to the final version of the paper going live this week.

Kevin O'Leary didn't get rich scrimping on coffee. He got rich selling a software company, and stayed rich by marketing himself. Not buying coffee from coffee shops is part of building the "Kevin O'Leary" brand mystique, not a meaningful way to build substantial wealth. When he gets to the office, he'll have assistants who are happy to brew a pot for him.

I'm having trouble with the math here. Over five years, you'd expect about a 10 percent increase due to inflation. So the "average" double-wide is only up about 10% over inflation. And that's looking at the average--are all mobile homes more expensive, or did the distribution of motor home sales just shift? Remember, the average goes up if the share of sales of high-end homes goes up, even if the low-end homes remain the same price. We're not told what the liveable-but-not-fancy homes cost, or how (or if!) that has changed with time.

Really, though, the more important statistic is buried in the linked article.

(At least they inflation-adjusted that figure.) The real problem is that the poor - including the working poor and retirees - are getting poorer. Even if housing weren't getting more expensive, they still wouldn't be able to afford to keep up.

the god damned 'job creators' that we have been worshipping really don't have our needs in mind; they could not care less if we all starved and died on the streets.

If not caring for others is a flaw in the morality of 'job creators', then it's a flaw in 99% of humanity. In practically any given question (automotive or workplace safety; educational quality be it primary, secondary or post-secondary; health services; commute times; etc) the only time people actually think about the problem and seek the "best" choice is when their own outcome [or that of close friends/family] is clearly affected.

The reason I have inverted commas in that last sentence is the critical factor here: only the scant minority of choices are ones where either you expect that everyone will want the same thing (a safe workplace, for example), or the only practical way to have certain choices (safe driving conditions) is to restrict what choices other people make. For all others, there isn't a singular, universally agreed-upon answer which everyone desires. If you're a parent, the "best" house might be in a excellent school district; a retiree won't care that much about schools, but might prefer being close to their regular places of activity instead; for someone with limited mobility, the primary factor might be finding one which doesn't have any stairs. Jobs are another prime example of this: most people may want to maximize their pay, but perhaps you'd be willing to take a job which pays only 90% of the "going market rate" if it maximizes your personal/family time by guaranteeing limited overtime, or the location cuts your commute time in half.

So whenever I hear something like "Job creators don't care about employee pay" I have to ask: why should they-- or anybody else for that matter? Unlike the choice of a single person to drive a hazardous vehicle making the roads less safe for everyone, that same singular person taking a lower-paying job (for any reason whatsoever!) doesn't prevent you from affording your bills, or negotiating for the sort of salary you desire. [If enough people are underpaid that it does become a problem, then it's the job of unions -- not the business owners -- to fix the problem.] If you claim that other people need to care about the outcome of your decisions, you are in fact claiming that everyone needs to care about the outcome of every decision -- which either assumes a priori that only one outcome is permitted, or erects a psychologically unreachable standard.

My congratulations to Julie Payette on her appointment to her new post. Bear in mind she isn't the first Canadian astronaut to assume a role as a senior government official, either.

Since 2015, former astronaut Marc Garneau has served as the federal Minister of Transportation--which seems just a little bit on the nose.

(That compares rather favorably, incidentally, to the 1995 appointment of Al Palladini - a used-car salesman - to serve as Ontario's Minister of Transportation...)

It "makes sense" in much the same way that it would "make sense" for Formula One cars to have narrow tires. Introductory physics courses tell us that friction is linearly proportional to normal force and the coefficient of static friction; changing the area in contact with the road doesn't matter.

But wait--that's nonsense. Real cows aren't spherical. The simple first-year physics model breaks down quite readily when one encounters more complex physical systems.

For some reason, though, there are people who like to think of economic systems as absurdly ideal transactions in a vacuum and then pretend that they understand what they're talking about, or that they can draw broad and meaningful conclusions. To take one aspect of the Seattle situation--what does the ECON 101 model have to say about demand when we increase the number of potential customers with money at the same time as we increase labor costs? Where's your pat "intuitive sense" now? A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

I see what you did there.

You Cannot Give Offense, you can only take it.

Fuck you

Certainly -- before or after dinner?

$55,000 is much cheaper than hiring developers to do it. It's akin to companies having a contest for a new marketing logo, and the winner get's their work used. The compensation is a line on a resume.

It's worth pointing out that XKCD's pretense that four random words are easy to memorize was based on them choosing four easy to memorize words. If I just have /usr/share/dict/words pull up random words for me, here's the first five passwords it comes up with:

It's a good thing that XKCD's Munro doesn't choose four random words from /usr/share/dict/words then, isn't it? The cartoon shows 11 bits of entropy associated with each word. That means a dictionary size of 2^11: about 2000 words. (In contrast, a typical /words file might have a hundred thousand entries. That's fifty-fold larger, so you get about 5.5 extra bits per word, but would indeed lead to the utterly useless output you've shown.)

The General Service List contains the top 2000ish most-often used words in the English language. I used the version compiled in 1995 and found here, mostly because it was the first version I could grab online. Pulling random words from the first 2000 entries, the four words I got (on my first three passes) were:
competition behave exact toward
experiment miserable there lord
spare page circle rabbit

Right out of the box, it's not what I would call a disaster, though a few of the words are a bit cumbersome, length-wise. (For reference, your /usr/share/dict/words selection only contains one word - "weave" - from the GSL.) If you started from, say, the top 5000 words, you could probably cut it down to a 2000-word list where every entry was non-obscure, had between 4 and 8 letters (the average word in the GSL has a length of 5.8 letters), avoided difficult-to-spell words, and eliminated similar-sounding words.

The Mashable report quoted in the Slashdot summary uses a slightly different phrasing from the original LinkedIn report. The LinkedIn article actually says "after having spent 24 hours cramped in an economy seat on Qatar Airways".

Poking around a bit on Kayak, I see a bunch of Qatar Airways itineraries from Lagos, Nigeria (LOS) to JFK that involve three segments, with stops in Doha, Qatar (DOH) and western Europe (CDG, FCO, MAN, etc.). Total travel time is 27 or 28 hours, with nominal times in flight adding up to about 23 hours. Add an hour in a holding pattern somewhere (or queued up for takeoff on a taxiway, or waiting for a gate to open up), and the poor guy could easily have spent 24 hours in an economy-class seat on his way to JFK. Yeah, the phrasing's a bit sneaky since he would have had a couple of short "intermissions" to stretch his legs...but still, if we figure he arrived at LOS two hours before his flight, he would have been stuck in the international air transport system for better (worse?) than thirty hours all told.

Well, the Swedish approach was to look at the individual job responsibilities of the CEO, and determine if all of those functions could readily be absorbed by other people or bodies within the company (where they weren't already overlapping - and sometimes conflicting - anyway). So if you want to go ahead and do the systematic hard work, there's nothing that prevents you from figuring out which positions could (or should) be eliminated, with their responsibilities reallocated to other staff.

Of course, it's waaaaay easier to just go the observational humor route and declare "Hey, everything is so much better in the office when the boss is away, amiright? Let's get rid of 'em all!" So, kudos for that contribution.

More seriously, I see a couple of obvious gaps that you would need to fill, right off the top. For one, you need to develop some mechanism for larger-scale strategic direction. In the Swedish company discussed, that role was filled by the company's board of directors. For another, you need to have some sort of framework for handling civil and criminal liability issues when someone eventually screws up. Where does the buck stop, ethically and legally?