The U.S. rarely attacks or occupies those that didn't recently attack someone.

I mean, the most recent war with Iraq was something of a stretch, though there was at least some justification because of Iraq not holding up its end of international agreements regarding their nuclear program, which were made at least in part in response to Iraq attacking Kuwait just over a decade earlier. Otherwise, it's pretty much peacekeeping actions in response to U.N. decisions, helping out neighboring countries whose leaders ask, etc.

And when we say "keeps alternate parties off ballots", we don't mean "keeps alternate parties off ballots unless they can get at least n% of eligible voters to sign a petition. In the U.S., any party can get on the ballot, including those who just list one of the major party candidates as their candidate (yes, this is weird) just by getting enough signatures. If you can't get that many signatures, you were never going to win anyway, and all you can do is cause less desirable candidates to win by drawing votes from more desirable candidates.

Mind you, we've evolved into a two-party system that basically gives third parties little chance of actually winning any major election, which is, at least in part, a flaw in the way we do vote counting, but that doesn't prevent them from being on the ballot.

So why is Marriott the one telling them that they have to vacate? That kind of notification should be coming from the property owner or Sonder. And more to the point, it shouldn't matter if Marriott cancels their contract with Sonder, because Sonder got paid already, or should have.

Actually, it does. In fact, that's possibly way worse, because unless they kicked you out to an outside website, Marriott literally took a payment from you.

None of this makes the slightest bit of sense. Either Marriott took the payment, in which case they are duty-bound to fulfill or reverse payment, and in the case where this causes severe harm, are liable for damages from that harm, or Sonder took the payment, in which case Marriott's contract cancellation with Sonder shouldn't affect your stay.

Yeah, you missed the part where I said that doing it with an iPad would be impractical because you'd have to find a way to synchronize two of them. :-)

Sorry, slightly off. I think it's actually 24". It's about the size of two 8.5x11 sheets of paper, and it is widescreen aspect ratio, so it ends up being pretty much the same size as two 13" iPad Pro tablets side by side, with a little extra unused width.

• I've burned out more micro-SD cards than I can count by overuse.
• The micro-SD card contacts are a point of failure when equipment gets moved around. And concert day is exactly when you don't want things to go wrong.
• We'd have to manually sync things like PDF annotations between the micro-SD card and the backup, because there's no network at the rehearsal building.

There's just no way in h*** that I'd trust something that boots off an SD card, much less micro-SD, when a failure would be catastrophic. Way too much risk, all of it concentrated on a day when people are rushing as hard as they can to get things set up in under three hours before the concert starts.

I'd much rather have a generic Android tablet for something like that than a pre-built setup or a custom-built setup. It has pretty much the same advantages as the Pi in terms of being able to write software for it or whatever, but likely fewer opportunities for things to go wrong, because the storage is self-contained.

Just my $0.02.

And at that point, they will be worthless.

If those are your only requirements, even the cheapest Kindle Fire is probably good enough.

You're off by a lot. My setup shows two pages at once, which means it's a 26-inch Android tablet (IIRC).

• To get integrated storage on the main board (for reliability), you'd have to go with something a lot less supported, like Rock Pi, and you'd spend over a hundred bucks just for the board.
• You'd have to add a 26-inch touchscreen monitor for another $250.
• You'd have to spend at least $20 on a case.

So even before the cables, you're at about $370 plus shipping, which is really close to the $400-ish price of the prebuilt Android tablet. That's with Android pre-installed, zero extra setup needed, no flash card to get accidentally dislodged and crash everything, just plug in, connect to a network, set a passcode if desired, and you're done.

Nice to know. It's still $800, and 13-inch Android tablets still start at $190 if you don't mind Android 14. So the Air is only as expensive as 4 bare bones Android tablets instead of 7. It's still massively overpriced if your CPU requirements are minimal.

More than just developers. There's an entire in-app purchase industry that basically doesn't exist because of Apple's monopolization of that market. Their behavior doesn't just affect app developers. It also affects banks that make merchant accounts available. It affects small-company payment processors like Stripe. And so on.

That smells a LOT like BS. I'm just going to eat all this food in your pantry to make sure you don't get food poisoning, and such.

Compare, instead of the nobleman charging rent, the herdsmen do get together and own the commons in common, working out a fair deal between them for sustainability.

As for the NYC situation, if there's a glut, why don't prices fall? Where are the buildings for sale cheap to someone who wants to do a residential conversion?

In all your life, have you ever gotten an email from someone in the middle of a trip saying that your pre-arranged hotel stay is cancelled, and you need to leave the room ASAP? That's not something anybody would ever expect to get legitimately.

Moreover, something like this would be *massively* disruptive to the person's vacation, possibly literally forcing them to live out of their cars, depending on when it happened and how busy the hotels were at the time. Even if you didn't ignore it, if your only option was to leave — especially if you had already paid for the room — you'd be more than just furious. You'd be filing a lawsuit against everyone involved.

No, it absolutely is on Marriott. Either the booking is prepaid, in which case you have paid for the room, and it isn't your fault that Sonder screwed you, or the booking is not prepaid, in which case you're paying Marriott, and it doesn't matter that Sonder screwed Marriott.

I am therefore assuming it is the former, which means you've pre-paid for the room, and you are legitimately entitled to service. Them breaking their contract with Sonder might excuse them for preventing future bookings, or even cancelling bookings beyond a certain date if they are not prepaid, and providing a way for the customer to pay directly, but it does NOT relieve them of responsibility for honoring any existing prepaid bookings, nor any active bookings that are already in progress.

In all likelihood, a judge would conclude that the people staying in the room are a party to an implied contract the moment they entered into the agreement with Sonder, and that Marriott is REQUIRED to honor those bookings under the principle of promissory estoppel. The liability for failing to meet those obligations would absolutely *DWARF* any possible savings from being able to rent the room to someone else. Think "million dollar pain and suffering claim" here. And because Sonder is not the one who kicked those people out of their hotel rooms, that liability falls on either the individual hotels, who would then sue the hotel chain to recover those losses, or directly on the hotel chain, whose only option would be to try to sue the defunct Sonder to recover the cost of those payouts.

Moreover, anyone who experienced this would not care in the slightest whether Sonder and Marriott had a falling out. They would only care that their vacation was ruined because a hotel room that *THEY PAID FOR* was suddenly yanked out from under them, kicking them out into the street. So those people will never trust a Marriott hotel again as long as they live, and they will tell all of their friends not to trust Marriott. This level of breach of trust is how companies die.

What Marriott did is so far from okay, whether you mean ethically, morally, or legally, that IMO, heads should roll at the C-suite level within the next week over it.

Why? Those companies get a discount for bookings. They pass those savings on in different ways. Some use reward points. Others give a discount up front. Why would you deliberately pay more for a hotel booking than you have to?

Like I said, Marriott had an implied contract with you, the person staying in the room, and that became binding on them when you checked into the hotel at the absolute latest, if not the moment you paid for the stay or any portion thereof. What they did is not only unethical, but also blatantly illegal, and whatever executives authorized or were in any way aware of the termination of the contract in this way should be fired for it, if not outright jailed.

It's sad that people think that such flagrant abuse of individuals by giant corporations is okay. It isn't. It is illegal, it is immoral, it is unethical, and it cannot be tolerated in a decent society.

If education was an easy fix, we'd have an educated populace and ClickFix wouldn't be a problem.

The fact is, we live in eternal September. No matter how many people we educate, there's a unending firehose of exploitable n00bs arriving to replace them.

My eyes are not 22 years old anymore. So yeah, I really do need the Pro version.

• Modern sheet music is usually printed on 9" x 12" paper. This is the equivalent of a 15-inch iPad, if Apple actually made such a thing.
• The largest iPad Pro, at 13 inches, is about the size of an 8.5" x 11" piece of paper, give or take. That means in many cases, it is only 92% as big as the original, which makes it noticeably more difficult to read music than at full size.
• The largest non-pro iPad, at 11 inches, is only 82% as big as a standard 8.5" x 11" piece of paper in its smallest dimension, or 74% as big as the original. That's a *lot* smaller.

So even the largest iPad Pro is smaller than I'd like, and is a noticeable compromise, but any standard iPad would be considerably worse.

Also, half the music I play on organ is some poorly scanned public domain music off of IMSLP, and that stuff is hard enough to read even at full page size, even after laser eye surgery. The last thing I would want is a screen that makes things smaller than 8.5" x 11" paper. So from my perspective, anything smaller than the largest iPad Pro model really is a non-starter, and if Apple made a 15-inch tablet, that would be even better.

And I'm guessing you still did not spring for the iPad Pro.

If only they didn't keep sending away people who weren't gang members based on false accusations and thinly veiled racism.

... was how to disable it.