I mean maybe, in theory, but how often do prices actually drop on hotels? Prices are usually based on occupancy, so unless somebody cancels a block of a hundred rooms or something, this seems unlikely to make a meaningful difference in hotel revenue.

Meanwhile, if this had happened five years ago, it would have meant not going on trips for me, because traveling with my dad in his last couple of years had a decent risk of having to cancel.

There are people for whom being able to cancel a trip without significant penalty is the only thing that makes travel possible. And if hotels are more concerned with maybe losing a few bucks in rare circumstances than they are with whether the elderly and disabled get to have a vacation at all, then F**K those hotels. They aren't worth doing business with.

Ideally, it should be a hair space (because em dashes in web fonts are borderline illegible without it), but Slashdot does not support Unicode, and   gets silently swallowed by Slashdot's HTML parser. Besides, we all know that AP style is the one true style, and it demands space.

No, an en dash is used for numerical ranges and certain compound hyphentions, not for parentheticals.

Could you please make no em dashes the default so that the 1% of us who actually know how to use em dashes correctly — professional writers and language nerds and so on — don't keep getting accused of using ChatGPT?

Thanks,
The aforementioned

My guess is that the finance team got wind of it, and they're tightening their belt.

If they do end up being that two-faced and there's a Democrat-led Senate and House, that's how you get a 15-person Supreme Court.

They did. From the summary:

I don't know how to read this in any other way besides that Marriott contacted these people and told them that they no longer had reservations.

I also don't know how to read this in any other way besides that Marriott's cancellation of the contract with Sonder was directly responsible for this, which must either mean that the stay was at a Marriott hotel contracted through Sonder, or that it was at a third-party hotel and Marriott decided to not pay Sonder for the rest of that person's stay. In either case, Marriott is at least partially responsible, and in the latter case, may even be guilty of tortious interference with that person's stay.

iPhone is FREEEEEEEEE!

These are basically websites that are wrapped by an app. These developers can currently get most of what Apple provides without using Apple tech, and keep 97% of the profits. Why would they want to keep only 85% for such minimal benefits? For that matter, why are they providing an app when a website will do?

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.