because A) your luggage B) where did we lose this person C) we now have to delay the flight to make sure our count is correct. D) is there a security risk to the plane.
A) your luggage This trick doesn't work with checked bags, since airlines tend to check bags through to the final destination. Hidden-city travel is a strictly carry-on-only tactic.
B) where did we lose this person They know where they lost you, since they scanned your boarding pass when you boarded the first flight, and they didn't scan your boarding pass at the gate for the connecting flight.
C) we now have to delay the flight to make sure our count is correct This is the only potentially obnoxious consequence--some airlines may delay a flight by a few minutes to allow a "lost" passenger to get to the gate. But if an airline has a takeoff slot they're not going to give it up to recover one wayward traveller. And they do a headcount of passengers on board before every flight anyway--if it matches the count they get from the scanned boarding passes, they're good to go.
D) is there a security risk to the plane Nope. They know that you and your carry-on were on the first plane, but that makes you no more dangerous to that aircraft than any other passenger. They know that you're not on the second plane, since you and your carry-on never boarded. They know you don't have a checked bag in the hold.
I have no credit score because I've never felt like spending more than I have.
I have a credit score - a rather good one - but I've never spent more than I have. One does not have to carry debt to have a credit history.
Remember that a person is also being extended short-term credit even when they are paying off their balance in full every statement period. And that's not just the case with use of credit cards (which remain the easiest - and sometimes only - way to make purchases or payments in some situations). Thing about utilities like gas, water, electricity, cable, telephone, (non-prepaid) cell, internet...if you're billed at the end of the month after you've used the service, then you're being extended credit--and in many cases the status of those accounts will be reflected in your credit report.
"Very few outside the US think US conservative media outlets are reputable"
And one significant reason for this is the relentless and universal portrayal of US conservative media outlets as disreputable by the US Leftist media.
I assume that your belief is informed by the restrained and nuanced portrayal of the US Leftist media by US conservative outlets. Ahem. (Incidentally, the "conservative" outlets seem to spend a lot more time talking about the "liberals" than vice versa.)
The non-US world has access to Fox just as readily as to MSNBC. In assessing reliability and trustworthiness, they've adjusted their Bayesian priors based on continuously supplied evidence about which networks give the most airtime to hypocritical, self-serving, lying sacks of shit.
How much would it have cost if NASA did it themselves ? I am also wondering if there isn't enough competition yet for this kind of thing.
It's an interesting question--what does it really mean for NASA to "do it themselves"? NASA has a very long history of contracting out the development and construction of launch vehicles. Remember, for the Apollo program the Command and Service Module was built by North American Aviation (as was the Saturn V second stage), the Lunar Module was built by Grumman, the Saturn V first stage (S-1C) was built by Boeing, the third stage was built by Douglas, the F-1 and J-2 main engines were designed and built by Rocketdyne.... I don't think anyone would dispute that the Apollo Program was a NASA project, but a great deal of the design and construction work was still contracted out.
The difference now is that NASA gets to choose its contractors after they've demonstrated their capabilities to build and fly the hardware. The "old" way was to decide in advance who got to have the monopoly and pay them to develop the technology; this "new" way involves choosing among members of a small oligopoly who already have the capability mostly off-the-shelf. There are tradeoffs - financial and planning - to either approach.
A widescreen aspect ratio doesn't have to be dumb unless the people who design apps and interfaces refuse to make good use of the hardware.
My Windows taskbar has been vertical, running up the right side of my screen, for probably a decade.
One of several reasons that Opera was my web browser of choice for several years was its native support for a vertical tab bar. I could have dozens of tabs open, and be able to see all of them, and read their titles. It was tremendously useful, while it lasted.
PowerPoint has started putting context-sensitive tools and controls on the right side of the screen instead of just at the top, and the slide thumbnails on the left.
Chrome now makes the status bar at the bottom of the window invisible - freeing up an extra line of space in the window - unless it has something important to display (e.g. when you're hovering over a link and want to see the URL).
Reading/comparing/referring to two documents side-by-side is pretty darned useful in a number of different contexts. (Of course then each application window has to have a sensible layout for portrait-oriented display, as well....)
Yes, it's an added burden for developers to have to consider how their application might be used on displays with different aspect ratios. That doesn't mean that they shouldn't do so, and especially not that they should fail to consider how to present their product on the most common format today.
Boat and plane navigation is reasonably similar - it's 'head to waypoint', not 'navigate through twisty curves'.
Actually...the article points out that a major source of avoidable expense and delays is collisions that take place in narrow and congested waterways--and often with inanimate, stationary objects. Inadvertent groundings, collisions with moored vessels, difficulties in constricted canals and locks. Insurance is a big cost.
That word...I do not think it means what you think it means.
Providing stable, long-term funding so that established, high-profile researchers can bring their projects and research programs to Canada doesn't really look like a sinecure; they're not getting paid to do nothing. The $350,000 or $1 million per year funding for these positions isn't handed over as a lavish salary; it's support to allow researchers to hire staff, buy equipment, and maintain their labs. It's a fairly long-term arrangement as these things go - the NIH's R01 grants contemplate up to 5 years, and many sources of money are 3 or fewer years, or one-offs - but it's not ludicrous.
The Vancouver SkyTrain system isn't a monorail, though; it's a fully grade-separated light-rail rapid transit system.
All three lines run on two rails, with an adjacent electrified third rail for power. Two of the lines use a linear induction motor drive, which requires an additional row of aluminum plates running between the two primary tracks. The third, newest line uses conventional electric motor propulsion.
...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".
It's hard to say what his out-of-pocket costs might be. One of his business ventures is a consultancy called Legal Engineering; Perens is the CEO. From his website:
...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.
If it took this long to find a case of this and write a story about it.
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.
Of course, if you save $2 a day every working day, then you pocket about $500 per year. Okay, but not an earth-shattering sum. (You could spend the $2 bucks buying coffee for your boss every morning, and get a bigger raise each year....)
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.
...pushed average prices for new double-wides up more than 20 percent in five years, putting them out of reach...
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.
...pay for the bottom fifth of earners is stagnating. Even after a modest pickup over the past two years, those households have seen their income fall by 9 percent since 2000, to $12,943 in 2016, based on inflation-adjusted Census Bureau data.
(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.
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...)
Even if the study has flaws, it makes sense in economic theory.... This is taught in introductory economics courses...
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.
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.
No commercial airline flight is 24 hours. There used to be a 19 hour one for a Singapore to New York flight but that's no longer in service.
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.
No upper management. And no board. Now that is a scary thought. How would companies run without people in charge? We need someone there don't we?
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?
Like I said, one can fiddle with the numbers to swing the accounting a fair bit in one direction or the other. As you've demonstrated, if one makes optimistic assumptions about the age of the donor and maximizes the number of recipients by assuming a strict one-organ-per recipient (include just one lung at a time, and no multiple-organ transplants--bear in mind that the vast majority of pancreas transplants are actually pancreas-kidney, for example) and 100% organ recovery and transplantation, one can choose to make the math give you the result you're looking for.
It's very sticky if you want to score tissues that aren't necessarily lifesaving or for which artificial or animal alternative sources exist. (It's ethically problematic to suggest, for example, that more dead motorcyclists are a good thing because it will improve the supply of cadaveric ACL replacements, especially given that many patients could instead receive an autograft of their own tissue.)
It doesn't help that you're neglecting the last and most important part of my comment acknowledging that a very substantial fraction of potential organs won't be converted into actual transplants: helmetless motorcyclists who die too far from care or too quickly for their organs to be recovered; ones who have communicable diseases, malignancies, or other medical conditions that exclude them from donation; and so forth. (Going forward, helmet laws will only be suspended if you're over 40, free of hepatitis and HIV infection, have recently been screened for cancer, and are biking in an area with excellent ambulance service within 1 hour of a major transplant center. Hmmm...) Each dead motorcyclist is only "worth" 60 years multiplied by the fraction of viable organ recoveries--which probably comes out to well under 50%.
Finally, we're using "accounting" in a couple of different ways, here. I was using it purely to refer to life-years saved or lost. If we actually want to look at dollars and cents, it gets really ugly really fast. In the United States, the total billable costs for a heart transplant (including 30 days of pre-operative screening and prep, organ procurement, the transplant operation itself, and the subsequent 6-month period of recovery and rehab) comes out to about a million bucks. A single lung or a liver transplant are both well over half a million apiece. Kidneys are well clear of the quarter million mark.
From a purely financial perspective, it's waaaaay less costly to just let the motorcyclist survive and the potential transplant recipients die in a few months or a year, rather than let them be brutally expensive surgeries with steep and ongoing maintenance costs. Amortizing that heart transplant over the likely life of the recipient (or the transplanted organ) runs a hundred grand plus per year. Oh, and don't forget the cost of care and rehab for all those brain-damaged motorcyclists who don't manage to actually die from their head injuries....
I've said for years that helmet laws probably costs lives.
Maybe, but not necessarily. It depends a lot on your accounting. A 20-year-old dumbass male might expect to have around 60 years ahead of him, most of which will be time spent in good health.
His kidneys will probably last about 10 years in each of their recipients, so count 20 years "saved" total.
The median survival time for heart transplant recipients is also about 10 years.
Liver transplants tend to do particularly well; the median survival is closer to 20 years.
Lungs are a lot pickier; the median is closer to 5 years, but is steadily improving.
Add that all up, and we're just shy of breaking even (55 life-years for the recipients, versus 60 life-years lost by the motorcyclist). On can fiddle with the parameters to swing things a bit either way. In some cases, the liver can be split into two lobes; the larger right lobe goes to an adult and the smaller left lobe to a child recipient. Some recipients only need a single-lung transplant, so one pair of lungs can go to two recipients. And we're getting better at keeping transplanted organs functional for longer. And, of course, some dead motorcyclists are 40-year-olds having a mid-life crisis.
On the flip side, some recipients may need multiple organs (heart-lung, heart-liver, etc.).
More important, not all organs will be viable--not every helmet-less fatality leads to a full complement of usable donor organs. For reasons of underlying disease or quirks of the donor's physiology, it may not be possible to transplant some organs. The fatal motorcycle accident may damage some other organs beyond repair. The accident may even occur in a location or under circumstances where none of the organs can be recovered for donation. That is going to tip the scales a long way against the "benefit" of more brain-dead motorcyclists.
Frankly, we have more than enough cadavers now; what we need is for more of them to donate their organs. Presumed consent (an opt-out rather than opt-in) system would be far more effective than suspending helmet laws.
...a half-hour travel time between Stockholm and Helsinki, which is the equivalent of about 300 miles.
"The equivalent of about 300 miles"? What does that mean?
Oh, it means "about 300 miles". Or even "a distance of about 300 miles". Right. But this is a 'technical' topic, so we need to use more and bigger words. The best words.
Unless there's some sort of weird space-time physical equivalence principle the authors are alluding to, in which case a half hour is actually 300 miles long.
Slashdot Mirror
because A) your luggage B) where did we lose this person C) we now have to delay the flight to make sure our count is correct. D) is there a security risk to the plane.
A) your luggage This trick doesn't work with checked bags, since airlines tend to check bags through to the final destination. Hidden-city travel is a strictly carry-on-only tactic.
B) where did we lose this person They know where they lost you, since they scanned your boarding pass when you boarded the first flight, and they didn't scan your boarding pass at the gate for the connecting flight.
C) we now have to delay the flight to make sure our count is correct This is the only potentially obnoxious consequence--some airlines may delay a flight by a few minutes to allow a "lost" passenger to get to the gate. But if an airline has a takeoff slot they're not going to give it up to recover one wayward traveller. And they do a headcount of passengers on board before every flight anyway--if it matches the count they get from the scanned boarding passes, they're good to go.
D) is there a security risk to the plane Nope. They know that you and your carry-on were on the first plane, but that makes you no more dangerous to that aircraft than any other passenger. They know that you're not on the second plane, since you and your carry-on never boarded. They know you don't have a checked bag in the hold.
I have no credit score because I've never felt like spending more than I have.
I have a credit score - a rather good one - but I've never spent more than I have. One does not have to carry debt to have a credit history.
Remember that a person is also being extended short-term credit even when they are paying off their balance in full every statement period. And that's not just the case with use of credit cards (which remain the easiest - and sometimes only - way to make purchases or payments in some situations). Thing about utilities like gas, water, electricity, cable, telephone, (non-prepaid) cell, internet...if you're billed at the end of the month after you've used the service, then you're being extended credit--and in many cases the status of those accounts will be reflected in your credit report.
I'm pretty sure I read this story in 1952: The Martian Way , by Isaac Asimov.
...Except it was Mars that needed water, not Dubai.
...And they got their icebergs from Saturn's rings, not Antarctica.
But aside from that, totally the same plan.
"Very few outside the US think US conservative media outlets are reputable"
And one significant reason for this is the relentless and universal portrayal of US conservative media outlets as disreputable by the US Leftist media.
I assume that your belief is informed by the restrained and nuanced portrayal of the US Leftist media by US conservative outlets. Ahem. (Incidentally, the "conservative" outlets seem to spend a lot more time talking about the "liberals" than vice versa.)
The non-US world has access to Fox just as readily as to MSNBC. In assessing reliability and trustworthiness, they've adjusted their Bayesian priors based on continuously supplied evidence about which networks give the most airtime to hypocritical, self-serving, lying sacks of shit.
The figure in that article places Infowars as being just center-right, and the Koch-supported Reason straddles the left-right centerline.
If you draw your line that way, you're probably the sort of person who complains about reality's liberal bias.
It is also the county's biggest taxpayer, paying $56 million in the 2017-2018 tax year.
On 2017 net income of $48.35 billion ($48350 million), that's a tax rate of 0.116%. Tell me again why we needed another corporate tax rate cut....
How much would it have cost if NASA did it themselves ? I am also wondering if there isn't enough competition yet for this kind of thing.
It's an interesting question--what does it really mean for NASA to "do it themselves"? NASA has a very long history of contracting out the development and construction of launch vehicles. Remember, for the Apollo program the Command and Service Module was built by North American Aviation (as was the Saturn V second stage), the Lunar Module was built by Grumman, the Saturn V first stage (S-1C) was built by Boeing, the third stage was built by Douglas, the F-1 and J-2 main engines were designed and built by Rocketdyne.... I don't think anyone would dispute that the Apollo Program was a NASA project, but a great deal of the design and construction work was still contracted out.
The difference now is that NASA gets to choose its contractors after they've demonstrated their capabilities to build and fly the hardware. The "old" way was to decide in advance who got to have the monopoly and pay them to develop the technology; this "new" way involves choosing among members of a small oligopoly who already have the capability mostly off-the-shelf. There are tradeoffs - financial and planning - to either approach.
My Windows taskbar has been vertical, running up the right side of my screen, for probably a decade.
One of several reasons that Opera was my web browser of choice for several years was its native support for a vertical tab bar. I could have dozens of tabs open, and be able to see all of them, and read their titles. It was tremendously useful, while it lasted.
PowerPoint has started putting context-sensitive tools and controls on the right side of the screen instead of just at the top, and the slide thumbnails on the left.
Chrome now makes the status bar at the bottom of the window invisible - freeing up an extra line of space in the window - unless it has something important to display (e.g. when you're hovering over a link and want to see the URL).
Reading/comparing/referring to two documents side-by-side is pretty darned useful in a number of different contexts. (Of course then each application window has to have a sensible layout for portrait-oriented display, as well....)
Yes, it's an added burden for developers to have to consider how their application might be used on displays with different aspect ratios. That doesn't mean that they shouldn't do so, and especially not that they should fail to consider how to present their product on the most common format today.
Boat and plane navigation is reasonably similar - it's 'head to waypoint', not 'navigate through twisty curves'.
Actually...the article points out that a major source of avoidable expense and delays is collisions that take place in narrow and congested waterways--and often with inanimate, stationary objects. Inadvertent groundings, collisions with moored vessels, difficulties in constricted canals and locks. Insurance is a big cost.
That word...I do not think it means what you think it means.
Providing stable, long-term funding so that established, high-profile researchers can bring their projects and research programs to Canada doesn't really look like a sinecure; they're not getting paid to do nothing. The $350,000 or $1 million per year funding for these positions isn't handed over as a lavish salary; it's support to allow researchers to hire staff, buy equipment, and maintain their labs. It's a fairly long-term arrangement as these things go - the NIH's R01 grants contemplate up to 5 years, and many sources of money are 3 or fewer years, or one-offs - but it's not ludicrous.
The Vancouver SkyTrain system isn't a monorail, though; it's a fully grade-separated light-rail rapid transit system.
All three lines run on two rails, with an adjacent electrified third rail for power. Two of the lines use a linear induction motor drive, which requires an additional row of aluminum plates running between the two primary tracks. The third, newest line uses conventional electric motor propulsion.
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".
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.
If it took this long to find a case of this and write a story about it.
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.
...pushed average prices for new double-wides up more than 20 percent in five years, putting them out of reach...
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.
...pay for the bottom fifth of earners is stagnating. Even after a modest pickup over the past two years, those households have seen their income fall by 9 percent since 2000, to $12,943 in 2016, based on inflation-adjusted Census Bureau data.
(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.
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...)
Even if the study has flaws, it makes sense in economic theory. ... This is taught in introductory economics courses...
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.
YMMV
I see what you did there.
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.
No commercial airline flight is 24 hours. There used to be a 19 hour one for a Singapore to New York flight but that's no longer in service.
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.
No upper management. And no board. Now that is a scary thought. How would companies run without people in charge? We need someone there don't we?
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?
Like I said, one can fiddle with the numbers to swing the accounting a fair bit in one direction or the other. As you've demonstrated, if one makes optimistic assumptions about the age of the donor and maximizes the number of recipients by assuming a strict one-organ-per recipient (include just one lung at a time, and no multiple-organ transplants--bear in mind that the vast majority of pancreas transplants are actually pancreas-kidney, for example) and 100% organ recovery and transplantation, one can choose to make the math give you the result you're looking for.
It's very sticky if you want to score tissues that aren't necessarily lifesaving or for which artificial or animal alternative sources exist. (It's ethically problematic to suggest, for example, that more dead motorcyclists are a good thing because it will improve the supply of cadaveric ACL replacements, especially given that many patients could instead receive an autograft of their own tissue.)
It doesn't help that you're neglecting the last and most important part of my comment acknowledging that a very substantial fraction of potential organs won't be converted into actual transplants: helmetless motorcyclists who die too far from care or too quickly for their organs to be recovered; ones who have communicable diseases, malignancies, or other medical conditions that exclude them from donation; and so forth. (Going forward, helmet laws will only be suspended if you're over 40, free of hepatitis and HIV infection, have recently been screened for cancer, and are biking in an area with excellent ambulance service within 1 hour of a major transplant center. Hmmm...) Each dead motorcyclist is only "worth" 60 years multiplied by the fraction of viable organ recoveries--which probably comes out to well under 50%.
Finally, we're using "accounting" in a couple of different ways, here. I was using it purely to refer to life-years saved or lost. If we actually want to look at dollars and cents, it gets really ugly really fast. In the United States, the total billable costs for a heart transplant (including 30 days of pre-operative screening and prep, organ procurement, the transplant operation itself, and the subsequent 6-month period of recovery and rehab) comes out to about a million bucks. A single lung or a liver transplant are both well over half a million apiece. Kidneys are well clear of the quarter million mark.
From a purely financial perspective, it's waaaaay less costly to just let the motorcyclist survive and the potential transplant recipients die in a few months or a year, rather than let them be brutally expensive surgeries with steep and ongoing maintenance costs. Amortizing that heart transplant over the likely life of the recipient (or the transplanted organ) runs a hundred grand plus per year. Oh, and don't forget the cost of care and rehab for all those brain-damaged motorcyclists who don't manage to actually die from their head injuries....
I've said for years that helmet laws probably costs lives.
Maybe, but not necessarily. It depends a lot on your accounting. A 20-year-old dumbass male might expect to have around 60 years ahead of him, most of which will be time spent in good health.
His kidneys will probably last about 10 years in each of their recipients, so count 20 years "saved" total.
The median survival time for heart transplant recipients is also about 10 years.
Liver transplants tend to do particularly well; the median survival is closer to 20 years.
Lungs are a lot pickier; the median is closer to 5 years, but is steadily improving.
Add that all up, and we're just shy of breaking even (55 life-years for the recipients, versus 60 life-years lost by the motorcyclist). On can fiddle with the parameters to swing things a bit either way. In some cases, the liver can be split into two lobes; the larger right lobe goes to an adult and the smaller left lobe to a child recipient. Some recipients only need a single-lung transplant, so one pair of lungs can go to two recipients. And we're getting better at keeping transplanted organs functional for longer. And, of course, some dead motorcyclists are 40-year-olds having a mid-life crisis.
On the flip side, some recipients may need multiple organs (heart-lung, heart-liver, etc.).
More important, not all organs will be viable--not every helmet-less fatality leads to a full complement of usable donor organs. For reasons of underlying disease or quirks of the donor's physiology, it may not be possible to transplant some organs. The fatal motorcycle accident may damage some other organs beyond repair. The accident may even occur in a location or under circumstances where none of the organs can be recovered for donation. That is going to tip the scales a long way against the "benefit" of more brain-dead motorcyclists.
Frankly, we have more than enough cadavers now; what we need is for more of them to donate their organs. Presumed consent (an opt-out rather than opt-in) system would be far more effective than suspending helmet laws.
...a half-hour travel time between Stockholm and Helsinki, which is the equivalent of about 300 miles.
"The equivalent of about 300 miles"? What does that mean?
Oh, it means "about 300 miles". Or even "a distance of about 300 miles". Right. But this is a 'technical' topic, so we need to use more and bigger words. The best words.
Unless there's some sort of weird space-time physical equivalence principle the authors are alluding to, in which case a half hour is actually 300 miles long.