hipmunk.com is the best out there. It shows whether a flight has wifi or not, it has a price graph for flexible flights, and their interface is just the best I've found.
Happens to be the way to deal with procrastination and analysis paralysis as well. It's easier to just do something and then course correct, than to try to calculate the best possible path before even starting out.
Neither is the US population. Let's compare apples to apples for a minute. WA + OR ~= Sweden:
WA+OR population: 10.6 m, size: 170,000 sq mi
Sweden population: 9.5 m, size: 173,860 sq mi
Now, I think that's a pretty fair comparison. The roads can be pretty terrible in Washington and Oregon from my experience. That may be because federal money for roads goes to other less dense states, but these proportions hold up fairly well nationwide too. I think it's just a matter of less public funding, it's that simple.
Oh yes, I've come to understand that these things are very valuable to her, but it's difficult for me to imagine. She's very cheap, unless it's something she cares very much about. When she's researching those things she's a huge optimizer, and I'm the biggest satisficer you can find. I think optimizers tend to be less happy though. For her engagement ring she spent months researching (wouldn't let me do it) and finally we bought a $7k ring. When she got it she was devastated that the ring didn't make her happier than it did. The good thing is, she's learning; I think she's realizing that optimizing everything doesn't actually lead to happiness.
I have never even given flatware or towels any thought. They both have minimal impact on my life and thus don't need optimization. My laptop has a great impact on my life, so I think it's reasonable to spend time researching what you need and paying for the best if that makes sense. My wife is a terrible premature optimizer. She pinches pennies on the most obscure things like toilet paper, just to turn around and spend hundreds on a bag. My view is that I would cut that bag out of my purchases, and then it doesn't matter if I optimize my toilet paper or not.
For a few years? Hardly. Actually living in another country is extremely different from traveling for a few months. You don't know much about a country until you live your everyday life there, shop at the grocery stores, participate in cultural events, go to the doctor, pay bills, rent an apartment, go through the immigration process, have a JOB etc. You don't truly know a place by just traveling there.
Yes, but they're acting as if this is a permanent disadvantage of this device. And again, I think it's a bit harsh to judge before it's even been released. If there were like 10 apps I'd be worried, but there are around 5000 apps already, and Win 8 will be running on plenty of desktops and laptops as well as tablets, so I think this is not really a fair critique quite just yet.
Tell me why we shouldn't demand devices that we can change, do whatever we please with? Why shouldn't we demand that computing devices has an override, or some way of running whatever software the owner wants it to? What would happen to Apple if we had these kinds of regulations? Would the iphone never have happened? I doubt it.
Businesses don't have any rights on their own, only the rights we give to them. When the interests of companies goes against the interests of the people, then we regulate. It's that simple. I'm against regulations that impose overhead for companies without good reason. Regulation to PREVENT companies from expending energy to actively keep users from doing what they want is not overhead. Forcing companies to keep their system somewhat open won't hurt them as much as it would benefit the world.
I'd say for a number of reasons they're different. Plumbing, while probably useful at some point in your life, is just one activity. Programming is NOT just one thing. It's closer to woodshop (which I hope is still in schools...). Another difference I think is that you can create something bigger with it, something that scales. Last but not least, I think it's inherently fun and fulfilling to create something out of nothing, but I'll admit that it's not for everyone. But neither is woodshop or gym class. I'd also say that teaching some programming along side math could have some benefits to learning and motivation.
I think the Monty Hall Problem is also extremely misleading in its formulation.
Take Wikipedia's formulation for example:
Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1 [but the door is not opened], and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?
What's not being explicitly said here is that the host knows what's behind the doors (this part is said) but that he also always chooses the goat. With that information, it's pretty clear that when the contestant first made the choice of a door, the probability of getting the right one was 1/3. The probability that the right door is among the other two is 2/3. NOW however, the host removes the one of (or the only) wrong option among those two doors. The thing to realize is that the host opening one of those doors does not give us ANY new information that would change the distribution. Therefore, the other door that the contestant didn't pick must have the probability 2/3.
My guess is that they use a probabilistic model that, for every tap, incorporates the probability distributions P('a'| X), ..., P('z' | X), X=(x,y) probably a normal distribution. Then assuming they have data on how likely a specific word is, you'd estimate the posterior probability distribution over all the possible words with that many characters. Pick the top most probable words as auto correct options.
I'm sure there's more to it than that, but I assume that's the basic idea.
Why is it "simply impossible" to provide healthcare for all? I can name many counter examples of countries that can and do. Have you made the calculation based on finite resources in the world and the size of the world population that it's simply impossible? Even if it would be impossible by today's technological standards to provide care to all, that doesn't mean it's true for the future when there might be additional productivity gains, preventing disease etc.
Or many people would just go "meh, guess I'll use something else then". Facebook is just not that big of a deal to most people, it's pretty easy to provide a similar service. Facebook knows this and wouldn't take a chance alienating the whole European population, many of whom are already itching to switch to something else, just looking for an excuse.
I'm almost as scared about privacy breaches in the private sector. I read a while back about Target sending out ads for pregnancy related products to a teenage girl. Their data crunching algorithms had picked up on the fact that she was pregnant before she even told her parents.