One positive change I noticed is when I'm searching for something related to C#, Google now retains the # symbol in the search suggestions rather than changing my search to C. For me that almost makes up for the missing + change.
I'm generally pretty optimistic but I feel that I should push back against the crowd a little here. Plenty of people say "I'd use it", but who will say "I'll pay for it"?
If you're not in it for the money, are you sure it's the most interesting, inspiring or needed tool/app you could be working on, given that it seems the competition may take care of this need anyway?
I've learnt the hard way that you shouldn't let sunk costs of a project sway your decision to carry on with it.
Monetizing something isn't the only reason to do it. And you're right too; just because you started something doesn't mean you have to finish it either.
That said, I don't know if any of the travel sites or airlines offer any affiliate programs, but that could be an easy way to monetize your site. Show users the best airport options on your end with pricing from your affiliate sites and bounce them to the airline/travel site with your affiliate code in tow if they click on the flight.
As for the idea, I've personally wasted some time scouring for airports on Google maps and then looking up the rates on various travel sites. Sounds like your site could have saved me some time for sure.
Why the down vote? The education bubble is not a global phenomenon, and there are plenty of great working educational models in other countries that the US could look to (even if it would be branded as 'socialism' etc).
I live in Australia, I'm in my late 20's, I've got a pretty good software dev job and I pay about 25% income tax (which includes 37% above $80k). I don't know what the real tax rate would be after factoring in all of the other taxes I pay.
For such a high amount of tax, I enjoy a very high standard of living. A four year software engineering degree cost me about $18k due to our sane education system, and I've never had to worry about whether I can afford decent healthcare or factored health insurance into career decisions.
Our high tax rate is offset by lower costs for universal services, and people generally have more freedom with their life decisions. As such, a substantially lower tax rate or major cut in social services would be disgusting on moral grounds to me, and I feel that your government is screwing its citizens by doing just that.
Depends obviously on the implementation. If it was seemless, didn't need to be configured, and actually worked, I'd pay something like, I dunno, $3.99 a month.
Yes, mainly to reduce bandwidth and download quota usage. Given that I haven't bought anything through browser ads over my ten or so years of web surfing without adblock, I don't feel like leaving ads on will help much (particularly with newer flash based ads that jump around the middle of the screen etc).
I'm not sure how many people living outside of the US would actually consider it to be the 'greatest country on Earth'. I certainly don't want to live there...
Not sure if this is just a troll actually. If so, good job I guess.
While it may be hip on the net to trash our country, if you ask an average person in a developing country where they want to go, they will invariably want to come here. Even in China, who everyone is waiting for with bated breath to overtake America, people want to come here.
Having been to quite a few other first world countries (Europe and Canada) and having relatives there, I would say that the upper middle class life is most definitely not better anywhere else. In America, you can get a nice big house, a nice big car, and have a comfortable life.
For example, I'm in Japan right now, and I miss the central air conditioning (here they have boxed air conditioners in select rooms instead). I miss the ridiculously cheap prices for just about anything I might want to buy. But most of all, while there are certainly advantages to having a convenient public transit system, I have to say that I miss having the wide open road before me and the sweet feeling of metal roaring to go beneath my feet.
Of course, things may be different for the poor, since they certainly have it pretty bad in America, but I am fortunate enough to have never known poverty.
