Airfare Predictions

The prices of plane tickets go up and down more often than a commuter shuttle. But now there’s Farecast.com, which predicts whether the price of your flight is likely to rise or fall before your travel date and tells you to buy or wait. The site achieves its 70 to 75 percent accuracy rate–high for a market so volatile–by using data mining to analyze past flights and determining which factors most affect ticket prices. The service is available on more than 2,000 popular routes. Free;

Dell Customer Files Crafty Lawsuit

The full title is really “Disgruntled Dell customer finds crafty path to lawsuit settlement”. It’s a fun article about how some guy sued Dell for his unresolved computer issues by serving the papers to a Dell shopping mall kiosk.

I wonder if HP has any kiosks? I finished reinstalling my programs and was having the same problems again, infrequently at first, then more and more. HP’s response was, “It must be one of the programs you installed causing the problems. We don’t know which one, and can’t help you.” Essentially, if you do anything other than use the computer in the factory provided state, you’re on your own from a support standpoint when you get an HP.