Nope, it's like having a normal, standard cigarette lighter sockey; and having a camera that checks what normal, standard cigarette lighter you insert; and not warning you and just doing nothing when you plug in a normal, standard cigarette lighter that they didn't happen to have in the workshop the day they tested multiple normal, standard cigarette lighters...
UHm so if I wanted to have an android based system for something like controlling my thermostat and give it access to google market, I shouldn't be allowed to because it doesn't have a discrete GPU?!
Umm..... why would you want your thermostat to be supported by the Google Market? Do you want to play Angry Birds every time the temperature rises above 25 degrees C or something...?!?
Not exactly -- it appears to prohibit users of the SDK from forking the platform by any means "including but not limited to" building stuff with the SDK.
No, sorry, you're missing the point. One of the core features of the GPL is that you can't ask anyone downstream to waive their GPL rights. This EULA doesn't just say "you can't use this SDK to fragment the Android platform," it says "if you ever want to use this SDK, you can't fragment this platform either with the SDK or without it."
Yes, the grandfathered clauses say you have the usual rights to the code, but the SDK EULA limits what you can do with it -- hence it's a GPL violation.
Google should be using the Android trademark as leverage to keep handset manufacturers in line, not EULA terms.
OK, true, this is the licensing terms of the SDK, not of the underlying operating system. BUT.... you could still argue that it's against the GPL because of the phrase "including but not limited to". The clause is "you won't fragment the OS, whether or not by using the SDK" -- ie in order to use the SDK you have to forego your rights to modify the OS source code.
Can people sign away that right? Sure -- but by doing so, you're refusing the terms of the GPL... and are no longer allowed to use the GPLed code in Android. But also, by letting you do so/asking you to do so, Google is in breach of the GPL and lose the right to use any GPLed code in the Android system.
Android is now, therefore, rogue software.
Silly Google. They should do the same as dozens of open source projects before them and use trademarks to protect the official version. Keep people in line with the old "you don't want to lose the use of the trademark" whip. Let people fork. Let little Chinese companies make non-Android phones and MP3 players with derivative versions. Who cares? Without the Android brand, it's small-fry.
Don't get too excited. The Met (London Metropolitan Police) frequently use "helmetcams", but whenever a complaint is raised against them, the unit in question is mysteriously faulty....
When the work started to retreive Archimedes's text from the palimpsest, I was a church-going Catholic. I remember a lot of howling about how it was another example of religion destroying science. At the time I responded by pointing out that a lot of us have binned a heck of a lot of books. At least this guy recycled his....
I have since "lost my faith" completely, and nowadays most of us would put our old books in a recycling bin. But I still believe that there's a lot unfair blame heaped on "religion" (the only more nebulous concept than "terror" in "war on terror") for it. All the other copies were abandonned. This one at least still exists, and we have it because of religion, because the book could have easily have been completely lost.
People should be free to be against religion, but the palimpsest has been (ab)used as yet another cheap shot....
I believe that what you're complaining about, is exactly what separates excellent teachers from mediocrities who are looking for tenure. A teacher who is incapable of making up his/her own exercises probably doesn't understand the content that they are teaching well enough to be teaching!
To be fair, it may take a lot of time to create an exercise. So - a good, motivated teacher does two or three such exercises this year, and saves them. Next year, two or three more - and saves those for future use as well. In five years, Teacher has all the textbook examples, plus a library of his own to draw on. Teach isn't restricted to the material that the students find in their textbooks, he has tools at his disposal to help him find the cheats.
The textbooks and workbooks are only aids for a good teacher, not the crutches that most mediocre teachers rely on.
Nice theory. If it's true, so what? The reality of the situation is that we also rely on mediocre teachers, because there simply aren't enough excellent ones to go round.
But is it true? Well, as a teacher, I'm predisposed to say "no", amn't I? So it'll be no surprise that I say "no", then. First up, you haven't even addressed the core problem here -- even if the teacher makes his own tasks, he's still reusing them, and they're still going to be the same for all his students.
But more than that, there are many component skills in education. A good teacher has to be able to motivate his students, and he has to be able to explain things clearly, and to identify any flaws in the student's understanding. These are skills that are partly taught, and partly acquired through time and practice (and in some lucky cases, it's an innate skill). These are vital classroom skills, and they are skills that are a matter of "real time" performance. Pedagogic task design is a very different skill. There's the matter of balancing out the different parts of the subject matter or skills and assuring everything is appropriately tested. I have very often looked at a worksheet after printing and realised I've checked one case three times and missed out two or three important variations. This isn't real-time performance, it's planning, thinking, and even statistical analysis. There are many great comedic writers who are incredibly bland and unfunny in person, and some great comic actors whose writing skills aren't even mediocre; and there is the odd "genius" who can write, act, do stand-up, improvise, and even pull off cracking one-liners in the pub. We don't restrict ourselves to the last category -- we enjoy the whole range.
Similarly, why should someone who is an excellent motivator and very good at explaining things be forced to become a mediocre teacher? Surely we can account for his weaknesses by allowing someone who is an excellent task designer but a poor motivator to provide him with suitable tasks.
And it's not even just a question of task design, but also one of selecting the material. The big time-waster in language teaching (my field) is hunting for suitable texts and sound recordings covering language that's appropriate for your class. None of us can ever do an "excellent" job at it, because while it's a statistical certainty that the "perfect" material exists, it a statistical impossibility that we'll find it. We really need to "outsource" the sourcing to someone who has more time than a classroom teacher, and then share the benefits between thousands of teachers. As it is, we can't find the perfect text, and have to find the "it'll do" text.
The same problem exists for photo manipulation courses: a photo for classroom use has to be an excellent photo or a flawed one with very specific problems. It has to have a good combination of areas of light and shade, high contrast and low contrast areas, and various other features. A teacher has 3 choices spend an inordinately long time looking for one, select a mediocre-but-it'll-do shot, or outsource the selection to an expert in iden
A) But surely risk-taking behaviours are genetically influenced too? Isn't it interfering with natural selection to airlift a mountaineer off after a broken leg? Risk-taking genes aren't sufficiently selected against if we save their arses every time....
B) What about carriers? Are we going to say to deny unemployment benefits to someone with a single recessive gene unless they get their plumbing blocked?
First up -- the further back you go, the less material you're going to find. Secondly -- I work in a university on a Mediterranean island. In the foyer, we have a fossil (well probably a cast -- I didn't ask) dating back thousands of years. It's an adult woman with severe mental and physical disabilities, and the forensic archaeologists reckon she was about 30. Clearly humanity has a long history of compassion for the disabled within the community. Modern bigotry against disabled people would therefore have to be due to the breakdown of "community" in favour of "society". Society is too big -- it breaches Dunbar's number by multiple orders of magnitude. This means that we aren't mentally capable of considering every member of society as a "person". We start to think of people in terms of labels, and disabled people are labelled by their "condition". We show compassion to "people", not to "conditions", and thus the disabled are viewed as a "problem" in modern society. I don't like this.
Says who? What experience are you talking from? I learned Gaelic to the point where I studied through the medium of the language at university level and was offered a job in the team translating one of the world's most popular software suites into Gaelic. I've also lived and worked in France and Spain, where I can get by very well indeed in the local language. I've got another 3 languages half-learned and squirrelled away that I could learn to full fluency in no time at all if I moved to the country in question, and another 3 that I can kind of blag my way in. Plus I'm a professional language teacher.
You should be naming the item in Gaelic or English or whatever language. Or taking the French, German or whatever word and applying it back to the thing to which it refers. Going word to word just takes too much time in the long run.
Then you have missed the whole point of me talking about subconciously understanding. If you give me a meaningful sentence in my native language, I understand it at a conceptual level effortlessly. When I read your post, I don't think about the exact words you're using -- why would I? I understand your meaning without having to break down every single thing you say.
So I am not going word to word -- rather I am going from "concept" to word... it just so happens that I'm using a word to evoke the concept.
Remember that an "item" is not a concept -- there are several layers of abstraction to deal with, as a single "item" can simultaneously embody many concepts. If I hold up a copy of The New York Times, it embodies "reading material", "paper", "newspaper", "broadsheet", and of course "The New York Times". And that last concept isn't just a subconcept of "newspaper", it's also a corporate identity.
Working through all those layers of abstraction is a cognitively demanding task, and I believe that this makes it even harder to achieve automaticity -- so using words is actually far quicker in the long run.
Or at least: I believe that using words is quicker. I have no proof. But no-one has any proof to the contrary -- what you have stated is an opinion -- a belief -- too. It's a commonly held one, but there is no good academic evidence to back it up....
Hell, the whole of Europe was pretty racist anyway. In the UK, the Irish were despised and distrusted (leading to a recent trend to refer to them as "the niggers of Europe" in reference to discrimination). Anti-jewism* and distrust of gypsies were pretty much universal -- the Nazis just amplified and manipulated existing fears.
(* Jews are not the only semites, and DNA analysis suggests the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe are partly European, so not even fully semitic. I therefore reject the term "antisemitism" as antiscientific.)
I was more fascinated by my inability to translate the word "eye" from English to Gaelic.
Longer version: I was using a computer language package designed to teach Scottish Gaelic. I'd done a lot of Gaelic already by this point, and I knew that "eye" was "sùil". In theory. But when the word "eye" came up on the screen, I just couldn't find the word. I could feel a blockage in my head, and I became convinced that my subconcious had fixated on the sound. The same sound can be one of four words: "I", "eye", "aye" and "ay". The first three are all part of my daily language, and the third isn't unheard of in modern Scotland either.
Had I been processing language consciously, I reasoned, I would have been able to recognise the word consciously from the spelling of the word in front of me. The fact that I could not override the sound-based problem suggested very strongly that it was my subconscious that was reading the word.
Yup. But on the other hand, I remember dreams in the run up to my university exams that applied course material nonsensically. I woke up one morning and I was completely baffled about how to sit up, because I felt I needed to "instatiate it" (Prolog terminology) and I couldn't work out how to....
If that's supposed to be an attack, it's pretty wide of the mark, because (funnily enough) I'm against that stuff. I'm a republican (small R, ie "anti-monarchy") and a pacificist (therefore utterly horrified by the sinking of the General Belgrano outside of the combat zone). So don't start trying to shoot me down with that old argument "you're as bad as us argument", because I was talking about the UK the whole time. Notice how I said "our forces".
(But while we're on the topic anyway, the UN did not exist at the time of the establishment of the UK colony in the 19th century. Argentina laid their claim to the islands through the UN, but got nowhere. It was an unelected Argentinian military dictatorship that invaded a territory inhabited by foreign nationals, and no-one needs a UN mandate to protect themselves against invasion -- it's an automatic right. I used to be of the opinion that the Falklands should belong to Argentina, but I now feel that the right to self-determination by the settled population should have the practical power to override any theoretical and historical territorial claimes.)
Well I for one am sick of all this "poppyganda" -- the symbol of remembrance for the dead has been coopted into the Cult of the Holy Liberation Force, as the poppy is tied into supporting troops in ongoing actions overseas.
I'm in favour of the white poppy: it is a statement that we stand in remembrance of the fallen, but with the qualification that we are against ongoing military action. For our forces to invade another country without a UN mandate, bomb, shoot and generally make mincemeat out of a lot of foreign nationals, many of whom aren't involved in any military action, and then to pin poppies to their uniforms is hypocrisy and an insult to the fallen.
But in all English -- UK, US, NZ, Oz and elsewhere -- both uses are acceptable. The classic is the "sports team" example. "France is playing well against Spain" vs "The Spanish team are fighting among themselves". The difference is sometimes an individual choice of style, but other times it reflects a question of agency. The French team is succeeded by acting as a single entity. The Spanish team fighting among themselves is an example of not working as a single entity.
(I am an English teacher and I studied English language to degree level and got a distinction (first class honours). This topic was covered in the course to a reasonable level of detail.)
I think the point is that the banking and turning of atmospheric dogfighting is a heck of a lot easier to deal with for the average game player than having to deal with all the physics of accelerating and decelerating in multiple directions in order to change the direction of motion.
It doesn't matter that I've never flown a real plane -- it applies the same physics in a full 3-dimensions as you experience on a road or bicycle on a road in constrained three dimensions.
And every time I took a course where the book was written by the lecturer, it was one of the most popular books in the world on it's subject, such as "Computers in Communication" by Gordon Brebner (and actually, Brebner was on a sabbatical that year, so it wasn't even "the prof's" book, technically) and Using UML: Software Engineering with Objects and Components, which was one of only two books in the world on UML at the time.
If your prof's good enough to be a published author, for pity's sake don't moan about it -- celebrate the fact that you're studying with a recognised expert!
If you assume 100% markup, then the bookstore pays $50 for a new book, and sells it for $100. Profit = $50.
You are roughly correct for the gross margins but the net profit is nowhere near $50 in your example. (Rent, utilities, staff salaries, etc) Net profit will be quite a lot lower, probably in single digits to low teens usually if the company is profitable.
Yes, correct -- it's the net profit, not the gross.
However, the exact same net/gross difference applies for the second-hand one. His point was that they do still make more on the new book than the second one.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, it's like having a normal, standard cigarette lighter sockey; and having a camera that checks what normal, standard cigarette lighter you insert; and not warning you and just doing nothing when you plug in a normal, standard cigarette lighter that they didn't happen to have in the workshop the day they tested multiple normal, standard cigarette lighters...
I'm sorry, Whoosh is for loser fanboys. Real men used "Myst: the point". It's the superior fork, with a much clearer UI.
UHm so if I wanted to have an android based system for something like controlling my thermostat and give it access to google market, I shouldn't be allowed to because it doesn't have a discrete GPU?!
Umm..... why would you want your thermostat to be supported by the Google Market? Do you want to play Angry Birds every time the temperature rises above 25 degrees C or something...?!?
It would prohibit forking the SDK.
Not exactly -- it appears to prohibit users of the SDK from forking the platform by any means "including but not limited to" building stuff with the SDK.
No, sorry, you're missing the point. One of the core features of the GPL is that you can't ask anyone downstream to waive their GPL rights. This EULA doesn't just say "you can't use this SDK to fragment the Android platform," it says "if you ever want to use this SDK, you can't fragment this platform either with the SDK or without it."
Yes, the grandfathered clauses say you have the usual rights to the code, but the SDK EULA limits what you can do with it -- hence it's a GPL violation.
Google should be using the Android trademark as leverage to keep handset manufacturers in line, not EULA terms.
OK, true, this is the licensing terms of the SDK, not of the underlying operating system. BUT.... you could still argue that it's against the GPL because of the phrase "including but not limited to". The clause is "you won't fragment the OS, whether or not by using the SDK" -- ie in order to use the SDK you have to forego your rights to modify the OS source code.
Can people sign away that right? Sure -- but by doing so, you're refusing the terms of the GPL... and are no longer allowed to use the GPLed code in Android. But also, by letting you do so/asking you to do so, Google is in breach of the GPL and lose the right to use any GPLed code in the Android system.
Android is now, therefore, rogue software.
Silly Google. They should do the same as dozens of open source projects before them and use trademarks to protect the official version. Keep people in line with the old "you don't want to lose the use of the trademark" whip. Let people fork. Let little Chinese companies make non-Android phones and MP3 players with derivative versions. Who cares? Without the Android brand, it's small-fry.
Don't get too excited. The Met (London Metropolitan Police) frequently use "helmetcams", but whenever a complaint is raised against them, the unit in question is mysteriously faulty....
When the work started to retreive Archimedes's text from the palimpsest, I was a church-going Catholic. I remember a lot of howling about how it was another example of religion destroying science. At the time I responded by pointing out that a lot of us have binned a heck of a lot of books. At least this guy recycled his....
I have since "lost my faith" completely, and nowadays most of us would put our old books in a recycling bin. But I still believe that there's a lot unfair blame heaped on "religion" (the only more nebulous concept than "terror" in "war on terror") for it. All the other copies were abandonned. This one at least still exists, and we have it because of religion, because the book could have easily have been completely lost.
People should be free to be against religion, but the palimpsest has been (ab)used as yet another cheap shot....
I believe that what you're complaining about, is exactly what separates excellent teachers from mediocrities who are looking for tenure. A teacher who is incapable of making up his/her own exercises probably doesn't understand the content that they are teaching well enough to be teaching!
To be fair, it may take a lot of time to create an exercise. So - a good, motivated teacher does two or three such exercises this year, and saves them. Next year, two or three more - and saves those for future use as well. In five years, Teacher has all the textbook examples, plus a library of his own to draw on. Teach isn't restricted to the material that the students find in their textbooks, he has tools at his disposal to help him find the cheats.
The textbooks and workbooks are only aids for a good teacher, not the crutches that most mediocre teachers rely on.
Nice theory. If it's true, so what? The reality of the situation is that we also rely on mediocre teachers, because there simply aren't enough excellent ones to go round.
But is it true? Well, as a teacher, I'm predisposed to say "no", amn't I? So it'll be no surprise that I say "no", then. First up, you haven't even addressed the core problem here -- even if the teacher makes his own tasks, he's still reusing them, and they're still going to be the same for all his students.
But more than that, there are many component skills in education. A good teacher has to be able to motivate his students, and he has to be able to explain things clearly, and to identify any flaws in the student's understanding. These are skills that are partly taught, and partly acquired through time and practice (and in some lucky cases, it's an innate skill). These are vital classroom skills, and they are skills that are a matter of "real time" performance. Pedagogic task design is a very different skill. There's the matter of balancing out the different parts of the subject matter or skills and assuring everything is appropriately tested. I have very often looked at a worksheet after printing and realised I've checked one case three times and missed out two or three important variations. This isn't real-time performance, it's planning, thinking, and even statistical analysis. There are many great comedic writers who are incredibly bland and unfunny in person, and some great comic actors whose writing skills aren't even mediocre; and there is the odd "genius" who can write, act, do stand-up, improvise, and even pull off cracking one-liners in the pub. We don't restrict ourselves to the last category -- we enjoy the whole range.
Similarly, why should someone who is an excellent motivator and very good at explaining things be forced to become a mediocre teacher? Surely we can account for his weaknesses by allowing someone who is an excellent task designer but a poor motivator to provide him with suitable tasks.
And it's not even just a question of task design, but also one of selecting the material. The big time-waster in language teaching (my field) is hunting for suitable texts and sound recordings covering language that's appropriate for your class. None of us can ever do an "excellent" job at it, because while it's a statistical certainty that the "perfect" material exists, it a statistical impossibility that we'll find it. We really need to "outsource" the sourcing to someone who has more time than a classroom teacher, and then share the benefits between thousands of teachers. As it is, we can't find the perfect text, and have to find the "it'll do" text.
The same problem exists for photo manipulation courses: a photo for classroom use has to be an excellent photo or a flawed one with very specific problems. It has to have a good combination of areas of light and shade, high contrast and low contrast areas, and various other features. A teacher has 3 choices spend an inordinately long time looking for one, select a mediocre-but-it'll-do shot, or outsource the selection to an expert in iden
A) But surely risk-taking behaviours are genetically influenced too? Isn't it interfering with natural selection to airlift a mountaineer off after a broken leg? Risk-taking genes aren't sufficiently selected against if we save their arses every time....
B) What about carriers? Are we going to say to deny unemployment benefits to someone with a single recessive gene unless they get their plumbing blocked?
First up -- the further back you go, the less material you're going to find. Secondly -- I work in a university on a Mediterranean island. In the foyer, we have a fossil (well probably a cast -- I didn't ask) dating back thousands of years. It's an adult woman with severe mental and physical disabilities, and the forensic archaeologists reckon she was about 30. Clearly humanity has a long history of compassion for the disabled within the community. Modern bigotry against disabled people would therefore have to be due to the breakdown of "community" in favour of "society". Society is too big -- it breaches Dunbar's number by multiple orders of magnitude. This means that we aren't mentally capable of considering every member of society as a "person". We start to think of people in terms of labels, and disabled people are labelled by their "condition". We show compassion to "people", not to "conditions", and thus the disabled are viewed as a "problem" in modern society. I don't like this.
A persistent internet connection isn't always possible when you're travelling... and it's not cheap even when it is.
You shouldn't be doing that.
Says who? What experience are you talking from? I learned Gaelic to the point where I studied through the medium of the language at university level and was offered a job in the team translating one of the world's most popular software suites into Gaelic. I've also lived and worked in France and Spain, where I can get by very well indeed in the local language. I've got another 3 languages half-learned and squirrelled away that I could learn to full fluency in no time at all if I moved to the country in question, and another 3 that I can kind of blag my way in. Plus I'm a professional language teacher.
You should be naming the item in Gaelic or English or whatever language. Or taking the French, German or whatever word and applying it back to the thing to which it refers. Going word to word just takes too much time in the long run.
Then you have missed the whole point of me talking about subconciously understanding. If you give me a meaningful sentence in my native language, I understand it at a conceptual level effortlessly. When I read your post, I don't think about the exact words you're using -- why would I? I understand your meaning without having to break down every single thing you say.
So I am not going word to word -- rather I am going from "concept" to word... it just so happens that I'm using a word to evoke the concept.
Remember that an "item" is not a concept -- there are several layers of abstraction to deal with, as a single "item" can simultaneously embody many concepts. If I hold up a copy of The New York Times, it embodies "reading material", "paper", "newspaper", "broadsheet", and of course "The New York Times". And that last concept isn't just a subconcept of "newspaper", it's also a corporate identity.
Working through all those layers of abstraction is a cognitively demanding task, and I believe that this makes it even harder to achieve automaticity -- so using words is actually far quicker in the long run.
Or at least: I believe that using words is quicker. I have no proof. But no-one has any proof to the contrary -- what you have stated is an opinion -- a belief -- too. It's a commonly held one, but there is no good academic evidence to back it up....
Hell, the whole of Europe was pretty racist anyway. In the UK, the Irish were despised and distrusted (leading to a recent trend to refer to them as "the niggers of Europe" in reference to discrimination). Anti-jewism* and distrust of gypsies were pretty much universal -- the Nazis just amplified and manipulated existing fears.
(* Jews are not the only semites, and DNA analysis suggests the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe are partly European, so not even fully semitic. I therefore reject the term "antisemitism" as antiscientific.)
I was more fascinated by my inability to translate the word "eye" from English to Gaelic.
Longer version: I was using a computer language package designed to teach Scottish Gaelic. I'd done a lot of Gaelic already by this point, and I knew that "eye" was "sùil". In theory. But when the word "eye" came up on the screen, I just couldn't find the word. I could feel a blockage in my head, and I became convinced that my subconcious had fixated on the sound. The same sound can be one of four words: "I", "eye", "aye" and "ay". The first three are all part of my daily language, and the third isn't unheard of in modern Scotland either.
Had I been processing language consciously, I reasoned, I would have been able to recognise the word consciously from the spelling of the word in front of me. The fact that I could not override the sound-based problem suggested very strongly that it was my subconscious that was reading the word.
Yup. But on the other hand, I remember dreams in the run up to my university exams that applied course material nonsensically. I woke up one morning and I was completely baffled about how to sit up, because I felt I needed to "instatiate it" (Prolog terminology) and I couldn't work out how to....
If that's supposed to be an attack, it's pretty wide of the mark, because (funnily enough) I'm against that stuff. I'm a republican (small R, ie "anti-monarchy") and a pacificist (therefore utterly horrified by the sinking of the General Belgrano outside of the combat zone). So don't start trying to shoot me down with that old argument "you're as bad as us argument", because I was talking about the UK the whole time. Notice how I said "our forces".
(But while we're on the topic anyway, the UN did not exist at the time of the establishment of the UK colony in the 19th century. Argentina laid their claim to the islands through the UN, but got nowhere. It was an unelected Argentinian military dictatorship that invaded a territory inhabited by foreign nationals, and no-one needs a UN mandate to protect themselves against invasion -- it's an automatic right. I used to be of the opinion that the Falklands should belong to Argentina, but I now feel that the right to self-determination by the settled population should have the practical power to override any theoretical and historical territorial claimes.)
Well I for one am sick of all this "poppyganda" -- the symbol of remembrance for the dead has been coopted into the Cult of the Holy Liberation Force, as the poppy is tied into supporting troops in ongoing actions overseas.
I'm in favour of the white poppy: it is a statement that we stand in remembrance of the fallen, but with the qualification that we are against ongoing military action. For our forces to invade another country without a UN mandate, bomb, shoot and generally make mincemeat out of a lot of foreign nationals, many of whom aren't involved in any military action, and then to pin poppies to their uniforms is hypocrisy and an insult to the fallen.
He might have spotted the reference if it wasn't the middle of the night and he wasn't wearing shades....
But in all English -- UK, US, NZ, Oz and elsewhere -- both uses are acceptable. The classic is the "sports team" example. "France is playing well against Spain" vs "The Spanish team are fighting among themselves". The difference is sometimes an individual choice of style, but other times it reflects a question of agency. The French team is succeeded by acting as a single entity. The Spanish team fighting among themselves is an example of not working as a single entity.
(I am an English teacher and I studied English language to degree level and got a distinction (first class honours). This topic was covered in the course to a reasonable level of detail.)
I think the point is that the banking and turning of atmospheric dogfighting is a heck of a lot easier to deal with for the average game player than having to deal with all the physics of accelerating and decelerating in multiple directions in order to change the direction of motion.
It doesn't matter that I've never flown a real plane -- it applies the same physics in a full 3-dimensions as you experience on a road or bicycle on a road in constrained three dimensions.
OK, then it's hybrid freemium/loss leader business model.
But unlike new books, used books can't be bought on sale-or-return... (No, it's not a simple matter at all.)
And every time I took a course where the book was written by the lecturer, it was one of the most popular books in the world on it's subject, such as "Computers in Communication" by Gordon Brebner (and actually, Brebner was on a sabbatical that year, so it wasn't even "the prof's" book, technically) and Using UML: Software Engineering with Objects and Components, which was one of only two books in the world on UML at the time.
If your prof's good enough to be a published author, for pity's sake don't moan about it -- celebrate the fact that you're studying with a recognised expert!
If you assume 100% markup, then the bookstore pays $50 for a new book, and sells it for $100. Profit = $50.
You are roughly correct for the gross margins but the net profit is nowhere near $50 in your example. (Rent, utilities, staff salaries, etc) Net profit will be quite a lot lower, probably in single digits to low teens usually if the company is profitable.
Yes, correct -- it's the net profit, not the gross.
However, the exact same net/gross difference applies for the second-hand one. His point was that they do still make more on the new book than the second one.