I know of no state that allows first cousin marriages where it is possible for there to be off-spring. Please cite for any state you think does.
Humm, a google search on "first cousin marriage" turns up
Where it is stated:
26 states allow first cousin marriages; most people can marry their cousin in the US.
No European country prohibits marriage between first cousins. It is also legal throughout Canada and Mexico to marry your cousin. The U.S. is the only western country with cousin marriage restrictions.
It is estimated that 20 percent of all couples worldwide are first cousins.
So I guess Germany is NOT wrong insofar as their policy seems to have maintained a higher number of bookstores - even if you do not particularly see that as being advantageous.
Oh, come on, what kind of bogus argument is that? When we're talking about the supposed importance of independent physical bookstores, what matters is not the selection of all bookstores "taken together", but the selection of my local bookstore, and, in my experience, that's even smaller at non-chain stores than in "generic" chain stores.
That might be what you are talking about, but many of the people supporting these types of pricing systems are talking about the system as a whole rather than just your small neighbourhood bookstore. If there is only one maga-store that gains a monopoly people are concerned that there will be all sorts of negatives:
- have to go a long distance to get ANY book since the mega-store only has a few big boxes - many small concerns go out of business eliminating many decent paying jobs and careers and replacing them with fewer lower paying and less fulfilling careers. - decreased numbers of local stores can be seen as a negative in and of itself changing the character of neighbourhoods in a negative way (perhaps worries that it will somhow signal less importance of literacy, destroy the "bookstore neighbourhood", give less status to old-bespectacled antiquarians, what-ever) - decisions about what types of books to order, advertise, and support would be concentrated in fewer individuals resulting in a shrinkage of the total number of different types of books being produced
Online, I can get anything I want anywhere, and I really don't care whether it's from a big or a small seller, I just want the lowest price.
If there is only one bookstore, you CANNOT get anything you want, you can only get the things sold by that one bookstore. A worry is that the one bookstore will not buy all the books that the society wants available, so these types of regulations work to avoid that type of outcome. I do not know how effective they actually are, but the aim is not on-its-face stupid.
And, of course, those arguments fall completely apart for e-books anyway.
Certainly e-books throw a wrench into things - at least in this type of analysis. Are paper-book stores "important" enough to a society to have extensive interventions in the market? Perhaps. Pricing e-books high enough would certainly allow paper books to more effectively compete so that is one possible intervention. Perhaps the marginal cost of entry for e-books means that anyone can easily produce and sell them so the worry of a monoculture of booksellers is overblown? Perhaps paper-books are so inefficient in comparison that we should not support them at all? Perhaps print-on-demand systems are affordable enough that the neighbourhood arguments are less weighty since every copy-and-print-shop will soon have a book-printer? Perhaps the old-bespectacled antiquarians lobby is going to finally see its iron-fisted influence over political discourse loosened and we will all better off for it?
Where in Germany are you located? I had thought (but cannot find any references of course) that locations such as Germany with this type of fixed pricing in fact did have a much higher number of bookstores per capita than those places (like the US) that do not have such systems.
It may be true that the large chains end up with increased profits, but it is possible that the small stores can stay in business in contrast to where there is no "price fixing" when the smaller places go out of business. Certainly excessive profits to some players is a societal negative, but it might be balanced by the perceived benefits.
There is an argument that the continued existence of a healthy ecosystem of independent local bookstores and multiple publishers is a benefit to the members of the society that outweighs the increased costs. In this particular case I do not know the details of how well that ecosystem has been protected and how much of a benefit it is (both quite difficult to quantify I would imagine) nor the details of the increased costs.
I don't think anyone suggests that one intentionally infect members of the studies.
It's not like the flu is exceptionally dangerous....
I am not so sure. According to http://www.wrongdiagnosis.com/f/flu/deaths.htm the 7th leading cause of death in 1999 and 2000 was "pneumonia/influenza" (CDC), 63,730 annual deaths for influenza and pneumonia (NVSR Sep 2001); estimated 20,000 deaths from flu (NIAID) An estimated 100,000 hospitalizations and about 20,000 deaths occur each year from the flu or its complications. (Source: excerpt from Focus On The Flu: NIAID)... average of 20,000 to 40,000 deaths per year. (Source: excerpt from Microbes in Sickness and in Health - Publications, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases: NIAID)... in the United States more than 100,000 people are hospitalized and more than 20,000 people die from the flu and its complications every year. (Source: excerpt from The Flu, NIAID Fact Sheet: NIAID)... In an average year, flu leads to about 20,000 deaths nationwide and many more hospitalizations. (Source: excerpt from What to Do About the Flu - Age Page - Health Information: NIA)
The regular flue kills off a lot of people, and puts a lot of people in the hospital each year.
It seems like a pretty obvious move - with the advent of so many free non-MS alternatives I think Microsoft has a legitimate fear that they will become just one of the options in the "office suite" space, rather than the de facto standard. Getting their "free" offering onto as many desktops as possible MIGHT protect that status.
The open source alternatives however are hard to "compete" against, since they are generally going to continue to live even with a vanishingly small "market share" - as long as enough technical types are willing to support them.
I think in the long term, MS and others are not going to be able to justify to the consumer the high prices for their offerings that they have been able to up to now, and that low cost (perhaps free/ad supported) is the only way they are going to be able to maintain any level of profitability and stay in business.
A lot of "graphic literature" (read: Comic Books) are available in scanned format - there is even a (slightly) specialized file format and software designed to view this particular sort of item - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_Book_Archive_file
The various torrent trackers list pretty complete archives of titles and character appearances for at least some of the more popular "mainstream" super-hero comics.
As with music and movies, it is not clear how much traffic in these types of files impacts the sales of new or used issues. It might have essentially no effect - it might be a net positive to the IP owner, or it might result in decreased sales of new issues. I certainly do not know.
The original poster didn't explicitly mention an Ethernet connection which I think you really want on any long-term purchase, and I find duplex printing very very useful - enough so that I keep lusting after new printers even though our Apple LW 1600/600 probably will never completely die.
I think it depends on the district, or at least the state. Some go by a calendar year, starting in January, some by a school year, starting in September. By the calendar year cutoff, January births should be oldest, thus most advantaged. By a school-year cutoff, January births are about the middle of the age-range for the class. Neither of these cutoffs would seem to disadvantage greatly those with January birthdays.
My eight year old son has recently been enjoying this type of thing in the English language. He asked me this one: "What's the difference between chopped meat and pea soup?" - "Most people can chop meat, but nobody can pee soup."
"If the prices are what I remember they were back in 2002-2003, though....."
He's looking to deploy a whole bunch of machines and Mac OS X Server retails for $500 US, that does not seem to be a whole bunch. (That's for the "unlimited clients" version, I think the "10-simultaneous logons" client is about half that price and may well be able to service this particular need - I can't quite recall exactly how they count that "10" value, my memory was that it was unlikely to be reached in even very large roll outs.)
I have some small bits of experience in using OS X Server in a small office - and for that situation it runs quite nicely on a macMini which is pretty cost-effective, even for keeping a duplicate machine available for disaster recovery.
In the US and Canada at least, my understanding is that unless you have it written into the contract of sale, you cannot take any appliances or light fixtures when you sell a house - one might think that light bulbs might fall under this category. Thus, the new owners might have the ability to sue for the cost of replacements.
With that said, if we were to move in the near future, I would probably go to the basement and take the big box of incandescent bulbs and swap out as many CFLs with those as I had.
Taking the hooks off the walls and filling the holes might be considered a service.
Well, it is a lot more expensive than the current huge number of years, and it might be easier to get passed politically if it starts at $1, but you could start at $10, and that would up your numbers by quite a bit, and let's face it, even the copyright to Steamboat Willy is probably not worth a Billion Dollars, even to Disney.
Increasing by a factor of 1024 every ten years gets pretty expensive pretty quickly. If this scheme were in place, only a vanishingly small number of items would have copyright beyond 30 years.
Naw, make the first 10 years free, the next year $1 and double the price each year after that in perpetuity - or some system like that.
With a centralized registration system it should be easy to see if something has been extended, with a geometric increase in price everything eventually gets into the public domain, but any one item can be kept "private" as long as the owner is able to pay for it. And it can generate some public money too in terms of the registration fees.
We have gotten a few Mega Bloks small kits recently, and their quality seems to have improved a fair bit - I think recent court cases about their ability to legally be inter-working with Lego-brand stuff have helped them gain investors and profitable marketing deals - I think they have done some Pixar and Marvel Comics sets - mostly in the larger "duplo" format as I recall.
Google seems to think at http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/764806.html with some links to sources that there are about 100 billion dead people - even the lower estimates put the dead population well above the live population.
Oh, and shouldn't that be "...there are more people..." ?
If you do not report all your income, the income tax people can hit you with tax evasion penalties - isn't that how they got Capone? Spend significantly more than you earn and the tax folk will come calling - asking about your un-reported income.
That's part of what "money laundering" is all about.
Places that deal in cash, and large volume of merchandise. Scope out the local supermarket or big box retailer some time while standing in line - there is a lot of cash changing hands. Heck, a busy doughnut shop or fast-food place probably pulls in something like $10 per customer, with lots and lots of customers that can add up pretty quick. Get someone on the inside to let you know when the tills are full and before they get dropped into the time-lock safe and you can probably clear quite a bit of cash, and cash is very easy to fence....
But is that 5k gross or net? Getting a good price on one stolen laptop, maybe not that hard via ebay or craigslist, but on a whole pile of them - if you are not really careful, you are going to get caught. How much work is that going to take? Once you start figuring out how many hours you are taking in cruising around town trying to unload this stuff, and the actual prices you manage to get, the numbers start to look much less attractive.
My father-in-law's place was recently broken into and within a few days someone called him to ask about the admin password to the computer that was stolen. The fellow had purchased it off of Craigslist, and upon learning it was stolen, was willing to visit the police station to ID the apartment where he had picked it up. Doing a better job of staying anonomyous when making such a sale again takes more time and effort.
Crime can pay, but to do so I think takes a lot more effort than most criminals put into it, and those that do put in the effort could make similar returns from straight legit labour.
"This is an important part of NII and it is simply wrong to ignore it."
I don't really have an opinion on this particular issue, but it is very true that we often, often, often ignore important parts of things we are teaching in order to assist the learning of something. From their first year at school, we essentially tell kids "What you learned last year is not completely correct - now we will work on a understanding of the concepts." Deciding which bits to "put off till later" and deciding how to avoid those bits with the minimum amount of future confusion and the maximum amount of "foundation laying" is one of the challenges of education.
The confusion between force and energy is common (doesn't the Force-concept-inventory have a bunch of questions on this type of thing? - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept_inventory but maybe it doesn't touch on energy at all and my memory is a bit bad) but it is often hidden within student's mixing of the concepts and the language at the same time. Both forces and energies have the ability to "make things move" in some sense, so it isn't a completely idiotic idea to mix them together in one's mental models.
My favourite quote from Physics Education Research is from Aarons who in the intro to "A guide to Introductory Physics Teaching" said something like "Research has firmly established that an engaging, exciting, well given lecture has little to no impact on student outcomes - which is not to say your lectures should be dull and boring." In my opinion, the text for a course has a pretty small overall impact on the learning of the student (which of course is no reason to choose a "bad" text) so choosing an affordable text that is acceptable over a slightly "better" text that is not affordable might make sense. The Light and Matter texts were at one point available as LaTeX files which I have in the past used to create supplementary texts with only a few of the L&M chapters to give a different approach for a few second year courses that have a review of 1st year materials - and the problems are nice too.
Slashdot Mirror
I know of no state that allows first cousin marriages where it is possible for there to be off-spring. Please cite for any state you think does.
Humm, a google search on "first cousin marriage" turns up
Where it is stated:
The list at http://www.cousincouples.com/?page=states seems to show a number of states that allow unrestricted marriage between first cousins: AK, AL, CA, CO, CT, FL, GA, HI, MD, MA, NJ, NM, NY, NC, RI, SC, TN, VT, VA and Washington DC, with links to the appropriate state laws on marriage and incest at http://www.cousincouples.com/info/statelaws.htm
So I guess Germany is NOT wrong insofar as their policy seems to have maintained a higher number of bookstores - even if you do not particularly see that as being advantageous.
Oh, come on, what kind of bogus argument is that? When we're talking about the supposed importance of independent physical bookstores, what matters is not the selection of all bookstores "taken together", but the selection of my local bookstore, and, in my experience, that's even smaller at non-chain stores than in "generic" chain stores.
That might be what you are talking about, but many of the people supporting these types of pricing systems are talking about the system as a whole rather than just your small neighbourhood bookstore. If there is only one maga-store that gains a monopoly people are concerned that there will be all sorts of negatives:
- have to go a long distance to get ANY book since the mega-store only has a few big boxes
- many small concerns go out of business eliminating many decent paying jobs and careers and replacing them with fewer lower paying and less fulfilling careers.
- decreased numbers of local stores can be seen as a negative in and of itself changing the character of neighbourhoods in a negative way (perhaps worries that it will somhow signal less importance of literacy, destroy the "bookstore neighbourhood", give less status to old-bespectacled antiquarians, what-ever)
- decisions about what types of books to order, advertise, and support would be concentrated in fewer individuals resulting in a shrinkage of the total number of different types of books being produced
Online, I can get anything I want anywhere, and I really don't care whether it's from a big or a small seller, I just want the lowest price.
If there is only one bookstore, you CANNOT get anything you want, you can only get the things sold by that one bookstore. A worry is that the one bookstore will not buy all the books that the society wants available, so these types of regulations work to avoid that type of outcome. I do not know how effective they actually are, but the aim is not on-its-face stupid.
And, of course, those arguments fall completely apart for e-books anyway.
Certainly e-books throw a wrench into things - at least in this type of analysis. Are paper-book stores "important" enough to a society to have extensive interventions in the market? Perhaps. Pricing e-books high enough would certainly allow paper books to more effectively compete so that is one possible intervention. Perhaps the marginal cost of entry for e-books means that anyone can easily produce and sell them so the worry of a monoculture of booksellers is overblown? Perhaps paper-books are so inefficient in comparison that we should not support them at all? Perhaps print-on-demand systems are affordable enough that the neighbourhood arguments are less weighty since every copy-and-print-shop will soon have a book-printer? Perhaps the old-bespectacled antiquarians lobby is going to finally see its iron-fisted influence over political discourse loosened and we will all better off for it?
Where in Germany are you located? I had thought (but cannot find any references of course) that locations such as Germany with this type of fixed pricing in fact did have a much higher number of bookstores per capita than those places (like the US) that do not have such systems.
It may be true that the large chains end up with increased profits, but it is possible that the small stores can stay in business in contrast to where there is no "price fixing" when the smaller places go out of business. Certainly excessive profits to some players is a societal negative, but it might be balanced by the perceived benefits.
There is an argument that the continued existence of a healthy ecosystem of independent local bookstores and multiple publishers is a benefit to the members of the society that outweighs the increased costs. In this particular case I do not know the details of how well that ecosystem has been protected and how much of a benefit it is (both quite difficult to quantify I would imagine) nor the details of the increased costs.
I don't think anyone suggests that one intentionally infect members of the studies.
It's not like the flu is exceptionally dangerous....
I am not so sure. According to http://www.wrongdiagnosis.com/f/flu/deaths.htm the 7th leading cause of death in 1999 and 2000 was "pneumonia/influenza" (CDC), 63,730 annual deaths for influenza and pneumonia (NVSR Sep 2001); estimated 20,000 deaths from flu (NIAID) An estimated 100,000 hospitalizations and about 20,000 deaths occur each year from the flu or its complications. (Source: excerpt from Focus On The Flu: NIAID) ... average of 20,000 to 40,000 deaths per year. (Source: excerpt from Microbes in Sickness and in Health - Publications, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases: NIAID) ... in the United States more than 100,000 people are hospitalized and more than 20,000 people die from the flu and its complications every year. (Source: excerpt from The Flu, NIAID Fact Sheet: NIAID) ... In an average year, flu leads to about 20,000 deaths nationwide and many more hospitalizations. (Source: excerpt from What to Do About the Flu - Age Page - Health Information: NIA)
The regular flue kills off a lot of people, and puts a lot of people in the hospital each year.
It seems like a pretty obvious move - with the advent of so many free non-MS alternatives I think Microsoft has a legitimate fear that they will become just one of the options in the "office suite" space, rather than the de facto standard. Getting their "free" offering onto as many desktops as possible MIGHT protect that status.
The open source alternatives however are hard to "compete" against, since they are generally going to continue to live even with a vanishingly small "market share" - as long as enough technical types are willing to support them.
I think in the long term, MS and others are not going to be able to justify to the consumer the high prices for their offerings that they have been able to up to now, and that low cost (perhaps free/ad supported) is the only way they are going to be able to maintain any level of profitability and stay in business.
A lot of "graphic literature" (read: Comic Books) are available in scanned format - there is even a (slightly) specialized file format and software designed to view this particular sort of item - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_Book_Archive_file
The various torrent trackers list pretty complete archives of titles and character appearances for at least some of the more popular "mainstream" super-hero comics.
As with music and movies, it is not clear how much traffic in these types of files impacts the sales of new or used issues. It might have essentially no effect - it might be a net positive to the IP owner, or it might result in decreased sales of new issues. I certainly do not know.
The original poster didn't explicitly mention an Ethernet connection which I think you really want on any long-term purchase, and I find duplex printing very very useful - enough so that I keep lusting after new printers even though our Apple LW 1600/600 probably will never completely die.
"When does thee USA school year intake start?"
I think it depends on the district, or at least the state. Some go by a calendar year, starting in January, some by a school year, starting in September. By the calendar year cutoff, January births should be oldest, thus most advantaged. By a school-year cutoff, January births are about the middle of the age-range for the class. Neither of these cutoffs would seem to disadvantage greatly those with January birthdays.
My eight year old son has recently been enjoying this type of thing in the English language. He asked me this one: "What's the difference between chopped meat and pea soup?" - "Most people can chop meat, but nobody can pee soup."
Hey, HE thought it was funny.
"If the prices are what I remember they were back in 2002-2003, though....."
He's looking to deploy a whole bunch of machines and Mac OS X Server retails for $500 US, that does not seem to be a whole bunch. (That's for the "unlimited clients" version, I think the "10-simultaneous logons" client is about half that price and may well be able to service this particular need - I can't quite recall exactly how they count that "10" value, my memory was that it was unlikely to be reached in even very large roll outs.)
I have some small bits of experience in using OS X Server in a small office - and for that situation it runs quite nicely on a macMini which is pretty cost-effective, even for keeping a duplicate machine available for disaster recovery.
Build a man a fire and he is warm for the afternoon - light a man on fire and he is warm for the rest of his life.
In the US and Canada at least, my understanding is that unless you have it written into the contract of sale, you cannot take any appliances or light fixtures when you sell a house - one might think that light bulbs might fall under this category. Thus, the new owners might have the ability to sue for the cost of replacements.
With that said, if we were to move in the near future, I would probably go to the basement and take the big box of incandescent bulbs and swap out as many CFLs with those as I had.
Taking the hooks off the walls and filling the holes might be considered a service.
Well, it is a lot more expensive than the current huge number of years, and it might be easier to get passed politically if it starts at $1, but you could start at $10, and that would up your numbers by quite a bit, and let's face it, even the copyright to Steamboat Willy is probably not worth a Billion Dollars, even to Disney.
Increasing by a factor of 1024 every ten years gets pretty expensive pretty quickly. If this scheme were in place, only a vanishingly small number of items would have copyright beyond 30 years.
Naw, make the first 10 years free, the next year $1 and double the price each year after that in perpetuity - or some system like that.
With a centralized registration system it should be easy to see if something has been extended, with a geometric increase in price everything eventually gets into the public domain, but any one item can be kept "private" as long as the owner is able to pay for it. And it can generate some public money too in terms of the registration fees.
We have gotten a few Mega Bloks small kits recently, and their quality seems to have improved a fair bit - I think recent court cases about their ability to legally be inter-working with Lego-brand stuff have helped them gain investors and profitable marketing deals - I think they have done some Pixar and Marvel Comics sets - mostly in the larger "duplo" format as I recall.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MEGA_Brands
According to the wekipedia, they have a licensing deal for "Halo" stuff.
...there's more people alive than dead ...
Google seems to think at http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/764806.html with some links to sources that there are about 100 billion dead people - even the lower estimates put the dead population well above the live population.
Oh, and shouldn't that be "...there are more people..." ?
>What is this?
Slashdot?
If you do not report all your income, the income tax people can hit you with tax evasion penalties - isn't that how they got Capone? Spend significantly more than you earn and the tax folk will come calling - asking about your un-reported income.
That's part of what "money laundering" is all about.
...it's hard to think of a more tempting target.
Places that deal in cash, and large volume of merchandise. Scope out the local supermarket or big box retailer some time while standing in line - there is a lot of cash changing hands. Heck, a busy doughnut shop or fast-food place probably pulls in something like $10 per customer, with lots and lots of customers that can add up pretty quick. Get someone on the inside to let you know when the tills are full and before they get dropped into the time-lock safe and you can probably clear quite a bit of cash, and cash is very easy to fence....
But is that 5k gross or net? Getting a good price on one stolen laptop, maybe not that hard via ebay or craigslist, but on a whole pile of them - if you are not really careful, you are going to get caught. How much work is that going to take? Once you start figuring out how many hours you are taking in cruising around town trying to unload this stuff, and the actual prices you manage to get, the numbers start to look much less attractive.
My father-in-law's place was recently broken into and within a few days someone called him to ask about the admin password to the computer that was stolen. The fellow had purchased it off of Craigslist, and upon learning it was stolen, was willing to visit the police station to ID the apartment where he had picked it up. Doing a better job of staying anonomyous when making such a sale again takes more time and effort.
Crime can pay, but to do so I think takes a lot more effort than most criminals put into it, and those that do put in the effort could make similar returns from straight legit labour.
"This is an important part of NII and it is simply wrong to ignore it."
I don't really have an opinion on this particular issue, but it is very true that we often, often, often ignore important parts of things we are teaching in order to assist the learning of something. From their first year at school, we essentially tell kids "What you learned last year is not completely correct - now we will work on a understanding of the concepts." Deciding which bits to "put off till later" and deciding how to avoid those bits with the minimum amount of future confusion and the maximum amount of "foundation laying" is one of the challenges of education.
The confusion between force and energy is common (doesn't the Force-concept-inventory have a bunch of questions on this type of thing? - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept_inventory but maybe it doesn't touch on energy at all and my memory is a bit bad) but it is often hidden within student's mixing of the concepts and the language at the same time. Both forces and energies have the ability to "make things move" in some sense, so it isn't a completely idiotic idea to mix them together in one's mental models.
My favourite quote from Physics Education Research is from Aarons who in the intro to "A guide to Introductory Physics Teaching" said something like "Research has firmly established that an engaging, exciting, well given lecture has little to no impact on student outcomes - which is not to say your lectures should be dull and boring." In my opinion, the text for a course has a pretty small overall impact on the learning of the student (which of course is no reason to choose a "bad" text) so choosing an affordable text that is acceptable over a slightly "better" text that is not affordable might make sense. The Light and Matter texts were at one point available as LaTeX files which I have in the past used to create supplementary texts with only a few of the L&M chapters to give a different approach for a few second year courses that have a review of 1st year materials - and the problems are nice too.