Or the updrafts from the flames would keep the little pieces fluttering and carry them away before they even get close to the flames.

Ah. As a Canadian, I don't have (legal) access to Hulu or the Hulu library.

By "can't be downloaded," I meant "can't be legally downloaded." Either way, it's the service and knowledge that makes the difference.

Mod parent up.

This is exactly what I was going to say. Provide movies that can't be downloaded. One point I'd add though: get to know your catalog and know how to help customers choose movies they'd enjoy. Some online recommendation programs work well, but others don't. If you know a lot about film, you can help people find movies they love that they'd never heard of, which will help promote repeat business.

The difficult part is starting now. Odds are, your friend has already seen a dropoff. (Though, frankly, your friend must run a good store if he's still in business at all.) It may be difficult to buy enough titles to diversify the catalog enough to keep things going. I'd suggest starting with Criterion Collection and Kino-Lorber titles. Criterion are more expensive but have strong brand recognition. Kino Video has weaker brand recognition but lower prices, and often do great work restoring copyright expired titles. (Just check out their silent library, such as the Art of Buster Keaton box set.)

You do realize that legally downloading movies is an option, right? iTunes, Amazon Prime, Netflix...

I read the OP as using "yahoo" to indicate the copyright violator, not the company.

If you take away the ones with the least financial backing, making it less likely their offspring will attend post-secondary and more likely that they have to get jobs as students and have less time to compete with others, you'll see a huge difference in any country. Sadly, removing the minorities will remove most people with poor socioeconomic status, but they are not equivalent actions. There are brilliant and productive members of every minority I can think of, as well as members of the majority who detract from their country's performance as a whole. One of the reasons your statement is unpopular is because it is focused on skin colour, and not the actual root cause: racist members of society or racist past policies that denied millions of capable individuals the opportunity to capitalize on those capabilities.

Even so, doing this will still not produce a "fair" comparison unless this is done with every country in the study. If those of us in North America want to make our part of the world better, we need to find a way to make sure each school age student has no undue concerns. Once every student has caring and supporting home environments, no apparent risk of starvation or lack of other needs, no abuse from any source, no problems with racism, etc. then the country's performance (assuming the school curriculum is properly designed) will improve dramatically. If those conditions are met world wide, I would expect to see little or no variation in studies like this one.

True, but there's a little more to it. If a skill is truly mastered, it doesn't regress. (Riding a bike is the standard example.) The skills you are exposed to on Monday that you don't really grasp until applied on Tuesday or Wednesday fade if Monday was the last day of school. For example, I did two physics degrees before my move to education. I can still solve most high school math problems by reflex, and probably always will do so. Things I learned in graduate studies or junior high social studies have mostly faded.

That absolutely is a factor, but this is far from the first research I've seen (as an educator myself) that indicates three weeks is the longest break the average student can take before skills start to regress. This is why some schools use the "happy medium" of year round schooling. The number of school days is the same as a ten month school year (standard here in Canada) but no break from school exceeds three weeks. Instead, there are more frequent and longer breaks during the school years. (Three weeks at winter, a week at Easter, four days off instead of three for most long weekends, etc.) Academic results are higher (on average), students usually like it once they've tried it because of the more frequent breaks, and working parents enjoy it more. The true test, however, needs to be comparing two otherwise comparable private schools. As you have correctly pointed out, any private system should be able to outperform the local public system on average because the parents who really don't care and produce students who don't respect the need for education send their kids to the public system.

I assumed it would cost more because I assumed that it would be priced in accordance with the fact that it is unlikely to be just a book reader, as other devices are, and would have full access to the App Store. As you point out, I could well be wrong.

I know a number of people who went with a Nook or Kindle instead of an iPad as a book reading device based solely on size, not prize. If Apple puts out a similarly sized device, it will cut into the Kindle and Nook markets. I would anticipate Apple's product will also be the most expensive device available at that size, so it's not going to kill the competition, but it will hurt them. This is valid competition.

What does your girlfriend like to watch? Start with the episodes/movies that are closest to that. For some people, "Star Trek: First Contact" is the best intro. For others, it's the JJ Abrams reboot, for others it's DS9, etc. "Star Trek: Insurrection" is often referred to as "Star Trek: Date Movie" for good reason; that might be a starting place.

Yes, it does take more, which is why we analyze the difficulty and discrimination of tests.

Difficulty: what percentage of the population gets the answer right?

Discrimination: sort the class by overall grade. Divide them into groups. (Thirds, quarters, etc. depending on class size.) Compare, question by question, the percentage of students in the top performing group who answer correctly to the percentage of students in the low performing group who answer correctly. A highly discriminating question should be correctly answered by the top performers but incorrectly answered by bottom performers. If the reverse is true, the question is confusing or miskeyed and needs to be adjusted accordingly.

We should also analyze how often students pick the "distractors" (i.e. incorrect answers) in multiple choice tests to determine if students answer correctly because they know the material or because the wrong answers are so obviously wrong.

Obviously, there is a lot more to it than this. The point I'm trying to make is that test structures need to be chosen and analyzed carefully to ensure validity and reliability. This can't be done by creating tests from "whole cloth" every time. Some degree of reuse needs to take place. That's why I used the LaTeX package. It can base questions on random numbers, and answers can be generated randomly or with preprogrammed algebra, so I set it up to have the correct answer, two answers generated by the most common mistakes, and a random number from a range that could make it the highest or lowest number on the list, sorted from smallest to largest. Then option e was "none of the above" for every question. I rarely used it intentionally, but it came in useful on the first couple of tests where typos in my algebra setting up the tests prevented the right answer from appearing on the list. (If you are interested, I wrote a book on assessment that you can access via my signature.)

The only part of the parent I disagree with is "of that era." I can't think of a more famous female aviator from any era.