It's not necessarily a linear relationship. Elasticities of demand are usually differential equations in the real world.

Companies set a suggested retail price in each market to maximize profit. (It depends on thngs like elasticity, incomes, availability of substitutes, etc.). You can't blame them for trying to make money. If you really want to save money you can always find a better deal on something, from so called grey markets, etc. But there is nearly always a trade off in your time, or lack of warranty, or some other factor. It reminds me of when I used to buy "international editions" of textbooks from Singapore. They were much cheaper than the books in our college bookstore, but I had to spend time finding them online and sometimes the homework problems would be different and I'd get screwed. Everyone--retailers, wholesalers, and consumers--is just finding their own trade-off to try to maximize their own utility. Basic Economics.

I grew up in Montana under the "reasonable and prudent" speed limit. Man, I miss those days. The problem was that too many tourists came in that didn't know the roads and got themselves killed, so the feds threatened to yank our highway money unless we changed the law. Unless you can do away with either the Federal government or idiot tourists, it's probably not coming back.

Hate to be pedantic, but no. Not really. The term loss-leader refers to a different strategy where a retailer puts an item on sale to increase traffic to their store. That is clearly not the main motivation in this case. I'm a business grad student...I've had to answer more than a few essay questions on these things.

In business school they call this the Gillette strategy, after the razors. Sell the razors at a loss...make your money back easily on the blades. Nail guns are sold the same way. The companies have been know to pass out free nail guns to construction companies just so they will buy more nails. Even if you buy a gun in a store, they are sold at pretty close to cost. Its a classic strategy. Besides, the more volume they can build, the closer to break-even they can get. By this time next year I bet they will be making a profit.

Here is the problem: most people don't really *get" an area of math until they have studied more advance areas. For example, a lot of people get through arithmetic by rote, and it finally "clicks" for them when they go on to study algebra. They understand algebra better after they've had calculus... you get the idea. I worked as a math tutor all the way through college (I was a math major) so I've seen it hundreds of times.

Now, as a technical draftsman, I don't use (or really remember)most of it. I live and die by arithmetic and trig, though. I'm actually glad I had 4 semesters of calculus, because it forced me to really understand arithmetic, trigonometry, and basic algebra.

This is going back a ways... but it reminds me of the '80s when people were using big dial-up services like Genie and Compuserve... Then hobbyists started writing software to set up a dial-up BBS on a PC. I used to have like 40 people who would regularly call my bbs to read the forums and play games.

The thing was, we could hack and customize our own BBSs to make the way cooler and more individualized than the big services. Potentially, this could be the new Web 2.0 version of that... Then again, maybe its all vaporware.

I wonder how long it takes them to hit the 5GB/month data limit, with 45 kids watching video.

A day?

An hour?

....is that it's easy to take on the subway. I get about half of my writing done underground where there is no wireless.

But at least OpenOffice is easy to download if you need it.

I bet they have had something like this in-house since the beginning. They probably just cleaned up the interface so they could offer it to the public. Hopefully we can use Wine, or something.

At work I get all of my project manuals and specification manuals in .pdf. Its the most miserable format ever for book-length documents. I hate trying to hunt through an 800 page manual one screen at a time to find the one paragraph I need that no one bothered to bookmark.

The modern public library and distance education are a natural match. I am working on a distance degree andM I practically live in my local library where I have research materials, a well lighted workspace, and helpful librarians.

My significant other is a librarian and she says that there are tons of articles in their journals about how they can support distance learners.