Here are the details of the book I mentioned last week, Business Law, by Davidson, Knowles and Forsythe. The site makes it clear how many features the book has to help students, but it doesn’t really bring out the wealth of documents illustrated. Would be interesting for a German student learning about U.S. business law.

This is a picture I took with the F100 in the World of Darkness, the dark section for nocturnal animals, at the Bronx Zoo. I haven’t edited it except to reduce its size. Digital cameras have always been good at night shots, but the new ones have special settings. I set the camera to Night Shot. No flash (I avoid flash for human and animal pictures anyway), no tripod. It wasn’t as loud as the children (the Minolta has an effect you can switch off: when you take a picture, there is a nostalgic sound of a mechanical shutter). I could see a hairy outline, but only when I saw the picture did I know what I’d seen. At least, I know what it looks like but not its name.

This is a picture I took with the F100 in the World of Darkness, the dark section for nocturnal animals, at the Bronx Zoo. I haven’t edited it except to reduce its size. Digital cameras have always been good at night shots, but the new ones have special settings. I set the camera to Night Shot. No flash (I avoid flash for human and animal pictures anyway), no tripod. It wasn’t as loud as the children (the Minolta has an effect you can switch off: when you take a picture, there is a nostalgic sound of a mechanical shutter). I could see a hairy outline, but only when I saw the picture did I know what I’d seen. At least, I know what it looks like but not its name.

This is a very low-powered entry in comparison to the advice on buying technical gadgets I’ve encountered in other weblogs, or even the ATA member’s husband I met at the Steinbachbräu in Erlangen last week who had a handheld GPS device that guided him from the Frankenhof hostel to the brewery. I can loosely connect it to the topic of the law when I say that I had heard it is much easier to exchange things in the USA than in Europe. I didn’t intend to buy a digital camera, learn how to use it in two days and then exchange it for another that I haven’t learnt how to use yet, but that’s what happened.

In September 2000 I bought a Nikon Coolpix 800 for about DM 999. When the switch broke, a simple mechanical defect, last summer, it cost me EUR 157 to have it mended – mostly labour and the postage to Munich and back. It was therefore a good idea to get a camera in New York, where they are a bit cheaper. I was in Manhattan for four days and went to B & H, allegedly the largest photo store in the world.

Following superficial initial research, I looked at the Nikon Coolpix 4500 but decided to take the Minolta Dimage F100 – I think it’s been replaced by a 5-megapixel one now. The former weighs twice what the latter does but it’s still very light at 12 ounces, although it doesn’t fit into a small handbag the way the Minolta does. However, the Minolta has one of those zooms that have to zoom out every time it’s turned on and in when it’s turned off, so it is awkward to start using in a hurry. The other thing that irritated me about it was that it came with a non-rechargeable Lithium battery that cost $16 to replace. Minolta advised against 2 AA batteries unless these were rechargeable, and even then it said they weren’t that good. But the old Nikon used 4 AA batteries, so how long would a 4 megapixel camera run on 2? I phoned Minolta to find out if I’d understood it right, and they said I ought to buy only Quest batteries from the USA. I would have finished up buying a recharger, about which they were not informative and an AC adapter, and also or instead probably an SD card reader, pushing the price up quite a way. I would have preferred to pay more and get a recharger with it. Another disappointment was the macro – you can get very near to your subject with the Nikons and I was used to that. The Minolta is an excellent camera though, takes good pictures and is easy to learn, and has a fair amount of manual control, but not as much as the Nikon. It has a focus system that is claimed to track a moving object. Cost: $380 (plus all the extras). The Nikon does more and costs $649, less a $200 rebate if I am lucky (camera has to have been delivered to you in the USA). The Nikon, for me, sits very well in the hand, the Minolta not quite so well.

In B & H, all the goods travel under the counters and overhead in green boxes on a conveyor system. You go first to the assistant who advises you and takes your order, then you queue to pay, then you queue to get the goods. Most of the staff, especially in the last stages, seem to be Chassidic Jews (but I am afraid this clothing catalogue may be a spoof).
It may be worth looking at B & H’s used equipment, because it will include my Minolta. When I went to return it, I found the five staff in the returns department in the side street engaged in a lot of joking in Yiddish, some of which I understood. I told them most of the Jewish community in Fürth speak Russian rather than Yiddish now. There is a Jewish museum here too.
I still need to sell the SD card I bought, but I had all 190 pictures I had taken copied onto a CD in 5 minutes for $11. (The photo shop in Manhattan said they needed two working days to do this, and it sounded as if they would have had to keep the card too).

People keep telling me digital cameras are not high quality. But I find I take more pictures than I used to. For years I used a Canon EF but it would be too heavy for me now. Nor could I imagine using a darkroom, any more than I tweak my pictures much now. A nice feature of the Nikon is that you can correct the verticals in pictures of architecture, while they’re still in the camera (I wonder if I could copy the original of the picture I posted recently of the Hyatt Regency back to the card and then correct it, because I think the verticals were rather Pisa-ish there). But there is a lot still to learn.

This is a very low-powered entry in comparison to the advice on buying technical gadgets I’ve encountered in other weblogs, or even the ATA member’s husband I met at the Steinbachbräu in Erlangen last week who had a handheld GPS device that guided him from the Frankenhof hostel to the brewery. I can loosely connect it to the topic of the law when I say that I had heard it is much easier to exchange things in the USA than in Europe. I didn’t intend to buy a digital camera, learn how to use it in two days and then exchange it for another that I haven’t learnt how to use yet, but that’s what happened.

In September 2000 I bought a Nikon Coolpix 800 for about DM 999. When the switch broke, a simple mechanical defect, last summer, it cost me EUR 157 to have it mended – mostly labour and the postage to Munich and back. It was therefore a good idea to get a camera in New York, where they are a bit cheaper. I was in Manhattan for four days and went to B & H, allegedly the largest photo store in the world.

Following superficial initial research, I looked at the Nikon Coolpix 4500 but decided to take the Minolta Dimage F100 – I think it’s been replaced by a 5-megapixel one now. The former weighs twice what the latter does but it’s still very light at 12 ounces, although it doesn’t fit into a small handbag the way the Minolta does. However, the Minolta has one of those zooms that have to zoom out every time it’s turned on and in when it’s turned off, so it is awkward to start using in a hurry. The other thing that irritated me about it was that it came with a non-rechargeable Lithium battery that cost $16 to replace. Minolta advised against 2 AA batteries unless these were rechargeable, and even then it said they weren’t that good. But the old Nikon used 4 AA batteries, so how long would a 4 megapixel camera run on 2? I phoned Minolta to find out if I’d understood it right, and they said I ought to buy only Quest batteries from the USA. I would have finished up buying a recharger, about which they were not informative and an AC adapter, and also or instead probably an SD card reader, pushing the price up quite a way. I would have preferred to pay more and get a recharger with it. Another disappointment was the macro – you can get very near to your subject with the Nikons and I was used to that. The Minolta is an excellent camera though, takes good pictures and is easy to learn, and has a fair amount of manual control, but not as much as the Nikon. It has a focus system that is claimed to track a moving object. Cost: $380 (plus all the extras). The Nikon does more and costs $649, less a $200 rebate if I am lucky (camera has to have been delivered to you in the USA). The Nikon, for me, sits very well in the hand, the Minolta not quite so well.

In B & H, all the goods travel under the counters and overhead in green boxes on a conveyor system. You go first to the assistant who advises you and takes your order, then you queue to pay, then you queue to get the goods. Most of the staff, especially in the last stages, seem to be Chassidic Jews (but I am afraid this clothing catalogue may be a spoof).
It may be worth looking at B & H’s used equipment, because it will include my Minolta. When I went to return it, I found the five staff in the returns department in the side street engaged in a lot of joking in Yiddish, some of which I understood. I told them most of the Jewish community in Fürth speak Russian rather than Yiddish now. There is a Jewish museum here too.
I still need to sell the SD card I bought, but I had all 190 pictures I had taken copied onto a CD in 5 minutes for $11. (The photo shop in Manhattan said they needed two working days to do this, and it sounded as if they would have had to keep the card too).

People keep telling me digital cameras are not high quality. But I find I take more pictures than I used to. For years I used a Canon EF but it would be too heavy for me now. Nor could I imagine using a darkroom, any more than I tweak my pictures much now. A nice feature of the Nikon is that you can correct the verticals in pictures of architecture, while they’re still in the camera (I wonder if I could copy the original of the picture I posted recently of the Hyatt Regency back to the card and then correct it, because I think the verticals were rather Pisa-ish there). But there is a lot still to learn.

I will make this the last report on the conference; the various questions it left me with will have to to introduced gradually.

Joe McClinton (on German tax and social insurance law) gave a full discussion of a list of taxes but left me with the feeling I ought to research all these for myself. It seems to be the same with all areas of law and accountancy (and for all other special subjects too): you can’t trust any bilingual dictionaries, but monolingual reference works don’t bring out the difference between the two systems. You really need to have an overview of a complete set of taxes in one country and of a complete set in another country before being able to decide whether the suggestions given in a bilingual law dictionary are helpful.
Take Gewerbesteuer. Joe doesn’t like the usual translation, trade tax, partly because it sounds like a ‘Handelssteuer’; at all events it does not give much idea of the meaning, whereas if you used the U.S. term ‘local business tax’ you would be very close in meaning and would be adding the idea of ‘local’, since Gewerbesteuer does go to the local municipality. The term ‘local business tax’ carries some meaning even for a British reader. On the other hand, one might think ‘business’ meant ‘an enterprise’ rather than the operation of a business (even translators pay Gewerbesteuer if they revise and make a profit on translations into languages they don’t speak, or run language schools).
Joe referred to a Lexikon Steuern A-Z on the Bundesfinanzministerium (German Federal Finance Ministry) website. It is an excellent source, answering the questions: what is taxed, who pays the tax, how much tax is paid, what is the wording of the statute that creates the tax, who collects the tax and how did the tax develop historically.
The presentation covered the definition of tax and Steuer (you don’t need two words for Steuern und Abgaben, because for all intents and purposes there is no difference between the two). I also wrote down: Gebühren, Beiträge, Sonderabgaben (like Solidaritätsbeitrag, Körperschaftssteuer, Lohnsteuer, Einkommenssteuer and Umsatzsteuer.
There is a lot of stuff on the Internet that will answer some of these questions. For example, Horwath has a page with links to brief definitions of taxes in English. KPMG has a virtual library of publications in English and German, including newsletters in English on German tax. Google searches on “Doing Business in Germany” produce good results. On LEGAmedia, there are articles by Dr. Thomas Marx on the subject.