Things are improving. It used to involve swimming or kayaking across the Pacific. At least now you can take a sailboat.

And an ebook version of a book does not need any more than the physical version. I would argue less (no typesetter, for example). You should, in theory, be able to take the same text and output it in whatever ebook version you want without much extra effort.

There is absolutely no reason why an electronic copy of a book should cost more than a physical version. The lack of printing and distribution costs (distribution cost to the publisher is negligible; just one copy to each retailer) should guarantee that it's lower. I've seen many cases where the Kindle version of a book was more than the paperback on Amazon. In every case, the price of the ebook was set by the publisher.

You seem to misunderstand Slashdot. There's no "journalism" here. Almost all of the content is user submitted, including most of the summaries. And with the "firehose," the "editors" take a step even further back in letting users select which submissions get posted.

Killing lawyers is inconceivable?

"Google's FRAND patent abuses?"

a) That was not Google, that was pre-buyout Motorola.
b) The terms are supposedly the same terms that many other companies have already agreed to.
c) It doesn't matter if the patent is FRAND or not. If it's being used without license, it's infringement. Yet it seems like every time FRAND patents get asserted, people go apeshit. Meanwhile, Apple and MS are asserting patents that should have never been issued and people are jumping on their bandwagon.

Just to point out, I'm against the idea of patents in standards. Instead of FRAND agreements, I think that they should be required to assign the patent to the public domain.

Maybe they meant to say Backfire (Tu-22M) or Blackjack (Tu-160)?

Actually, not.

Whooooosh!

It's a quote from Contact.

First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?

Sony isn't bigger than HTC in the smartphone market. In the US, at least, they're going after the ones who make Android phones that sell well (Samsung, HTC, and Motorola), but leaving the ones that don't (Huawei, ZTE, Casio, and Sony) alone to the best of my knowledge.

To the uTorrent forums, that's exactly what it was.

There's a bit of a difference. MS was convicted of using their OS monopoly to harm existing competitors in the web browser space. Because of the closed nature of the entire iOS environment, there has never been a competing browser to Safari in iOS.

One could argue that there is an abuse of position by Apple, but unless/until the courts decide there is, nothing will be done.

FTFY

At National, there's concrete around the terminals where the planes are expected to sit for a while, but tarmac on the taxiways and runways.

At nearby Dulles, which has far more traffic, it's concrete everywhere.

I think you just named Ubuntu 15.10...