And you've never used one of these systems where you need to collect accurate date (such as this one would). It also has to be more durable then your hobby plane, and possibly fly a lot longer whilst carrying heavier equipment to use for wildlife monitoring (HD cameras, backup radios, radar, etc (depending on what exactly it was doing).

Protip: look how much an accurate GPS unit it costs, an accurate one is well over a $100. (Think closer to $1000).
What about radar?
This is a wildlife monitoring drone, it's going to need reasonable range and that means good battery life and low power equipment. Add $100+ to all purchases and a reasonable budget for a long life, lightweight battery. Autonomous navigation and other custom software features (which need to be extensively tested with your possibly unique hardware combination) ass at least $5000

No, they're just being cheap by not installing cameras in every lecture theatre. I've yet to have any lecturers who has turned the system off though.

My university does this (records sound and computer screens so not always useful), a very small number of lecturers turn it off. It is good for catching up or reviewing a topic, but I tend to find that the face to face lecturers allow me to learn better. (And I take notes on my laptop)
One of my lecturers has gone further and recorded all of his lecturers with videos, it allows the course to cover more content as the pre-recorded lectures don't take up class time where extension lecturers and some repeat content is provided.

"Laptop note takers' tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning. If you can type quickly enough, word-for-word transcription is possible, whereas writing by hand usually rules out capturing every word."
So the problem is that laptop users have bad note taking skills, not that laptops cause students to remember less... (Or rather people have bad note taking skills and it's easier to take bad notes on a laptop)

No its because the industry is changing, and there is a number of independent publishers offering authors similar rates, and those services (e.g. smashworlds). Amazon are sticking with the times and taking advantage of new technology to offer authors a different deal.

Considering that's what Amazon does with their kindle app (if you read a series the next book will usually be in the recommendations section on the Amazon home page), it wouldn't surprise me if they did that.

ironically Amazon does the same.

In don't know about Comixology, but amazon pays independent ebook publishers 70% on items with a list price between $2 and $10 and 35% the rest of the time.

Not at all, just because something immoral is being done for a strategic military reason does not make it more moral.

The difference with Jerusalem is the United Nations specifically placed restrictions on Israel forbidding them from annexing those territories (for good reason). This makes it very different from individual states recognising it as belonging to different entities, which is the case with Crimea,

So Australia isn't a democratic country? I'm going to have to disagree with you there.
I would argue that it is a sign of a bad democracy that few people turn out to vote. Whether this election is valid or not is an entirely different question.
Where there international observers? Where people coerced? Was the counting process public and valid? (The answer to two of these isn't currently clear).

If you use a stable distro, I've only ever had this happen on release updates (with nvidia drives, or ubuntu not disabling hibernate before upgrading usually being the cause). On release upgrades however I always schedule a few days downtime to fix the inevitable inability to boot.

because aptitude always seems to want to unistall half my packages whenever I run it and I don't have time to work out why,

it's not rocket science that prevents that, it's the cost of building the rockets.