If only! If your computer is faster than your needs then you're blessed with an easy project. Or you spent a vast amount on hardware. One of my current projects lies bleeding because we can't afford the machines to run the simple solution; and we're doing some painful redesign to fit the project to the hardware budget

I find this too. But, sometimes being the one providing the advice (for software other than Linux and Unix), I can see why it happens. It's not always snottiness on the part of the experts.

My ideal, as a potential provider of information, is a question that I can answer easily, in one short post, without research, and using jargon. I.e., I like to help but I'm lazy. It's tedious if I have to spend 20 minutes translating the jargon into something a beginner can understand. It's more tedious if the answer turns into a dialogue because the questioner doesn't understand the first answer. It's extremely tedious if a later answer in the dialogue turns out to need research (which the questioner can't do for himself) and where I feel obligated to look for him because I already engaged (mutter mutter).

Basically, answering questions well for beginners turns into writing good documentation for an unskilled audience. It's brain-meltingly difficult and no fun at all.

No, the example in the GP explicitly considers it and provides an example where the licensing costs wouldn't outweigh the OSS costs.

I know you want the per seat licensing always to end the debate in favour of OSS, but life isn't that simple. Wishing doesn't make it true.

You're presuming that the author does the layout, detailed typography, indexing, illustrations, etc. I don't think that's typical. I don't believe that it's an automatable process either.

The pre-production cost to the publisher is also necessary. That's taking the author's typescript and actually making it into a book. For technical works, it would include the cost of the illustrations.

Following the links in TFA leads to a goverment web-page listing one-line descriptions of things they consider illegal. But their definitions are broken. They include this:

web pages that show pictures, videos or descriptions of violence against anyone due to their race, religion, disability, sexual orientation or gender identity

That would be...news sites? Maybe we should all report news.bbc.co.uk?

I thought, perhaps wrongly, that the copyright was attached to a particular edition of a book. Therefore, if a book was published separately in the UK and in the USA, I could make a facsimile of the British edition and distribute that in the USA while the American edition was still in copyright. Correct? Wrong? Different rules for images of the pages vs OCR'd text?

Or they could just post an automatic update to those copies that removes the offending feature.

If you provide the servers and workstations and applications for an organization, that's IT. When they cut your budget and make you responsible for the 'phones as well, that's ICT.

TFA says that the county also tweets names of people charged with "soliciting a prostitute" (whatever that means exactly in Texan law). That sounds like a whole new blackmail industry hatching. At least with DUI you can objectively prove innocence.

Third guess: X-ray machines are very good at finding weapons in luggage unless said luggage is carefully arranged to confuse the view. To get the right arrangement you'd have to study some of the radiograms to see what worked.

Personal experience supports this. My laptop back-pack, which is full of cables, chargers and peripherals, usually goes through security unchallenged, except when it gets jumbled such that the security person can't work out what they're seeing; then they search. I often get a look at the screen while I'm waiting for it to come through (screens not concealed in most European airports). When it passes, I can identify my stuff. When it's searched, I can't.

This may be one of the rare, non-theatrical parts of the operation. But I still don't see why this particular regulation was redacted.

This is a bit like gunpowder weapons in the 14th century. They appeared in Europe early in that century, were pretty pointless at first, then useful in special cases, then, after about 100 years, more-generally useful. Professional soldiers at that time must have been pretty skeptical. "Interesting, but I'll keep the trebuchet for now, thanks." Up to, say, 1350, it would have been difficult to predict whether gunpowder would ever become a practical weapon.

That's telling us something about the replacement cycle for Windows PCs. As discussed on Slashdot before, few private citizens will upgrade a browser on a "working" machine.

Umm...you mean immigration is a privilege, don't you? When the right to leave the country is withheld things are really bad. (Yes, I know, the anti-terrorist laws probably do restrict the general right to leave.)

The downside of smaller, more-numerous planes is having to rebuild airports for a greater throughput of flights, as currently being considered in the UK. Perhaps Boeing's approach fits better with US facilities than European airports?