Have you actually used WinME? It's the same Win98, but with DOS hidden and locked down and a icons/sounds backported from Windows 2000. Windows 2000 is a much more modern NT-based OS and having used it alongside WinME I can tell the difference is clearly visible, with Windows 2000 winning in almost every test except memory consumption and compatibility with Win9x apps.
Windows 2000 was originally planned to replace the DOS-based 98, but application/driver compatibility was not perfect, so Microsoft instead produced the WinME abomination before finally moving everyone to XP.

Dumping Surface RT could attract enough users that developers would start to take the Windows platform seriously. Then, since MS makes a $50/year per developer account, and 30% from every app sale, they may use the discounted RTs to jumpstart the Windows Store and recover at least some money (maybe unbundle Office and sell it as an addon?).
And hardware cannot sit on shelves forever. Storage space costs money, components get obsolete over time and in 2 years 50 bucks would be the right price. However this may repeat the netbook disaster (from the manufacturers standpoint) where people got accustomed to getting a perfectly usable machine for $300 and sales of more expensive hardware dropped.

Would you provide a prooflink? I've been monitoring MS news and the only news was Metro being renamed into "Modern UI" because of a lawsuit from the German supermarket chain.
So far Windows 8/WP8's biggest problems is the lack of good apps. Plus, Metro apps don't integrate well with the desktop and Microsoft's Metro apps have less features than the desktop alternatives (e.g. Mail, Calendar, Onenote). It would make no sense for Microsoft to abandon this platform and start from scratch AGAIN, pissing off developers who just ported their apps to WP8/Win8. What may actually be going on is merging WP8 and Win8 APIs to simplify porting; by the way porting between Win8 and WP8 is already not terribly difficult.
The metro design (just the design, not the whole paradigm) is actually quite successful, just look at how Apple is abandoning their skeumorphic concepts or how Android also shifted to a flatter style in 2.3 and 4.0.

Some people don't trust banks, especially if they lived in a Soviet Union-related contry. They had a history of decreasing your savings either by government order (to keep everyone equal) or simply because they f*cked up investing your money.

Based on my travel experience (2 trips to North America, 1 to the Middle East), nobody really cares about the contents of your laptop. Come on, it's not 1998, pirating stuff over the internet is a lot easier than bothering to carry it physically.
What customs are usually interested about is
1) Large quantities of identical stuff which may be contraband
2) Illegal items, which oddly enough includes most food. Also drugs, firearms, etc.
Security may check your laptop to detect any unaccounted cavities which can carry contraband or explosives - my laptop was coming apart and security looked really concerned and ran it through quite a few extra tests.
Customs may want to check any software you may be importing for sale, but the nature of your visit must hint you may be carrying such stuff - like being a contractor who is visiting the US to install & configure software.

If you're just a tourist they're not going to look, not even in random searches. It's difficult to determine or prove the files are not legal under US law right in the airport. You should only be concerned if you were previously convicted for piracy or have a strong reason for having your laptop searched, like being a spy, terrorist or Julian Assange.

Authors are paid next to nothing. I've published a paper by Springer which is currently selling for $40 for a download. Guess how much I got paid? $0 (and even had to sign a huge contract detailing the terms of my $0 compensation).
Scientists publish papers because they need credit, references, public claims on their discoveries etc. Big-name scientists may actually earn something if they negotiate it.
The only reason I see the publishers get such a huge compensation is that they have to review papers (probably hire scientists from similar fields) and deal with the incoming stream of bullshit articles.

They should revise Google's punchline to "Now let's shutdown everything and watch civilization collape".

I bought a business-class (TPM, Intel Management Engine & other useless shit) ultrabook a few weeks ago. It was bundled with Windows 8 and Windows 7 DVDs, and had Windows 7 preinstalled.
But it seems that only business laptops are considered "serious" with proper warranties, longer support cycles (and better support as well!), disassembly/upgrade instructions, and much less crapware preinstalled.

And keep updating drivers included with the game for every GPU, WiFi card and modem out there? Not to mention that some people use background software for voice chat (if the game doesn't support it) or constantly alt+tab into a browser with a walkthrough or guide opened.

This report if for MTS retail stores. Unlike US where you buy your phone and contract in an AT&T store, in Russia operators used to sell you only the SIM card. Third-party mobile phone stores have a much larger marketshare, sell contracts and let you pay the phone bill. Operator stores historically have been slow to offer new phone models or lower prices on older ones.
MTS acquired a retail store chain, but still sell less phones that other popular chains. In addition, their iPhone price used to be way above average.
And iPhone in Russia is priced significantly more than in the US - probably the only significant reason of why WP7.5 is winning.

Actually, Skydrive already has this feature, with right-click and no registration.

Google Drive does have some innovated stuff from Docs - it has awesome realtime collaboration, borrowed from Google Wave. I'd say that if you need several people editing a document at the same time, nothing beats Docs.
The only addition Google made to Docs before rebranding it into Drive is the desktop sync feature and bumping up free storage to 5 gigs. I'd say this is minor compared to existing document editing/viewing/collaboration features, which
a) Dropbox doesn't have;
b) Were steadily developed for at least 5 years.

Chrome collects search engines in "Manage Search Engines...". All you have to do is manually open a search engine and do one search, Chrome will then add it to the list.

I remember the time when IE dominated the web and it was not pretty. Most sites didn't bother testing compatibility with other browsers - when Firefox 1.0 was finally released, a lot of sites didn't work or display correctly. IE6 was synonymous with stagnation (a popup blocker appeared only in Windows XP SP2, 3 years after IE6 was released!). Most feature-rich or banking sites simply installed their own ActiveX controls or used flash because Javascript in IE was so poor.
Futhermore, IE versions for Mac and Windows Mobile worked differently from the desktop version. I'd say it's remarkable that today you can expect 99% websites to work properly on any browser or device - a direct consequence of IE losing marketshare, forcing webmasters to care about compatibility with non-IE browsers.
Although I do admit that IE introduced AJAX before others.

WP7 is even worse than Android - in Android, fart apps are usually buried and don't appear in search. In Windows Phone, I found a completely useless app in the top-45 list, which is sad because the next page is even worse.