The 10% + 3mph rule in the UK is actually more of a guideline than a hard limit. You could technically be pulled over for exceeding the road speed limit by just 1 or 2 mph, although very unlikely in most cases unless you're also driving like an idiot, or if it's bad weather with poor visibility. The ACPO (Association of Chief Police Officers) came up with the 10% + 3mph as a guide for when to prosecute, or issue points against your license / ask you to partake in a speed awareness course.

The way you're doing it is the only sane way to do it; using a registered domain under your control, for all internal naming.

Avoid all this crap and just use a properly registered domain name (that you own and control DNS for!) as the most significant part of your FQDNs. You likely already own one for your business's Internet facing resources, but if you don't, spend $5 and get one. Set up public DNS for any Internet facing resources (www, mail, etc) and then use a subdomain of your choice for all your internal network's resources (fileserver.lan.mydomain.com, mediaserver.lan.mydomain.com, etc). No chance of collisions. Job done.

As we've seen, innovation is not a prerequisite for a patent.

Apple is rumoured to be introducing its iWatch later this year and Samsung has already released several models of smart watch over the last few months or so. I'm sure both parties will now be armed to the teeth with patents applicable to the other's watches, and the potential patent disputes between them likely more even sided than we've seen with phones and tablets. It makes very good sense for both parties to come to an agreement now so they can each concentrate on the coming shitstorm of fitness patents that will rear their head from all directions before long.

IIRC, Metro apps have additional sandboxing so I'd presume that is the reason it is more difficult to exploit.

With a good 2A+ PSU, it seems the B+ can now supply up to a total of 1.2A over USB (compared to ~600mA with the older model B).

All I can say is, I have something in the region of 300 1080p movies, mostly H.264 encoded, all of which play with no trouble at all. Google it, YouTube it, there are countless people doing the very same thing.

If you're not just trolling, report your issue in the Raspbmc forums, ideally with a link to a sample video for others to test with. I'll quite happily test a video or two on my Pi if you supply some links.

And whilst you're at it, where's the SSD, SATA, Thunderbolt, optical I/O, gigabit ethernet and built in Wifi?

It is quite obvious that the Pi is designed for a very specific price point; one that gets it into the most hands possible. Every dollar you add to the production cost, makes it much less likely to get into the hands of people who would otherwise not be tinkering with such things. If you need something more capable, look elsewhere, the Pi is not for you.

I've been running Raspbmc (the most popular XBMC distro for Raspberry Pi) for a long time, and it has been excellent. It's small enough to be hidden behind my TV, and with an added remote control, offers one of the best user interfaces you'll find in a 'set top box'. Streams all my 1080p movies and TV shows flawlessly (*), and handles pretty much every codec under the sun. All for ~$40 (including HDMI cable, USB PSU, SD card and MPEG-2 license for hardware acceleration).

If you search for "Raspbmc" on YouTube, you'll see my experience is the norm. If you have any specific issues, post in the Raspbmc forums and someone will most likely sort you out. :)

As for Raspbian, I'm also running this on another Pi. It's certainly not going to replace x86 servers any time soon, but it certainly has its uses. Maybe your expectations are too high for a $35, 700MHz, 512MB machine?

* Apparently, it may struggle with some very high bit rate encodes, but I've yet to see this in practice and is unlikely to be an issue for most people.

As long as all drivers keep their eyes closed.

Depends what you intend exposing.

Amazon already have their fingers in movies, music, ebooks and app markets. With the leading vendors of smartphones having their own content deals and distribution partnerships (that generally don't include Amazon) tied to their devices, Amazon may see the move into smartphones as essential to getting their existing and future services into people's hands. Similar to what Google has done with Nexus devices, Amazon could sell smartphones at very low margins, or even at a loss, if in doing so they can protect and enhance their other revenue streams. They've now got a lot of experience and brand awareness with their e-readers and tablets, so it's not like they are starting from scratch.

There are alternatives, although I can't comment on how they compare with OpenSSL.

GnuTLS (LGPLv2.1)

Mozilla Network Security Services (Mozilla Public License)

PolarSSL (GPL2 and proprietary).

MatrixSSL (GPL and proprietary