Actually I'd say that one of two things should happen... Google is allowed to do this but they have to hand over the all end result data to the US government for it's free use by any other individual/organization in the US after a 2-3 year exclusive embargo; or the US government should fund doing this and again allow anybody in the US to use the results.

http://www.windows-now.com/blogs/robert/weighing-in-on-the-visual-studio-express-eula-debacle.aspx

This is the only thing I can find about the EULA and VS having any contraversy. Basically the primary issue was around some bits in the license which MS said was there to prevent you from using it to work around restrictions. i.e. timebomb shareware / limited functionality software that you need pay for, etc. VS had/has different levels and a guy had written some things to extend the cheap limited version of VS to basically give it the functionality of the full version.

I've not been able to find anything anywhere relative to your acusation...

Actually those higher flow performance air filters make the engine work a little less hard so the engine actually is more efficient at burning the same ammount of fuel and better for the environment... normally at the expense of not being as good at cleaning the passing air allowing more particulates into the engine.

It really depends upon the size of the sutff you are doing. If you are going to recompile the same stuff over and over and the dataset will fit in memory... you most likely will get little to no benefit. Linux (Vista and others) cache every single file until some app needs memory and pushes it out. It sounds like he's doing it on a box by himself (not a server shared by 5000 other people), and with memory so cheap... unless you are compiling something huge I'd guess that you probably not have to disk again after the first time it read it in (as long as there isn't another app ran that eats up all the memory, forcing out cached files from buffer cache and at some point freed up all the memory again and the compile is ran again).

For a point app for a single user, spending less on SSD and buying more memory would probably give you much more benefits.