Ugh. Their.

In the EU, the seller would charge the VAT rate of the country they operate out of - so there's only one rate to be concerned with. Also, I don't know whether this applies to other countries in the EU, but sellers only have to charge VAT when they're annual sales exceed ~£80,000 in the UK.

Someone else gets to take the financial risk?

They advertise one year 'complimentary support', as perfectly illustrated on their store pages for AppleCare.

Probably because Verizon are selling the 32GB version, whereas only the 16GB version is available in the UK

Chrome does this for a number of plugins, including Java.

I think the treatment of DigiNotar vs Comodo is really an issue of 'too big to fail'. Removing DigiNotar was essentially a painless exercise because nobody used their certs. I very much doubt they would follow the same course of action for a major player such as Comodo.

Ninite is a similar product with a wider range of software, although they charge $10 per year for their automatic updater.

Taiyo Yuden claims a 70 year shelf life, but they have only been around for what, 8 years tops?

The company itself has been around for 60 years. Granted, they haven't been optical discs for all that time, however their oldest discs are coming up for 30 years now, so there should be some indicator of quality by now.

• There are a ton of free (cost & licence) applications for Windows. For almost every Linux application, there will be an open source equivalent for Windows, often the exact same program.
• Do you know why most of the applications in the Ubuntu package manager are free? Because almost nobody develops commercial software for Linux.
• As to the cost of Android apps, Google only takes their cut if you sell through them. Unlike Apple's ecosystem, you have the choice to distribute through other marketplaces or just by throwing the APK online for people to download. I don't know if Google restricts the licences of apps distributed through their market, but no one can stop you releasing the source if you're distributing the app yourself.
• Android is, for the most part, open source. As for other distros, perhaps you've heard of CyanogenMod?
• Anyone can develop for Android. For free. Here's the SDK for you. And as I mentioned, you can freely distribute the APK once you've finished.