As far as I know the BIOS is unfortunately still involved with anything related to power management through ACPI - suspend/resume etc.

It appears it's a useful feature because many applications allow commands to be embedded in documents - even ones you might not expect, like vim. From FreeBSD's pkg-message for editors/vim:

SECURITY NOTE: The VIM software has had several remote vulnerabilities
discovered within VIM's modeline support. It allowed remote attackers to
execute arbitrary code as the user running VIM. All known problems
have been fixed, but the FreeBSD Security Team advises that VIM users
use 'set nomodeline' in ~/.vimrc to avoid the possibility of trojaned
text files.

That's almost exactly what Chrome does except that new users do get the plugin and have to 'uninstall' it if they don't want it.

I do when it takes Internet Explorer several seconds to open a blank page. Fortunately other browsers are a lot faster at starting up and creating new tabs.

It's only the SPEs in the PS3 that are specialized: the main CPU, the PPE, is similar to a PowerPC 970.

It was fixed via a FreeBSD Foundation project in 8.0 and merged back to 7.x.

You don't need to remove RAM to reduce the amount of memory Windows has available - you can configure it via msconfig (Boot -> advanced options) or bcdedit.