In his order, Judge Robart specifically points out that the patent describes how to do the encoding but not the decoding.

The answer is no, you're not limited to the set of OS versions on the page you linked to. That page just lists the OS versions where you put the /PAE switch into boot.ini. Later versions support PAE just as well, but have a different configuration mechanism to enable it. Details are available from the page you linked to.

One of the big differences is the "quests", which not only teach you about using the tool, but more importantly teach you about game design (or at least level design) and how to make your game interesting/fun. The free quest covers things like setting goals for the players and using space in the levels to control difficulty.

I've only gone through the free quest. It was interesting, and I'm interested in seeing more, but I wasn't interested in paying a monthly fee. If there was a one-time, reasonable cost for the premium content instead, I'd probably go for it.

The site claims that more free content is coming, but I've been watching for more than a year and haven't seen any new free quests yet.

I just started reading this book, based on the review, and it looks like it'll be worthwhile.

However, in the first chapter, in the section titled Choosing the Right Platform and Evaluating a System (which really just focuses on how the newer Sun Sparc processors differ from other multi-core, multi-threaded processors), they manage to repeat themselves four or five times, using almost the same words each time.

I'm hopeful that this is an isolated case and not something that happens throughout the book. The earlier parts of that first chapter didn't have the same issue.