No, Saro Dursun is a fraudster. I don't remember all the details but she Imigrated to Sweden in the 60/70s with another persons papers stating she was 65+ when she was in fact 40-something. 65 is the retirement age in Sweden...
I don't think that bothers him. He has discussed his views and tastes regarding pornography (with explicit examples) before on his site. He also has a travellog from Las Vegas that includes a visit to a prostitute. He's quite a character and his site includes posts about everything from math and tech to the stuff I mentioned above.
You get the full Office 2013 suite with most x86 tablets nowadays (which you won't when you buy a Surface oddly enough). For me that definitely played a part in my decision to get an Asus T100.
As a sidenote regarding iOS, you could checkout http://www.robovm.org/. It's already used for running libgdx (a Java game framework for a number of platforms) games on iOS for example.
To be honest I am not seeing a lot of "excellent features" there. Except for the UI changes the rest seem to be mostly small miscellaneous stuff and some of them for the better.
Silverlight for Linux has existed through the Mono platform since 2007 under the name Moonlight: http://mono-project.com/Moonlight . With Microsoft's blessing I might add.
That's why milk companies in Sweden (total fucking darkness for 6 months every year) have to enrich milk with less than 1,5% fat with Vitamin D. It's actually a requirement by law.
Nokia Maps is _amazing_ and has been since the Symbian days, even more so by the fact that you can download maps beforehand (whole countries) and use them offline. Utterly unparalleled might be a bit harsh.
I can't say that I have used the Firefox OS simulator extensively but I have been fiddling around with it a little bit and a lot of stuff didn't seem to work for me at least (like landscape mode, buttons in the notification menu, scroll seem to behave very weird in lists and/or gets stuck quite often resulting in me accidentally clicking on stuff, strange text formatting so that text gets printed outside of the screen, it crashes when I turn on WIFI, can't seem to change screen resolution, etc.). So "the best" might be pushing it, especially compared to the Windows Phone emulator and tools which are really, really great (but sadly won't be used by most mobile developers for obvious reasons :) ).
However I am excited to see where Firefox OS might be heading even though I think they will have a though time fighting it out with other potential "third spot" platforms for starters.
Well doesn't most IT-students qualify for a free MSDN subscription or at least Dreamspark (which has Windows Server, SQL, VS and so on for free for any student)? My experience with Microsoft is that they are very generous with their software in regards to students since they have a lot to gain and really nothing to lose by letting soon-to-be-professional-developers get comfortable with their stack.