Expense has a massive impact on how and why a technology is used. Phone tapping used to be cost prohibitive because you had to have someone review the results in real time, today between metadata and speech to text you can mine the conversations of literally the entire world for less than 0.0007% of US GDP, and so we have. If aerial surveillance of the populace cost as much as 20 patrol cars with officers then few departments will even bother with an air unit and those that do have one will use them sparingly, if it costs less than the fuel for a patrol car there will be a push to use them, and that will open all kinds of abuse.

No, it has limited time caching of a specific small tile area, very different from real offline maps.

They're likely getting a subsidy from MS paid for by future Office365/OneDrive revenues plus I'm sure this has Bing integration so there's some ad revenue to split.

Also owned by Google =)
Sygic maps is a decent alternative if you don't want to go Google, and they support offline maps which can help if you have a limited data plan or you'll be somewhere with expensive or nonexistent roaming.

Well Kitkat is apparently making good inroads as it went from 13.6% in June to 24.5% in early September, and versions earlier than JB are down to 21%. This move by Google to cut off the bottom feeders that want to push old models without any hope of them ever being updated can only help these numbers. Personally I think they should cut off any manufacturer that doesn't agree to at least security updates for 2 years (typical length of contract in many parts of the world).

Intel will be able to support playable framerates @4k sometime in 2020 or so...

Yup, just like with the BLM/MMS it's a case of regulatory capture. In fact in the financial sector it was even worse as the banks were basically allowed to make minor changes to their operating and reporting structure to choose which regulatory agency(ies) they reported to so if one agency started to get too strict they'd just make changes and get a new regulator, and once enough banks switched there would be downsizing at the effected regulator so there were strong incentives not to go strong on enforcement.

I don't mind paying $20 for a light bulb I'll probably never have to replace again
OLED's are nowhere near that, OLEDs are expensive to manufacture, and the most common current chemistry results in a blue half life of 15-20k hours, or 5-7 years at 8 hours per day. With traditional LEDs the bulb lifespan isn't dominated by the LEDs themselves, but rather by the heat sensitive electrolytic capacitor (this is why in the real world LED bulbs have no advantage over CFLs, they both fail due to capacitor failure).

Now the ammo box I can understand...Murica! F yeah! Murica! MURICAAAA!!!! Land of the FREE! Freedom! Democracy! Liberty! Guns!!...but the government have bigger guns and tanks and armored vehicles and drones and aircraft and ships and missiles and....yeah, fat lot of good your guns will do

Uh, a small minority of people in a foreign country with a gun ownership rate 1/10th that of the US just kept all our high tech war apparatus occupied for over a decade, if you think the military operating on domestic soil (massive desertions) would be able to subjugate the populace by force you're nuts.

Looking into the history of the grand canyon to see why that is not such a good idea...

This will get overturned the first time a journalist fights it, freedom of the press is probably the most important right in a democracy and this supreme court has shown that they're very strong advocates of the first amendment (perhaps too much so in their interpretation of corporate personhood, but that's another thread).

Considering Gates has pledged to give away 100% of his fortune any tax avoidance is only to increase the amount of money that ends up in the charity. Let's face it, as the wealthiest man in the world he's never going to go hungry, or even be uncomfortable, but unlike many his goal isn't to setup a line of descendants that never need to work. He's done making his money and now his focus is how to use that amassed wealth to help the world. Frankly to his mindset offshoring isn't necessarily a bad thing as it increases wealth in parts of the world that need a lot of infrastructure work that's beyond the scope of even what the Gates Foundation is capable of.

I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but total solar insolation on the lower 48 is 46,700 Quads/year, compared to that the total electricity usage of the USA at 38.2 quads/year is a rounding error, the albedo effect from heavy clouds created by El Nino or heavier than average snowfall in the winter probably has several times more effect on the strength of winds than if we were to tap 100% of our electricity needs through wind.

Stored solar thermal exists, it might not be as cheap as coal without coals externalities included in the retail price, but it's doable and switching over baseloads to it would cost at most a few tenths of a percent of GDP for developed nations.

Because there are very few $200 smartphones that are capable of doing much but the basics and performance will be sloppy

Huh? You must have missed the Moto G, $150 and it's almost the same as the Nexus 5 from TFA. If you insist on 4G then the Moto G LTE comes closer to $200. There are now a bunch of competitors to the Moto G, though only a few are available in the US.