Considering the Tesla is a luxury car, both by market segment and by marketing I'm not sure where you're going with that...

The WRX is inexpensive as far as sports cars go, especially if you go with the base rather than STI model.

I was watching the US version of Top Gear and the fifth episode of the new season featured high performance people haulers, Rutledge picked an 1,100+ HP Honda Odyssey =)

No, it's a list of inexpensive sports cars and cheap cars that young drivers will be able to afford. The only one on that list that really stuck out to me was the Prius C, guess the younger demographic isn't as eco-conscious as the folks that bought the original Prius.

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).