Nowadays, the instruction set is just a front end and changing it won't do much in term of performance.
I believe that the reason why x86 is so prevalent on PCs and ARM in mobile devices is mostly historical : Intel focuses on expensive, high performance CPUs and ARM on cheap, low power SoCs.

Cell phones and tablets screen are also touch devices and I believe smooth (and therefore, shiny) is better. Matte PDAs exist but they are almost all stylus operated.

Considering how much crap uninformed users tend to install just to ask their their more knowledgeable friends to fix their mess, I don't think that putting a small barrier is a bad thing.

Wouldn't the flammable nature of magnesium be a problem in case of a car crash ?

At least on Android : https://play.google.com/store/apps/collection/topgrossing
Most apps are "free". Which means their income results from in-app purchase.

For Diablo III (softcore), I noticed just the opposite : on average, gear quickly lose value.
This is understandable because the auction house, with its 15% commission makes a very efficient gold sink : if the prices get too high, more gold will get destroyed by this commission, but it won't be created any faster. It is effectively a negative feedback loop that stabilize the prices. In the last patch, the new actually useful crafting recipes added even more gold sinks. OTOH, once a good item enters the economy, it stays. And once people upgrade they are likely to sell their lesser items for cheap. And now these lesser items are actually quite rare and good enough to clear the game in its hardest difficulty setting.

Cables are just cables. If there is nothing to connect them to, they are worthless.
And the telecom companies will be all too happy to sell this connection without having to pay for the costly "last mile" network.

Systems don't really matter, games do. When people buy a console it is usually to play specific games, sometimes just a single one.
Whatever the age or the technology behind the console is, if there are great games on it, it will sell. It's that simple.

It the correct SIM card is not inside the phone, the phone can't turn on without a password.

Yes, it could work. The key for this system to work is to make sure that to follow a car closely, you should check constantly (let's say within 10ms) that the next car is OK.
A blowout doesn't stop a car instantly, in fact, few things can stop a car faster than breaking. In the event of a blowout, the computer can quickly notice that something went wrong and signal an emergency to break all the other cars behind it and those coming the opposite way. All cars will then start breaking at the same time, relying on their internal distance sensors and ABS like systems to release the breaks when the car behind it comes too close. Because the cars constantly check each other, a failure is unlikely.

Self-driving cars certainly must adapt to radio interference and use all their senses but this is no reason to make one of these senses less reliable.
For the same reason that even if we don't absolutely need break lights it is no reason to make them less reliable.

I don't know about Australia and Canada but French rural areas contain a large number of small villages (about 35000-40000). It results in a complex network of small roads and I believe it is much more difficult to connect than a few farms along a highway with huge fields in between.
The disadvantages is not just the size (population density and area are somewhat average) but the fact that the population is more evenly spread out than in most other countries.

Here is an example of what I'm talking about :
- USA : https://maps.google.com/?ll=38.350273,-99.51416&spn=0.98327,1.983032&t=m&z=10
- France : https://maps.google.com/?ll=44.570904,2.411499&spn=0.893188,1.983032&t=m&z=10

IMHO, Megatexture style engines are the future. The reason is that we our eyes resolution is limited, there is a point where adding more detail is useless and we are close to this point right now. On the other hand, storage capacity and bandwidth continues to increase, making repeating textures less interesting.
Also, RAGE is designed to run 60 fps on XBOX360 and PS3, as a result, a lot of compromises were made. It probably explains the mostly static environment.

I was also a bit disappointed by RAGE but I don't understand how one can say it is 10 years out of date when it uses something that has never been done before in a commercial game engine.

If it isn't an invention worthy of a patent, I don't know what it is.
The idea of tying a generator to a radio is the easy part, and like all big ideas, even earth-changing ones, it is not worthy of a patent. What deserves a patent is the hard work that transform an idea into a working prototype.
Ok, you want to tie a generator to a radio : what kind of radio do you use, what gears, what materials, how does it hold together, how to get a steady voltage, etc... ? These are the questions an inventor must answer. And this is probably the reason why M.Baylis didn't get any royalties from the battery-based design : it is not the same invention even if the idea is the same.

Yes, you sometimes need concessions. For example, sockets and slots take valuable space and may be points of failure, this is why I have no real problem when manufacturers decide to solder everything to the main board. Same thing for these fused digitizer/screens, it prevents dust and moisture from entering, which is a very good thing.
But what is the reason behind glued batteries ? If the space inside a device is that well managed, the battery should have no room left to move around, meaning that glue is superfluous. Also, user replacable batteries are not just good for repairability. There is the ability to use spare batteries and a way to really turn off the device (by removing the battery).
And what about the glued screen ? I'm sure a few screws would have greatly imporved repairability while sacrificing maybe a few milligrams of weight and a few micons in size. There are already more than 90 screws inside the device, Would that be that much of a problem to make some of these accessible from the outside and avoid a dangerous operation with the heatgun.