The Apple logo is just the invitation to this sort of techno-moralism. For natural born atheists and non-Christians, the half-eaten apple is a representation of the Forbidden Fruit. So, yes, Apple is "evil" in that "iconic" sense. You just have to have an iPhone but all you can afford is an Android? Confess your sin and say your prayers, son.

Then there's fusion reactors, a proven clean energy source that seems to always be left out of the discussion.

You probably mean fission, unless you know something we don't. Or are you talking about the biggest power source within eight light minutes of us?

The best the First World can do militarily[*] is a no-fly zone, that is, grounding the dictator's main military advantage. Shipping lots of arms can only serve to escalate the war. And who knows, in whose hands those weapons would fall? Remember what happened in Afghanistan when the US was trying to root out the Soviet-sponsored regime? That succeeded marvelously and also gave birth to the Taliban.

I suspect your suggestion comes the the so-called "right to bear arms" that many in the US hold so dear. This doesn't work in all situations, but probably only in those countries or locales where you have a strong middle class. If you're poor and hungry, you tend to think of a gun not just as an instrument for self-defense and national liberation but as a tool to get the necessities you want (food, sex, etc.).

[*]Food and medical aid is probably still the best option.

I agree this is irrelevant, as far as nerds are concerned (so where's the !nerd tag?). Yes, it's probably monstrously important for Slashdot users as human beings that some order is being established in that country. After all, who needs another Somalia? But it should be in a news for nerds context like how to get news in/out of net-deprived $country, make a cheap sat-dish receiver, or send aid online (without getting scammed), etc. More of this and Slashdot becomes just another Digg or Reddit.

No, if you're earning $$, why bother? Like a dictator or mob boss, have somebody else do the dirty deed for you. That way you don't get sued for whatever happens to the child. Let the manufacturer think of the children.

Well then I nominate /book as the antisocial equivalent of Facebook. Wait, where are the photos and the casual games? Really, if something's going to be called the X version of Facebook, shouldn't it be a site that at least allows you to deal with real people (or at least people pretending to be real) rather aliases and cartoon avatars? According to tFA, the site

appeared as lines of computer code and broken English [where] hackers and fraudsters traded anonymously [...]

Seems more like the "criminal" equivalent of Twitter to me. Or Craiglist, which has already been accused of being one.

Yeah, there should be a big button, right on the release announcement page, labeled "Download" for the OS/Architecture of the browser you're currently running. But the download's not that far off. For those to tired or lazy to look, the link to the download page is right under the link for "Release Notes". (This might be a case of deliberate obfuscation, since this is a beta that you don't want to mistake for a supported official release.)

I kind of like BTW the sci-fi theme of the page background, where you got this team of people fixing or unloading things off their hovercars.

The headline is a bit deceptive. I think the good professor was arrested for showing the videos to other people. (Although it's still possible the people he showed it to were arrested, too.)

Yeah, I know this is an computer hardware question, so I checked hard disk. But in terms of being "active" and "available", my most significant bits of information is stored between the ears: wetware. Really, most of the information I have stored on hard/optical/flash disk is information that I could afford to lose since I can Google or download them again. I can ill afford a neural systems crash.

Being at home above the equator, I'm confused by the article's reference to "material relating to confidential commercial information". Supposedly, such information could and should be protected from disclosure.

But why does the government need to have trade secrets along with the usual military and diplomatic embargo on information? Dictators and their cronies might think it's okay to run a government for profit, but my understanding of democratic government is that, at best, it shouldn't lose money ("balanced budget"). Fees are charged for paperwork and the like so the government can pay its employees or buy the raw materials it needs to render its services.

if the seeds don't grow? I mean, if they're targeting the tree-hugging crowd, shouldn't there be some guarantee the shoes will sprout as advertised?

It seems more like a contest for the design school crowd, not hardcore engineers. I find the Google moon rover contest far more interesting from an engineering perspective.

Park one or more of these puppies in orbit, next to the ISS.

Attach them to the ISS, to be sure they don't float away and add to the space junk. But I like the idea of keeping the shuttles up in space after their last flight. Since money has already been burnt on the launch, why not keep the shuttles up as, say, extra storage for non-critical radiation-tolerant supplies.

Only problem is how to get the shuttle astronauts back to Earth. The Soyuz is perhaps the only other human-rated spacecraft that can serve as a return vehicle for the ISS.

Iran's government is perfectly designed to weather this kind of thing. First off, the Islamic council aren't dumb, not in the slightest. The protests in mid last year were met mainly with subterfuge and false flag operations (sound familiar). Secondly they've isolated the military and police in this. They use the Republican Guard which are primarily non-Iranian Arabs (Iran is mostly Persian in ethnicity) who are loyal to the government and not attached to the people. Thirdly the power structure is not centred around a single person (president mahmoud whatisname) he's just a puppet, a front man to keep the real rulers (Islamic Council) safe.

This reminds me of the political situation in China, where the president is the face of what is effectively a collective presidency, the politburo of the Chinese Communist party.

The Iranian government isn't a brutal dictator like Gadafi or an incompetent embezzling oaf like Mubarak. They are cold and calculating, much like the Soviets.

The Soviets weren't as cold and calculating as the Chinese government is now. Or else how explain the monumental collapse of the Soviet Union after the Party decided to launch a coup d'etat against itself in the early 1990's?

What China and Iran have in common is the realization that you can't have somebody sitting as president-for-life when you want the Party (or whatever you call the ruling class in Iran) to reign for eternity. Whether through rigged elections or party machinations, the titular change of leadership in the two countries fulfills the same function (for the general population) as general elections in the US or UK, and none of the possibility of electing narcissistic whackos. One downside to "free" elections is that a really determined media-savvy newcomer has a shot at leapfrogging to the top without getting vetted (or purged) at the lower levels of the party. Hitler, after all, was a democratically elected leader of pre-World War 2 Germany.

to molecular printing and the Star Trek economy (without the warp drive, tractor beam, and transporter).

I remember seeing a BBC (?) video somewhere about some research lab printing some human organ prototypes. The prototypes weren't functional in themselves but supposedly will be used as scaffolding for embedded heart/lung/etc sells to grow on, thus requiring the success of another technology, stem cell manipulation.