Near as I can tell, Apple isn't doing anything to try to make Free software disappear. They are, however, creating many alternatives ever since GPLv3 made it unviable for them to continue to participate in that community as much. Even now, though, if you look at all the packages they use and contribute to as part of MacOS X (the core of which is all open source, although most of it isn't Free Software), there are many GPL packages among them: http://www.opensource.apple.co... . It does seem that with companies like Apple actively participating in Open Source but not as actively participating in Free Software, that to a certain degree it's proving many of the anti-GPL folks' points and probably really pissing off RMS.

There are such records. The Bible discusses silk, and the Romans loved it. The Silk Road was established about 1800-1900 years ago to supply the Roman empire with Chinese silk. Later the Romans attempted to breed their own silkworms.

As for extensive pre-Colombian contact, I would assume based on the exchange of plants, animals, metals, disease, and technology, that such contact would stick out in the historical record. In my opinion it's far more likely that the carbon dating was inaccurate or that the interpretation of the plants as American than that extensive pre-Colombian exchange existed.

This attack is not an all-or-nothing thing, either. 51% is just the threshold to be able to guarantee success. Controlling 40% of the mining capacity is enough to be able to double-spend a transaction that's been confirmed 6 times with 50% confidence.

Here's a list of semiconductor manufacturing plants many of which are in the United States, including some of the most advanced fab lines in the world. It's true, as others have said, that assembly almost always happens in Asia now, though, but that's not a requirement if you're not price conscious. As for the capacitors and such, I think there's been less concern about them from a security standpoint.

These predictions were made in 1964. "The pill" had just become available for birth control use in the United States a few years previous, but only in some states and only to married women... it wasn't generally available to any woman who wanted it in all states until the early 70's. Maybe it was because he was a male, but not realizing the impact this would have on the (developed) world seems to be one of his bigger oversights.

The real comparison comes in how good the machine is at doing what you need it to do. If you're making a movie or doing serious sound editing, video editing, or modeling, this machine and the accompanying software is clearly top-tier, compared to trying to assemble a full workflow yourself that includes the hardware, software, and infrastructure integration. And the fact that you just order it off the shelf and it comes with everything and integrates with everything isn't really priced into this comparison.

Measles is tracked in part because it's really easily preventable with a safe vaccine which had eliminated it on the North American content a decade ago, and because it's one of the single most virulent diseases known to man. In a susceptible population, breathing the same air of someone who has it will make you 90% likely to get it. Many of the "pandemic" worst case scenarios is the measles virus combining with a more deadly virus to create a super virus, but even without that measles complications are common and can lead to permanently reduced vision, encephalitis leading to brain injuries, or other long-term problems. In the developed world the death rate is something like 0.3%, but in the undeveloped world it's sometimes over 25%. Nasty, easily preventable stuff worth tracking.

This makes no sense to me. First of all, G+ is a non-starter because Google is even worse than Facebook about collecting all the data they can on everyone who touches their services and trying to sell to them. If it ever were to catch on (however unlikely that may be), you'd see the exact same thing there or worse. The rest, well, if you can't monetize it somehow, who's going to pay the developers to develop it? A bunch of enthusiasts only gets you so far, and won't be able to keep up with an organization that has a revenue stream that's able to sustain a large development team. Apple's theory has been to tie their services to hardware and make money there, thus negating the need to track and spam, but it doesn't seem to produce great online services that way (and most geeks here seem to prefer Google monitoring their every move to Apple's model anyway). So basically, it's not going to become world-class if it can't be monetized, and while the only two models today (track and spam like FB and Google or tie to hardware like Apple and Samsung) each have significant issues, you don't seem to be proposing any alternate model that could be self-sustaining either.

The Matrix came out in 1999. Remember those switchblade phones they used? That was a Nokia 8110... state of the art in 2000. The PalmOS phones wouldn't come out for a few years after that, which are arguably one of the first mass-produced "smart" phones.

On this site a substantial number of readers use a phone whose OS is produced by a company that gets 95% of its revenue and profit from recording everything about you that it can, finding your weaknesses, and selling access to them to the highest bidder with zero oversight. Compared to that, what is the outrage over a Government agency sifting through metadata looking for people who want to hurt us and trying to stop them?

It can't possibly be Google's fault; this is Slashdot. It must be Oracle's fault that Google copied badly from Java.