what makes you think anyone still uses internet explorer. inflated botnet numbers from microsoft? oh wait windows 8 by default has about 20 automatically refreshing tabs with internet explorer. between win8 and botnets the traffic is skewed.
android is proof that open source and 'free software' are a far cry from each other, and it tracks a lot of data while i have yet to hear of free software containing adware.
instead of cherry picking just one state, why not cherry pick 30 states. http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/press/rprts05p0510pr.cfm sure only 77% repeated within 5 years... but hell i was messed up for 20+ years and nothing worked until i was diagnosed and medicated. sure i didn't 'break' many laws and was only in police care until they could transport me to psychwards etc. and they were trying to help me. i would say they did good, because now i am stable and i'm a heavy streaming media user, rather than a heavy torrent user, now... though sometimes only torrents have things due to stupid unfair approaches to copyright... like licensing movies and tv content from separate parties and thus not having the movies available when the tv series is available... and i need to see the movie to understand how the storyline is from the tv series... (like movie 10 of the anime one piece) and keep in mind one piece has 600+ tv episodes with more to come and it doesn't make sense to just watch the anime without the movies because the movies make more sense (but except movie 10 are all non canaon of the manga or anime) if crunchyroll had the movies i would watch it there of course, but they don't and piracy is something many many people do, from radio mixtapes to vhs copying to dvd ripping most people have circumvented copyright if they had the resources to have a device but not the income to own content. so great i don't have to pirate movies because i can afford to stream them and i don't mind waiting for netflix or amazon or crunchyroll or don't mind hulu ads but when these sites only get partial content i have few options buying the movies off amazon is one possibility but at $20 a movie it then conflicts with my entertainment budget of $100 a month. anyways, i do have quite a backlog of movies to watch, and i easily spend $100 a month on entertainment so i probably sound pretty vain but i was taught that sharing is a good thing. that people are supposed to share the good parts of their life to others in hope they too lead an enjoyable life. copyright shouldn't be seen as a way to make the world a better place because it doesn't. it makes sharing a harder process and i don't always like the 'hyped' content for instance i spent $20 of my entertainment budget on the first 5 books of game of thrones(kindle edition) and have only gotten through the first chapter, so far. and if it doesn't get better it will be not very high on my list of things to do. if i had pirated the books i probably would have deleted them by now. as it is i feel obligated to keep the ebook until i finish the first book, because i know sometimes it takes authors a while to get a good storyline rolling.
for live events there is this neat thing called 'multicast' where you beam the same stream in one broadcast signal to as many customers as needed. multicast is way underutilized but it does get used for the big live streams. live streams can only be paused if buffering on the client end allows it. streams from non live media use a lot more bandwith as each user needs to hold open a stream can pause it (though with flash the stream will time out) etc. but flash only has a 10 megabyte buffer and defaults to a single megabyte. anyways google seems to be able to do it, as do netflix hulu crunchyroll etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB in my timeline windows 98se was the first wide spread use of usb technology. a full 2 years before apple decided to add usb, based on your '5 year' timetable. personally i thought usb 1.1 too slow, and while i did eventually buy a 4 port powered hub, the main thing i used usb for was joysticks and mice, at the time you got 2 usb ports on a computer, and so when printers went usb i had to get one to have 3 usb ports. also digital cameras and scanners both went usb, and then i needed 5 ports... and then i quit using printers and scanners, but then external hdds were cheapest backup options, then flash memory came out and those eat usb ports for breakfast... connecting a whole lot of them is easy and sometimes it is nice to have several pluged in for various uses... luckily motherboards come with 6-12 ports for decent desktop computers, and some laptops have 4 usb ports which then means using a powered hub, because now bluray burners, cell phones, wifi/ethernet dongles, flash memory, mouse, hdds, etc etc etc. unplugging things is possible but not ideal.
"Slashdot are a bunch of sellouts now. There is so much popup bullshit all over the screen, I think i'm done with Slashdot."
slashdot looks better with noscript and the original layout options. of course you deny slashdot the ability to run scripts in your browser that way which imo is good.
http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lectures/deforest/deforest.html along with seasonal co2 levels http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/ the first url shows where active forests are mostly the northern hemisphere. the second shows how winter co2 spikes globally as measured as far away from humanity as you can get. deforestation without replanting is unsustainable since the industrial revolution global forest have been 50% cleared. this is in 200 years of deforestation, another 200 and even the best efforts to replant forests will be irreversible, as charts show this will cause temperature rising and water resources dwindling as freshwater is pumped out of aquifers for human and crop consumption. animals don't use nearly as much water as humans do. so if more and more people are born more and more drought will hit especially as heat rises. which will lead to humans airconditioning more and more, which will raise the temperature.
no the 'system' is not perfect and capitalism doesn't 'solve' global warming at best it makes companies greenwash the public and it is clear that unrestricted growth will lead to the extinction of humans, unless something is done, and i don't trust humans to do this on their own. computers need to do it and have the respect for creating a better world through more efficient recognition of real problems and real solutions.
"There is more slavery in the world today, than ever before."
yup, in america we call it wage slavery. mcdonalds, walmart, subway, papa johns, numerous tipped workers at restaurants everywhere... none of these companies pay all of their workers fairly, and some of them help make sure their employees who are so under paid to sign up for welfare and they actually qualify for it! and even management are abused by paying them 40 hours a week and expecting 80 hours a week in real work hours. and it doesn't stop with the employees, the items in walmart come from a lot of companies who pay $1 an hour for a call center and barely enough to buy food for the low end workers. for a while china was heavily using unpaid political prisoners in work programs until 'consumers' started finding pleas for help to escape from notes in the products. so they closed a few factories until the could quietly ensure workers had no way to sneak notes into products. sweat shops aren't just over seas though, illegals get caught by corrupt people who then force them to work for almost no wage making counterfeit items that they try to sell at $100 of more an item. everything i've mentioned has been covered by major news outlets. so likely are token efforts by the press to make the world a better place.
if you count a quad core cell phone running a linux kernel as a 'linux only' machine then the big boxes will sell you one. but then the carrier has fees more extravagant than any av suite.
he is spot on with cell phones. the chip that communicates with towers can currently only be turned off, by physically altering the hardware, or by removing the battery. both of which violate the EULA you agreed to with your carrier. they legally can block you from their networks for modifying the hardware to turn off the geo positioning chip. turning the phone off does not disable the radio chip, nor does airplane mode. tablets and phones no longer have end user serviceable batteries and even some laptops require a complete dismantling to remove the battery. phones should be fully documented and run free software. but the PTB are afraid of that. and google makes $500 a year off of every unique user of their service. open source is just not good enough i don't trust android devices to have full access to my home network and neither should you. and yes i actively use facebook knowing they are evil. it is better to have a presence than to not for me so i use it. still i agree that social networks are just self reporting spying, no one ever said i was being 100% truthful on social networks. i try to make a profile of what i want the world to know rather than in the past where i was trying to get people to understand who i was and such.
i get all my Rx meds refilled by a smartphone app but that can be used over wifi but i have my phone's wifi separate and off most of the time, well and one laptop... because android is a threat to my network and allowing it 24/7 access to my network is unthinkable. i realize they make av software for smartphones but they tried that with windows and it still gets pwned if you are not careful. so i am careful and assume that my phone is a spyware laden (by design) and only let it see one machine on my network. i also have the other wifi for guests with smartphones. i really need a third network for those people but only family ever comes over so it isn't a priority.
also realize the nuclear 'football' that goes every where with the president is linked to networks all over the world thanks to satellites ground penetrating signals etc.
for security they only check the system where they are pretty sure no one can spy on the radio in the hopes that enemies can't learn to mimic the signals needed to launch a nuclear war from anywhere on the planet.
8" floppies wouldn't compensate for someone getting the launch codes and the frequency to launch from global networks.
you didn't provide links verifying your points. without links it is too hard for the people who regularly get mod points to mod positive, because if you want a soap box on slashdot you should use their journal system. having read the definition of austerity measures it is clear that the usa is also using austerity measures... the world is a complex place, though.
"After the french government committed to economic suicide with austerity policies" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austerity In economics, austerity describes policies used by governments to reduce budget deficits during adverse economic conditions. These policies may include spending cuts, tax increases, or a mixture of the two.[1][2][3] Austerity policies may be attempts to demonstrate governments' fiscal discipline to their creditors and credit rating agencies by bringing revenues closer to expenditures; they may also be politically or ideologically driven.
In macroeconomics, reducing government deficits generally increases unemployment in the short run.[4] This increases safety net spending and reduces tax revenues, partially offsetting the austerity measures. Government spending contributes to gross domestic product (GDP), so reducing spending may result in a higher debt-to-GDP ratio, a key measure of the debt burden carried by a country and its citizens. Higher short-term deficit spending (stimulus) contributes to GDP growth particularly when consumers and businesses are unwilling or unable to spend. This is because crowding out (i.e., rising interest rates as government bids against business for a finite amount of savings, slowing the economy) is less of a factor in a downturn, as there may be a surplus of savings.[5][6]
i am already paying $50 a month for verizon cell phone, that's a 4g lte phone with i think 1500 anytime minutes. 2gb data cap, unlimited texting costs $5 a month but i send/recieve less than $5 worth of texts a month. so no not 'everyone' has text messaging plans. my parents both have dumbphones still and they have text messages blocked to avoid unwanted charges.
and guess what, every other carrier servicing my area basically non existant. the towers used to be owned by alltel but now are all verizon and people can barely make phone calls if they aren't verizon phones.
i know a guy who never locks anything. his house, never locked. his car never locked. with the keys left in the visor in the closed position. so far he has never had a car broken into or a house burgled. the world is far safer than video games lead many to believe.
in linux any screen grab program can capture streams if you 'trust' the third party repository that hosts the software that convinces netflix it's streaming to a windows machine -- as long as you are using the open source driver to your gpu/apu whatever. in windows the driver enters a secure mode so you get a pink screen instead of the video, at least on ati it does.
if OpenSSL had 5 pages of bugs so far... and was widely used in an ecosystem where the source was there, just imagine the nightmare of closed source projects...
patching 100 bugs on average introduces 3 new bugs. now i know bugs != security vulnerabilities. but bugs are why people complain about software stability.
also a 'vulnerability' bug has a black market value that is always going to be higher than bug bounties. however an old exploit has the added value of 'reporting' it after a new vulnerability is found and the old one is blamed perhaps by news of this 'old' vulnerability. it's a revolving door problem. back in 1997 i knew how to 'fix' broken open source ports tree applications, because i used freebsd and it was very buggy (though less buggy than the windows 95 machine i had).
as i see it the problem is marketing. to get people to buy computers they promote them as doing a lot of things that they can only just barely do. and often the code base is filled by people who don't care about quality and comprehensible coding. and for for profit they often take steps to make the code illegible as a so called security through obscurity (which never works for more than a few years).
from what i can tell the 'freedombox' is using freedom as in freedom fries. it requires all the software to turn a pi into a server that is totally controlled via the internet with the ability to lie about who is sending the packets etc. some people call this type of software a 'rootkit' and it is understandable why they don't explain this to would be users who are expected to just flash a pi with it no questions asked. i could be wrong, but i'm not the only person on slashdot to 'doubt' the software.
the paper microscope is easy to incinerate, and i doubt the have autoclaves to sterilize the 'same magnification' in a educational microscope. the thing can be printed on almost any printer with a few parts (battery) that shouldn't be incinerated and are not printable yet. to use all you do is go into a shaded room insert a slide and see everything on a tabletop below the device. they can then have a list of pathogen shots pre printed and bundled with the microscope, at least the website has the photos so including common pathogens adds little to the cost. in africa you don't need education to be a doctor. you show up and do what you can. a quality microscope that doesn't come with shots of known pathogens is unlikely to exist in many parts of africa. while a $1 paper projection microscope doesn't seem like it is great, it is something that can really help people.
electricity is not a hard thing to make. my rambling on which must have been tldr for you said how easy electricity is to come by if you're just powering one guys gear. or mobile devices.
i know a guy who can test and replace most parts on a motherboard. post appocalypse thats real handy, i never learned it, because blown caps can take a number of other hard to find parts... still with 3d printers that can 3d print themselves means the ability to print computer parts. not top of the line, but for data preservation and access technology it's pretty feasible when you consider sites like http://www.cd3wd.com/ are doing now, to advance civilization in the third world nations it means that people will continue to make useful technology and need skilled tech people. an appocalypse would make it hard but not impossible. patents on software and hardware has done more to stunt technology than anything else. so post appocalypse there will be people stringing up 80 watt wireless tranciever from a tree or flag pole like they do now in africa, and powering an 80 watt and a few hundred 5 watt devices is easily solar powerable not to mention other energy sources like solid waste and biomass gasification... corn can be turned into plastic with a catylyst... so its really hard to say what it's gonna look like. the assuption is that tech will die that is not necisarily correct.
Slashdot Mirror
what makes you think anyone still uses internet explorer. inflated botnet numbers from microsoft? oh wait windows 8 by default has about 20 automatically refreshing tabs with internet explorer. between win8 and botnets the traffic is skewed.
android is proof that open source and 'free software' are a far cry from each other, and it tracks a lot of data while i have yet to hear of free software containing adware.
instead of cherry picking just one state, why not cherry pick 30 states. http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/press/rprts05p0510pr.cfm sure only 77% repeated within 5 years... but hell i was messed up for 20+ years and nothing worked until i was diagnosed and medicated. sure i didn't 'break' many laws and was only in police care until they could transport me to psychwards etc. and they were trying to help me. i would say they did good, because now i am stable and i'm a heavy streaming media user, rather than a heavy torrent user, now... though sometimes only torrents have things due to stupid unfair approaches to copyright... like licensing movies and tv content from separate parties and thus not having the movies available when the tv series is available... and i need to see the movie to understand how the storyline is from the tv series... (like movie 10 of the anime one piece) and keep in mind one piece has 600+ tv episodes with more to come and it doesn't make sense to just watch the anime without the movies because the movies make more sense (but except movie 10 are all non canaon of the manga or anime) if crunchyroll had the movies i would watch it there of course, but they don't and piracy is something many many people do, from radio mixtapes to vhs copying to dvd ripping most people have circumvented copyright if they had the resources to have a device but not the income to own content. so great i don't have to pirate movies because i can afford to stream them and i don't mind waiting for netflix or amazon or crunchyroll or don't mind hulu ads but when these sites only get partial content i have few options buying the movies off amazon is one possibility but at $20 a movie it then conflicts with my entertainment budget of $100 a month. anyways, i do have quite a backlog of movies to watch, and i easily spend $100 a month on entertainment so i probably sound pretty vain but i was taught that sharing is a good thing. that people are supposed to share the good parts of their life to others in hope they too lead an enjoyable life. copyright shouldn't be seen as a way to make the world a better place because it doesn't. it makes sharing a harder process and i don't always like the 'hyped' content for instance i spent $20 of my entertainment budget on the first 5 books of game of thrones(kindle edition) and have only gotten through the first chapter, so far. and if it doesn't get better it will be not very high on my list of things to do. if i had pirated the books i probably would have deleted them by now. as it is i feel obligated to keep the ebook until i finish the first book, because i know sometimes it takes authors a while to get a good storyline rolling.
for live events there is this neat thing called 'multicast' where you beam the same stream in one broadcast signal to as many customers as needed. multicast is way underutilized but it does get used for the big live streams. live streams can only be paused if buffering on the client end allows it. streams from non live media use a lot more bandwith as each user needs to hold open a stream can pause it (though with flash the stream will time out) etc. but flash only has a 10 megabyte buffer and defaults to a single megabyte. anyways google seems to be able to do it, as do netflix hulu crunchyroll etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB
in my timeline windows 98se was the first wide spread use of usb technology. a full 2 years before apple decided to add usb, based on your '5 year' timetable. personally i thought usb 1.1 too slow, and while i did eventually buy a 4 port powered hub, the main thing i used usb for was joysticks and mice, at the time you got 2 usb ports on a computer, and so when printers went usb i had to get one to have 3 usb ports. also digital cameras and scanners both went usb, and then i needed 5 ports... and then i quit using printers and scanners, but then external hdds were cheapest backup options, then flash memory came out and those eat usb ports for breakfast... connecting a whole lot of them is easy and sometimes it is nice to have several pluged in for various uses... luckily motherboards come with 6-12 ports for decent desktop computers, and some laptops have 4 usb ports which then means using a powered hub, because now bluray burners, cell phones, wifi/ethernet dongles, flash memory, mouse, hdds, etc etc etc. unplugging things is possible but not ideal.
"Slashdot are a bunch of sellouts now. There is so much popup bullshit all over the screen, I think i'm done with Slashdot."
slashdot looks better with noscript and the original layout options. of course you deny slashdot the ability to run scripts in your browser that way which imo is good.
http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lectures/deforest/deforest.html
along with seasonal co2 levels
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
the first url shows where active forests are mostly the northern hemisphere. the second shows how winter co2 spikes globally as measured as far away from humanity as you can get. deforestation without replanting is unsustainable since the industrial revolution global forest have been 50% cleared. this is in 200 years of deforestation, another 200 and even the best efforts to replant forests will be irreversible, as charts show this will cause temperature rising and water resources dwindling as freshwater is pumped out of aquifers for human and crop consumption. animals don't use nearly as much water as humans do. so if more and more people are born more and more drought will hit especially as heat rises. which will lead to humans airconditioning more and more, which will raise the temperature.
no the 'system' is not perfect and capitalism doesn't 'solve' global warming at best it makes companies greenwash the public and it is clear that unrestricted growth will lead to the extinction of humans, unless something is done, and i don't trust humans to do this on their own. computers need to do it and have the respect for creating a better world through more efficient recognition of real problems and real solutions.
"There is more slavery in the world today, than ever before."
yup, in america we call it wage slavery. mcdonalds, walmart, subway, papa johns, numerous tipped workers at restaurants everywhere... none of these companies pay all of their workers fairly, and some of them help make sure their employees who are so under paid to sign up for welfare and they actually qualify for it! and even management are abused by paying them 40 hours a week and expecting 80 hours a week in real work hours. and it doesn't stop with the employees, the items in walmart come from a lot of companies who pay $1 an hour for a call center and barely enough to buy food for the low end workers. for a while china was heavily using unpaid political prisoners in work programs until 'consumers' started finding pleas for help to escape from notes in the products. so they closed a few factories until the could quietly ensure workers had no way to sneak notes into products. sweat shops aren't just over seas though, illegals get caught by corrupt people who then force them to work for almost no wage making counterfeit items that they try to sell at $100 of more an item. everything i've mentioned has been covered by major news outlets. so likely are token efforts by the press to make the world a better place.
to be fair microsoft has been trying to get tablet windows machines since forever. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_tablet_computers
i worded it wrong -- it voids the warranty. i can get pictures of the seal on my smartphone's battery it is not end user serviceable
if you count a quad core cell phone running a linux kernel as a 'linux only' machine then the big boxes will sell you one. but then the carrier has fees more extravagant than any av suite.
he is spot on with cell phones. the chip that communicates with towers can currently only be turned off, by physically altering the hardware, or by removing the battery. both of which violate the EULA you agreed to with your carrier. they legally can block you from their networks for modifying the hardware to turn off the geo positioning chip. turning the phone off does not disable the radio chip, nor does airplane mode. tablets and phones no longer have end user serviceable batteries and even some laptops require a complete dismantling to remove the battery. phones should be fully documented and run free software. but the PTB are afraid of that. and google makes $500 a year off of every unique user of their service. open source is just not good enough i don't trust android devices to have full access to my home network and neither should you. and yes i actively use facebook knowing they are evil. it is better to have a presence than to not for me so i use it. still i agree that social networks are just self reporting spying, no one ever said i was being 100% truthful on social networks. i try to make a profile of what i want the world to know rather than in the past where i was trying to get people to understand who i was and such.
i get all my Rx meds refilled by a smartphone app but that can be used over wifi but i have my phone's wifi separate and off most of the time, well and one laptop... because android is a threat to my network and allowing it 24/7 access to my network is unthinkable. i realize they make av software for smartphones but they tried that with windows and it still gets pwned if you are not careful. so i am careful and assume that my phone is a spyware laden (by design) and only let it see one machine on my network. i also have the other wifi for guests with smartphones. i really need a third network for those people but only family ever comes over so it isn't a priority.
"You buy a card reader for your home computer."
but there is no chip & pin to buy the home reader.
it's there is a hole in the bucket problem, because the whet wheel needs water to hone the knife to fix the hole in the bucket.
also realize the nuclear 'football' that goes every where with the president is linked to networks all over the world thanks to satellites ground penetrating signals etc.
for security they only check the system where they are pretty sure no one can spy on the radio in the hopes that enemies can't learn to mimic the signals needed to launch a nuclear war from anywhere on the planet.
8" floppies wouldn't compensate for someone getting the launch codes and the frequency to launch from global networks.
you didn't provide links verifying your points. without links it is too hard for the people who regularly get mod points to mod positive, because if you want a soap box on slashdot you should use their journal system. having read the definition of austerity measures it is clear that the usa is also using austerity measures... the world is a complex place, though.
"After the french government committed to economic suicide with austerity policies" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austerity In economics, austerity describes policies used by governments to reduce budget deficits during adverse economic conditions. These policies may include spending cuts, tax increases, or a mixture of the two.[1][2][3] Austerity policies may be attempts to demonstrate governments' fiscal discipline to their creditors and credit rating agencies by bringing revenues closer to expenditures; they may also be politically or ideologically driven.
In macroeconomics, reducing government deficits generally increases unemployment in the short run.[4] This increases safety net spending and reduces tax revenues, partially offsetting the austerity measures. Government spending contributes to gross domestic product (GDP), so reducing spending may result in a higher debt-to-GDP ratio, a key measure of the debt burden carried by a country and its citizens. Higher short-term deficit spending (stimulus) contributes to GDP growth particularly when consumers and businesses are unwilling or unable to spend. This is because crowding out (i.e., rising interest rates as government bids against business for a finite amount of savings, slowing the economy) is less of a factor in a downturn, as there may be a surplus of savings.[5][6]
wisconsin,
i am already paying $50 a month for verizon cell phone, that's a 4g lte phone with i think 1500 anytime minutes. 2gb data cap, unlimited texting costs $5 a month but i send/recieve less than $5 worth of texts a month. so no not 'everyone' has text messaging plans. my parents both have dumbphones still and they have text messages blocked to avoid unwanted charges.
and guess what, every other carrier servicing my area basically non existant. the towers used to be owned by alltel but now are all verizon and people can barely make phone calls if they aren't verizon phones.
"In my world, a locked door is normal."
i know a guy who never locks anything. his house, never locked. his car never locked. with the keys left in the visor in the closed position. so far he has never had a car broken into or a house burgled. the world is far safer than video games lead many to believe.
in linux any screen grab program can capture streams if you 'trust' the third party repository that hosts the software that convinces netflix it's streaming to a windows machine -- as long as you are using the open source driver to your gpu/apu whatever. in windows the driver enters a secure mode so you get a pink screen instead of the video, at least on ati it does.
the url you mentioned or one of them is here http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/easily-enable-silverlight-watch-netflix-linux/
http://opensslrampage.org/
if OpenSSL had 5 pages of bugs so far... and was widely used in an ecosystem where the source was there, just imagine the nightmare of closed source projects...
patching 100 bugs on average introduces 3 new bugs. now i know bugs != security vulnerabilities. but bugs are why people complain about software stability.
also a 'vulnerability' bug has a black market value that is always going to be higher than bug bounties. however an old exploit has the added value of 'reporting' it after a new vulnerability is found and the old one is blamed perhaps by news of this 'old' vulnerability. it's a revolving door problem. back in 1997 i knew how to 'fix' broken open source ports tree applications, because i used freebsd and it was very buggy (though less buggy than the windows 95 machine i had).
as i see it the problem is marketing. to get people to buy computers they promote them as doing a lot of things that they can only just barely do. and often the code base is filled by people who don't care about quality and comprehensible coding. and for for profit they often take steps to make the code illegible as a so called security through obscurity (which never works for more than a few years).
from what i can tell the 'freedombox' is using freedom as in freedom fries. it requires all the software to turn a pi into a server that is totally controlled via the internet with the ability to lie about who is sending the packets etc. some people call this type of software a 'rootkit' and it is understandable why they don't explain this to would be users who are expected to just flash a pi with it no questions asked. i could be wrong, but i'm not the only person on slashdot to 'doubt' the software.
the paper microscope is easy to incinerate, and i doubt the have autoclaves to sterilize the 'same magnification' in a educational microscope. the thing can be printed on almost any printer with a few parts (battery) that shouldn't be incinerated and are not printable yet.
to use all you do is go into a shaded room insert a slide and see everything on a tabletop below the device. they can then have a list of pathogen shots pre printed and bundled with the microscope, at least the website has the photos so including common pathogens adds little to the cost. in africa you don't need education to be a doctor. you show up and do what you can. a quality microscope that doesn't come with shots of known pathogens is unlikely to exist in many parts of africa. while a $1 paper projection microscope doesn't seem like it is great, it is something that can really help people.
electricity is not a hard thing to make. my rambling on which must have been tldr for you said how easy electricity is to come by if you're just powering one guys gear. or mobile devices.
i know a guy who can test and replace most parts on a motherboard. post appocalypse thats real handy, i never learned it, because blown caps can take a number of other hard to find parts... still with 3d printers that can 3d print themselves means the ability to print computer parts. not top of the line, but for data preservation and access technology it's pretty feasible when you consider sites like http://www.cd3wd.com/ are doing now, to advance civilization in the third world nations it means that people will continue to make useful technology and need skilled tech people. an appocalypse would make it hard but not impossible. patents on software and hardware has done more to stunt technology than anything else. so post appocalypse there will be people stringing up 80 watt wireless tranciever from a tree or flag pole like they do now in africa, and powering an 80 watt and a few hundred 5 watt devices is easily solar powerable not to mention other energy sources like solid waste and biomass gasification... corn can be turned into plastic with a catylyst... so its really hard to say what it's gonna look like. the assuption is that tech will die that is not necisarily correct.
apple"and has shown no willingness to compete head-on with Android for the entire smartphone space."
have you read this http://apple.slashdot.org/story/14/03/12/0011257/apple-demands-40-per-samsung-phone-for-5-software-patents
or maybe this http://apple.slashdot.org/story/13/11/21/2137256/samsung-ordered-to-pay-apple-290m-in-patent-case
or maybe even this http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/01/27/1546238/google-and-samsung-sign-global-patent-deal
freebsd had code years back that was patented and 'leased' for free to freebsd when the owner sold the rights freebsd was in a panic to rewrite a huge portion of it's code base... there are linux distros that do things 'wrong' (ie binary blobs and code that is in effect a rip off of copyrighted and patented code) totally 'free' systems do a lot of wierd interface choices and code writes that are sub optimal, just to avoid patents. but when a company is making a lot of money, they get sued for it even if small linux distros get away with not paying up.