You're fired -- literally: Ten evil tech companies we'd invest in

Omni Consumer Products (RoboCop)

Business model: In the 1980s, the flipside of the Wall Street 'greed is good' philosophy was the science-fiction nightmare of the megacorporation. OCP was one such company, a rapacious organisation with its grasping fingers in every industry, in every aspect of public and private life. As CEO Dick Jones put it, "Take a close look at the track record of this company, and you'll see that we've gambled in markets traditionally regarded as non-profit: hospitals, prisons, space exploration. I say good business is where you find it."

In practice, this meant privatising the entire city of Detroit and rebuilding it into a monetised utopia called Delta City. But first, OCP turned a dead cop into an implacable killing machine called RoboCop. Not so much tough on the causes of crime as excessively violent on anyone stepping out of line, RoboCop was supposed to effect bullet-riddled slum clearance before the bulldozers moved in. Not a bad idea on paper, but as can happen so often, the technology wasn't quite ready.

EvilSE share price: With the 80s villainous dream team of Ronny Cox, Kurtwood Smith and Miguel Ferrer on board, shareholder confidence was high, until Officer Murphy started getting his pesky memories back.

Blue Sun (Firefly)

Business model: Described by Firefly creator Joss Whedon as a combination of Coca Cola and Microsoft, Blue Sun seems to have its logo on everything. The show ended before we got a glimpse of the full extent of Blue Sun's corporatised evilness, but we do know that it was involved with the experiments that tied River Tam's noodle in a knot. Her subsequent discovery of serious bad-assedness in Serenity suggests Blue Sun may have been yet another big company trying to work out how to weaponise human beings. On top of the horrific violation of delicate young things like River, Blue Sun employed the Blue-Handed Men, troubleshooters that fire people with the sort of extreme prejudice that would make Alan 'Suralan' Sugar wet himself.

EvilSE share price: Not so hot. It turns out that monkeying with people's heads to make them into ultimate badasses may be a great investment opportunity on paper, but someone's got burned on just about every such scheme, from OCP to Treadstone to Rekall to the Universal Soldier programme. Probably time to knock that idea on the head, as it were.