You're assuming they even offer that as a cost-effective option, etc.

But, if I can sub for a season for something like $15 and catch all the episodes of the show in HD with 5.1 audio, I might consider it.

I was saying that the conditions in the hospital were better than could be expected if Ebola got out of control (ie hundreds of people sick in every town). I don't dispute that they weren't ideal enough. My point is that you can't expect hospitals to be "ideal enough."

Yes, it is apparent that under truly ideal conditions you can contain the spread of Ebola. My point is just that so far we aren't doing a great job at it, and if we fail to contain it things will get even worse as hospitals aren't even able to afford the level of rigor they used in Dallas (which again was obviously already insufficient).

The design of linux essentially ensures that every process has a stdin/stdout. It does not ensure that every process contains a webserver. So, having a way to manage the stdin/stdout for things like containers makes more sense than implementing a webserver for every process.

Of course, it would be nice if the design for the console make it really easy to attach to it using a browser-based application. :)

But, that is just the nature of the capitalist system. The people making the decisions are the ones investing the money, and the ones who personally benefit from the effects of that decision on the bottom line.

The Mona Lisa didn't make much money, so the capitalist would say it was a worthless effort.

The question is, who cares if somebody can run a huge company full of lawyers, engineers, and scientists? Your answer would be "the investors" - and to that I'd say that this is just proof that the investors are unfit to be investors in the first place, and shouldn't be entrusted with so much money. :)

Viral hemorrhagic fevers have an infectious dose of 1 - 10 organisms by aerosol in non-human primates. In blood at least the loads can be billions of viruses per milliliter - I'm sure it is lower in saliva/etc, but the bottom line is that it takes very little to cause an infection. Touch a doorknob, then touch your eye, and boom, you're done.

Cites:
http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/lab...
and
Franz, D. R., Jahrling, P. B., Friedlander, A. M., McClain, D. J., Hoover, D. L., Bryne, W. R., Pavlin, J. A., Christopher, G. W., & Eitzen, E. M. (1997). Clinical recognition and management of patients exposed to biological warfare agents. Jama, 278(5), 399-411.

Hospitals have every incentive not to prepare for Ebola, and little incentive to do so.

If they spend a bunch of money on a closet full of hazmat suits and training for the staff, they can't increase their rates to cover it, so they just lose money. Insurers will only pay them for having that equipment if an actual Ebola patient WITH INSURANCE actually shows up. Most hospitals will probably never see such a patient, so they are just sinking these costs with no return.

That is the nature of free market anything - there is no incentive to buy stuff that you probably will never use. That is why "black swan" events tend to be so devastating. Public models also can tend to downplay preparedness, but at least the public can elect to prepare if they're willing to pay the bills - a market-based solution usually doesn't even give individual participants the option of preparing if they don't want to go bankrupt.

Materials and preparation cost money. Hospitals that don't have them make more money than hospitals that don't, unless they actually have an Ebola outbreak. Hospitals figure they never will, so they don't prepare.

That is what happens when you don't mandate preparation by regulation and audit compliance, and combine that with a competitive market-based healthcare system. Nobody has incentive to prepare for anything unlikely to occur. If anything does go wrong they just throw their hands in the air and say that nobody could have seen this coming and beg for help from the (CDC/Federal Reserve/FEMA/whatever).

If they really wanted to cause havoc they'd get a bag full of contaminated vomit or something and have a completely healthy person start smearing bits of it all over the place. That healthy person would probably be completely healthy for a week or two before they even start to become symptomatic themselves, and then they'd have a few more days to spread it further before they succomb. They don't have to personally be the source of the virus they're spreading, which greatly increases the length of time they have to spread it before they die.

Will those windows laptops have:

1. Secure boot with verification of the entire OS.
2. All installed software runs in a sandbox.
3. All installed software gets automated updates.
4. All OS configuration is cloud-backed.
5. Full disk encryption by default, with protection of each user profile (such that no user can read another's profile).
6. Ability to reset to factory state with a single click, with re-configuration just requiring a user to login with a cloud ID.

There are certainly things you can do with Windows that you can't do with ChromeOS. However, the real value of ChromeOS is that it brings a fairly comprehensive data security and configuration management solution to the masses, and by security I mean it in the full sense - not just preventing others from accessing your data, but ensuring that you don't lose access to your data.

When I get my hands on a new Windows install I spend about half a day tweaking and hardening things. When I get my hands on a new Chromebook I just enter my WiFi WPA2 key and log into it.

https://chromium.googlesource....

Google supports running Chromium OS on any Chromebook. It basically has everything but a few plugins, which I believe you can install (though those are not FOSS).

I wouldn't say it is any less FOSS than something like the Linux Kernel if you don't de-blob it.

Please be sure to stop using your DVR, automobile, and the other 47 Linux systems you intereact with every day which don't offer you a bash prompt. :)

I do get what you're saying, but the purpose of a Chromebook is not the same as the purpose for the general-purpose Linux distro I'm typing this on.

The problem is that they're not going to let you JUST stream GOT. They're going to probably want you to commit to a year full of programs you won't watch at $20/month or something crazy like that. If you could pay $15 for a whole season of GOT streamed I suspect that it would be a popular offering.

#4 is really the show-stopper for me, with #2 being a close second.

If I want to buy 1 series from HBO, I don't want to pay $120/yr for it. That is just WAY too much for a single show. Yes, I realize that I'm getting another 47 shows that I don't watch along with it - that doesn't really win me over...

Honestly, I really wish the US Government would just issue national IDs, including an electronic component with a standardized interface (cheap enough to be deployed to any PC, and usable for remote applications in a secure way). This would make identity theft nearly impossible (or at least much easier to clean up after-the-fact), and kill off many social engineering attacks and the need for passwords in general.

The usual fear is that a US government ID would create some kind of big brother system. The thing is, we already have that - the US doesn't need an ID to identify everybody, since they operate on such a large scale they can just scan every yearbook, facebook account, email, security camera, etc to identify everybody all the time. They undoubtedly assign a unique ID to every person they identify, so they basically have that government ID system already, and we get to suffer all the downsides of that. What we don't get to experience are any of the upsides, since while the US government might be able to tell who I am while posting this, nobody else can.

There is also no reason that a government ID couldn't be used in a semi-anonymous manner. When I authenticate to slashdot they could give slashdot a unique identifier for me which is traceable to me upon issuance of a warrant, but which is different from the ID they issue for any other website. That means nobody else can log in as me to Slashdot, and I don't need any slashdot-specific credentials, but I can still be a pseudonym as far as Slashdot is concerned (but I can only create a single account). We could even allow somebody to have multiple IDs for a single domain all traceable to the same real person (with a warrant). Obviously there needs to be a lot of policy around who can insist on having a real identity vs a pseudo-one, or when somebody is allowed to have sock-puppets, etc.

They certainly will change them - to the next sequentially-numbered password. Everybody I've ever talked to about password aging says that they use an incremental number appended to the same password they've used for years.