Adding to a culture that is already responsible for enormous amounts of waste... and you want to create more?

Its all well and good that you can buy cheap tablets to just throw away, but how many are going to be needed over the lifetime of an event like this? How often do they need to be cycled, and how much will that cost?

How do you properly and responsibly recycle these disposable tablets after theyve been used? You cant burn them, and they are potentially contaminated so you cant ship them elsewhere to be recycled or give them away or allow them to be recovered for fear of spreading ebola again. Batteries need to be recycled properly, and other materials used have a degree of recyclability which should be respected.

And whos going steal something thats been in an ebola treatment centre anyway?

Any sensible person would probably stay the hell away from it for fear of getting infected. Of course I do use the distinction "sensible person" and many crims dont really fit with that, but Im pretty sure they'd even be a little wise to this.

But if you look at pictures of the tablets, and read about them, these things are quite distinctive, not your generic tablet you could flog at the local pawn shop. Theyve been modified, fitted in to a sealed case, fitted for wireless charging since there cant be any open ports where germs could accumulate or the chlorine solution could leak in to the electronics of the device and ruin it, etc.

Im going on the assumption that a lot of these things have been thought about, including solutions that could well have been easier and cheaper to implement, and they didnt just go with the most elaborate solution for the sake of doing so. What theyve come up with is re-useable, so it doesnt need to be disposable.

I think you are missing a lot.

You assume they have regular, reliable utility power, or generators they can run 24/7 in these places to power computers and what not.

Where is this computer to be located? The tablet can be used beside the patient, so you dont have to keep running back and forth to the computer to enter data, and that could be the difference between something being recorded incorrectly or not.

The tablet can also be disinfected by soaking in 0.5% chlorine, you cant do that with most other electronics or the will be ruined.

This tablet can be used in a hazardous environment, disinfected and taken back outside of that environment safely for repairs or to transfer to another location. The whole solution is designed to be re-useable, its not just for ebola.

I guess you haven't worked at enough companies to get the full picture then. My employer expressly prohibits Windows on the desktop, providing the choice between either a Mac or an in house supported Linux distribution. And no, I don't work for Apple. Windows is provided where necessary by remote desktop and is heavily restricted in external connectivity - basically it is for access to internal systems where Windows based clients are the only option.

Except that is slightly wrong.

Sure, they all share the same anycast IP address, but they also all need to be uniquely addressable too (at the very lease for management purposes). Otherwise how does an anycast server perform any kind of look up to an external server and guarantee that it will get the response back?

If an anycast DNS resolver sent out a request to resolve an IP from an authoritative server on the other side of the country and soured it from its anycast address, how does that authoritative DNS server know that it shouldnt just send the response to its nearest anycast neighbor?

As long as an individual providers anycast servers are sufficiently dense then you probably cant beat them for location correctness.

Im not sure that kind of build methodology really works. You'd be coming back several times to build fibre down any given street to hook up those customers who at random times want fibre instead of copper. And since this is a PON network, youre going to be running a lot of point to point fibre back to a location somewhere to hook in to a splitter, versus tapping into an access point in the pit out front of the property.

And then when someone moves, and the previous occupier had fibre, but the new one doesnt want it, do you just leave that infrastructure floating?

If youre going to do anything down a street you might as well do it just once, and get everyone on it in one go and then pull out the old infrastructure. They could probably recoup some of the build cost by recycling all of the copper they could pull out.

http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20100621130456/simpsons/images/4/4a/Hell-IPD-Door.jpg

Who actually friends people they havent spoken to or even *seen*?

I dont even add people I have met and known for a couple of months, until Ive had a chance to speak with them on a semi regular basis first and work out if they are interested in my life, or if I am even interested in theirs.

Far too much trust on the Interwebz, no wonder so many people get screwed by scammers.

And dont forget your Linux conversion party how-to video...

s/Fortran/Chuck Norris

Oh. Thats me assuming too much. I thought you were in the US. :-)

Clarify "major out-of-country resources" for me...

I would like to see you get "70-100ms" to Australia even from west coast USA. Unless you're talking about one-way, but then latency is not normally spoken about as unidirectional figures.

20ms "inside the country" would depend entirely on where you were, what you were accessing and where it was located, and the transmission medium(s) in between. Trans Atlantic RTT should be about half of what you specified because, fun fact: Hibernia Atlantic is planning a new cable between New York and London following a "great circle" route across the Atlantic. This is expected to reduce trans Atlantic latency to ~65ms RTT and that will be *the* fastest way to get across, and this is only improving on traditional latency by a couple of ms. They predict financial institutions will snap up capacity like hot cakes, and will price it according to the value represented to these financial institutions. The faster you can execute trades ...

You cant just put arbitrary latency figures on things and expect it to make any sense. Latency is dictated by physics. Light only travels so fast.

A cat with claws is still a cat with claws even if its hiding them.

This is why I get my packages delivered to my work place.

My employers have not minded the fact that I do this. As long as youre not running a mail order business where packages are comming and going every day I suspect most others wont either.

For you it means you wont miss a delivery because theres usually always someone in the company mail room or at the front desk to receive it, and for your employer it means youre at work being productive rather than taking a day/couple of hours off at home to wait for it. :-)

Except that its not actually on the logic board itself, its on a small daughter card that plugs into the logic board. Semantics. :-)

See the video on the Apple website and pause at about 3:07.