It's not an airborne virus. You need direct contact to bodily fluids meaning the person would need to literally sneeze on your face. That is why ebola only readily spreads in countries where basic hygiene (read: washing your hands) isn't practised.

It's just a cold at first for a very VERY short time. Ebola once it takes hits you very suddenly. Much like meningococcal which can go from nothing at all to 40+ fever in a matter of hours. You don't need to be some kind of medical genius to recognise people with an onset of severe symptoms, and the symptoms really are severe.

If you insist. Sure if an ebola victim comes in and start bleeding on you then you'll get it with short term exposure, but the disease is hard to spread. How often do you share bodily fluids with co-workers? In any ordinary scenario you need prolonged contact for the virus to make it across. You shake your co-workers ebola ridden hand and then go to the loo and wash your hands you're in the clear. That's what I mean with prolonged contact, in most normal cases it won't spread and the CDC even listed the highest risk groups are those providing continuous care to a patient.

Anyway in summary you seem to agree with the principle of theres no need to freak out, right?

That's only because you didn't try. Why not do it again and this time sideload the Amazon app store, or better yet F-Droid. You'll find you can do pretty much everything with your phone without Google services except access gmail. Android devices aren't any less useful without Google and you can see that from the quite capable devices which ship without Google apps like the Kindle Fire or the default install of Cyanogenmod without Google Apps (a separate download).

Without linking to a google account:
Maps works
Navigation works
Youtube works
Internet browsing works
Side loading apps works
Sideloading whole app stores works (obviously not the Play Store)
Contact list works
TXT messaging works
Every email program except for Gmail works.

So tell me what exactly are you interested in doing with your phone that doesn't fit in the above categories?

This* What people fail to realise is that Ebola is not very contagious. It has a high mortality rate which makes it scary as but as far as contagious goes it has nothing on influenza or many other viral infections.

You can't get Ebola from someone sneezing in the room.
You can't get Ebola from someone showing no symptoms. Unless the person is physically ill the virus is not contiguous.
You typically can't get Ebola from very short term contact.

My advice is not to tongue kiss people who just got off the plane from west African countries and you should be fine.

I don't follow your logic. I turn on my phone and fire it up as I work through the first time prompts I get to a page that says sign in with your Google account. There's two buttons on the screen, the two with equal prominence are "next" and "skip".

If a user is so careless that he can't read one single sentence and decide which button to press then I don't think there's any helping them. It's like the uproar over the location tracking website which can show you where your phone has been. People are freaking out that Google knows whereas I distinctly remember them saying exactly that on the screen where you enable location services. It's not buried in some massive EULA it's right there on the screen in half a paragraph.

I just think people are getting stupider and then get upset when something they were plainly told was going to happen actually happens.

Missing the point that we're talking about consumers here and that not all of us live on the bottom of a cliff with a giant elevated water reservoir. Tell you right now that if you actually are following the thread rather than mindlessly nitpicking parent post facts then pumped hydro is about the only technology you will NEVER see in a house and is an absolutely TERRIBLE idea.

The only thing you may be in the minority about is knowing how Android works. Do yourself a favour and load some debugging tools and find out just how many of your precious resources these apps take up. For some of the ones you don't want, think of them as APIs. Google TTS for instance does nothing unless called upon.

Never go full retard man.

Ok so you don't like social apps. Now tell me how you feel about having a market place for apps, a keyboard, the system level text-to-speech interface, google maps, a browser, a print service, an easy to access search function, ... the list of Google apps that are almost necessary to the Android experience goes on yet people keep using the word crapware. I wonder what my computer would be like if I installed an OS which had no browser or ability to print.

You had me until you said Significant amounts of very limited flash memory. Google's complete app package takes up a pittance of the total OS even including those features required on a system level like a text-to-speech engine and a keyboard.

The reason you can't uninstall them is the same reason your laptop which allows you to delete everything will come with a multi-gigabyte large recovery partition hidden from the OS. The default apps are read-only to facilitate a factory reset. Nothing more. Don't like the apps? Hide them. If you seriously have problems with storage space then maybe you should spend more than $50 on your next Android phone, or get one with an SDcard slot.

Erm IE?

Also while we're being pedantic which unrelated app are you using that requires you to hand over Google credentials? Think carefully about what you are doing before you respond considering you can use any Android device without even having a Google account (though installing apps becomes a bit of a pain).

The reason this sounds overbearing is that not all apps are immediately customer visible. Consider looking up the Play Store and search by the vendor Google Inc. and you'll get a lot of things that your phone already has by default without you realising:

Search
Text-To-Speech Engine
Chrome
Youtube
Play
Maps
Drive
Keyboard
Voice Search
Google Now
Google Cloud Print

These apps are already part of nearly every Android install as it is. Some of the rest of the 20 can be due to Google's (IMO silly) decision to split Play store content by type:

Play Newsstand
Play Books
Play Movies
Play Games
Play Music

So what is really left? 4 apps? I probably won't notice or care if 4 additional apps are installed on my phone, especially if it eliminates some of the crapware that already comes with it.

Not all "crapware" is "crapware" when you realise that they are functions of a system that you already use. i.e. do you consider the Windows Print Spooler crapware too? As usual the article is sensationalist and people are freaking out.

The problem with any system is content. You said all Wikis have failed so far, have you figured out why? The answer may not be in the format itself but rather the content it provides. If you can't get the content right, and most importantly relevant, then it doesn't matter what technology you will use.

My suggestion is before you even consider doing this you need buyin from the various departments you support to help create content. If you launch with little you will be irrelevant. If you put it off long enough to fill it and make it useful then you may have a chance of surviving.

"Build it and they will come" does not apply here.

The IoT does not mean your fridge. Every idiot keeps posting about their fridges for some reason when IoT is discussed.

IoT is about having data available at all times. Since you people keep harping on the fridge example let me give you a good example. Is it going to benefit you in your house? No. What about if you owned a large store? Or you are a big company with some 100 fridges throughout the building. Having fridges able to continuously upload diagnostics about power use, time door spent open, and temperature can give you an indication of mechanical failure or tell if you seals are worn. This may save you real money in the form of power bills or savings by not having a service man come out every month.

Of course it never rusts. Rust is the formation of Iron Oxide. That last word is key, "oxide". Quality stainless steel (as with aluminium and titanium) do not rust, but they most definitely do oxidise, they are just more resistant to it than iron.

See the key part of stainless is that the alloys form a protective coating on it which prevents oxidation. When scratched the coating slowly reforms. However there are many cases where this coating can be continuously damaged and oxidation will occur. It doesn't look like "rust" but it definitely is the same mechanism. Tightening stainless on stainless is a classic case which is also why stainless bolts are very sensitive to galling if you don't use a protective grease when you put them together.

There's no such thing as "crap" stainless steel, and expensive does not automatically mean "good" either. Stainless steel comes in many forms and grades which have different purposes and are used for different things. "Austentitic stainless sucks" is 100% false for many applications, but 100% for others. Your pot is likely 304SS, most good pots are. It's far from the most expensive stainless steel but it's great for cooking applications.

Best place I have seen Braille is on the warning outside the door to a squash-court. Ironically it was a legal disclaimer and a note about wearing safety glasses while playing.

I live in Brisbane with several small inhabited Islands off the cost. It costs Australia Post about $200 to do delivery / collection to the island in transit fees for the barge, not to mention that it puts the truck out of order while it sits on the boat.

I can definitely see a business case for this. A simple small letter does not need a truck to come pick it up. Weekly mail deliveries can be done more frequently and the large stuff can be reserved for a truck when need be.

Aside from the technical limitations already mentioned there's a physical limitation too. Go and have a look at the prop span of a helicopter and look at injuries too.

For an autonomous system I like my blades at high speed and low momentum. Having flown my quad into myself it was no fun, but nothing a few bandaids couldn't fix. On the other hand the last injury I heard using a helicopter involved near complete decapitation. It's a whole world more dangerous having a large prop span.

Also there's the number of moving parts issue. A quad has 4 motors. Motors are very reliable with the only thing that can really fail being a set of bearings (which don't involve falling out of the sky) or electronics failure (which is common to both types aircraft). A helicopter on the other hand has swashplates to tilt blades as the rotor spins, and they are not only expensive, but on a small scale not the most reliable from what I can gather. The only person I know with an RC helicopter of any size says he services his every few months, quite a bit more than the never I do to mine (save for checking the various bolts are tight).