It varies by strain and number of people infected. Some outbreaks get to 90%, this one is closer to 60%.

No, far later than that. Slaves brought from Africa in the 15th and 16trh centuries came with Yellow Fever and Malaria. Since they either already had it as children or had better genes to handle the disease, they were usually okay, but Europeans who were in the colonies would get sick for a year and possibly die. They made a connection, but didn't do anything about it.

For those of you in the US, the PBS show Frontline had part of an episode dedicated to what's going on. While it is very hard to get, cultural problems there make it really easy (mourners touch the dead). People in remote villages are scared to tell doctors that they have symptoms since they'll be whisked off to the clinic, never to be seen again, just like almost everyone else that went to the clinic. In the larger cities, some nitwits are spreading the rumor that Ebola doesn't exist and the government is just trying to steal blood from the patients. So bands of people think that patents bleeding from every orifice needs to be rescued(!).

Is that different from weapons-grade helium?

If there's no other services presented to the world, yes. But a simple port scan will tell you it's up and that doesn't take long to do.

For some reason, disabling ping is considered a security feature, so a lot of places block it at the firewall. Cloud services (I'm looking at you, Azure) also either doesn't allow it or can't do it.

If by long term you mean 50 years, I'm fine with that. And as a "hey, if we had to replace TCP/IP today, what could we do?" thought experiment.

But to think that we're going to replace TCP/IP when we can't even replace IPv4, don't for a second think this will happen during our lifetime (well, I might make it another 50 years, but I'll be in my 90s then).

Well that and all the vending machines and coin slots that would have to be replaced to handle dollar coins. IIRC only the USPS can handle dollar coins.

This. There's likely trillions of dollars invested in IPv4 that is going to be around for decades. Consider the Internet like highways and train track widths - we're stuck with it for a very long time.

Android is pretty good about knowing when I'm on a bike vs. in my car.

Coding is computer science, but computer science is not just coding. I got my CS degree 20+ years ago, I've been in the field ever since, and I only spent a few years doing actual coding. The rest is all sysadmin/hardware design/architecture.

From the namecheap link:

There's plenty of other low-cost embedded systems that use Linux.

Here's what one person said about it:
 

Someone is new to open source/designs I see. Arduino has a bazillion knockoffs that are compatible yet they still seem to be doing okay. Unless RPi isn't an open architecture - in which case, why do we advocate its use?

You can likely do some of that, though some of what you describe (following specific people) would fall under anti-stalking laws. As noted elsewhere in this thread, repo companies are already doing this and businesses have cameras set up on their property and within the store recording your every move. Get writing! You only need a bunch of people willing to do this and a lot of license plate reading equipment.

Seems reasonable to me.